WILLIAM TATMAN .    It is one of the old and prominent families of Scioto County that William Tatman is a representative.  Mr. Tatman has spent his active career as a farmer, has an attractive and valuable homestead in Union Township, and his name stands for the best things in the community life of that locality.
     Born at Friendship in Nile Township of Scioto County, Feb. 16, 1864, William Tatman is a son of Peter Tatman who was born at Moscow in Clermont County, Ohio. Oct. 12, 1836.  The paternal grandparents were Joseph and Elizabeth (Fisher) Tatman.  Elizabeth Fisher was a cousin of Hon. David Fisher, who early in the nineteenth century represented the old Sixth Ohio District in Congress and was a member of the House of Representatives when former President John Quincy Adams was stricken and assisted in removing this great statesman from the main chamber of the House.  Peter Tatman, father of William, was reared and educated in Clermont County, grew up on a farm, but early in life took up boating on the Ohio River.  For a number of years his principal business was transporting tanbark to the southern markets.  This was his chief occupation for eighteen years, and after retiring from the river he bought a farm on Brush Creek in Union Township of Scioto County, and was identified with agriculture and with lumbering for a number of years, and died in that locality Jan. 17, 1901.  He married Ruhama Holt, who was born on Upper  Turkey Creek in Nile Township, a daughter of John and Sallie (Lewis) Holt.  Mrs. Tatman was the youngest in a family of fifteen children, nine of whom grew to manhood and womanhood.  Her brother Andrew J. is remembered as having been the strongest and most athletic man in the community.  Mrs. Tatman now lives with her daughter, Mrs. Saddler.  The children of Peter Tatman and wife who reached maturity were Joseph; John; Rosetta, who married Henry C. Payne; William; Lucius; Dora, who married Alexander Saddler; Sarah, who married William Bear; Clara, who married E. B. Oakes; Maud, who married Oscar Foster; and Ruhama.
     As a boy William Tatman attended the rural schools in the neighborhood of his father's farm, and at the same time developed a vigorous constitution by regular work at home.  His career has always been identified with agriculture and since succeeding to the ownership of the old homestead he has made an unusual success in general farming and stock raising.  His farm is perhaps the equal of any rural place in Union Township, has excellent buildings and other improvements and its operations are carried on with an efficiency which betokens the highest standards of agricultural enterprise.
     At the age of twenty-five Mr. Tatman married Blanche Wamsley.  She was born in Brush Creek Township of Scioto County, daughter of Reverend Foster and Amanda (Liston) Foster.  Her death occurred in 1891.  Mr. Tatman married for his present wife Jennie Mershon, a daughter of David and Jennie (Potts) Mershon.  Mr. and Mrs. Tatman have two children, Peter and May.  While the parents are members of the Christian Church, the two children belong to McDermot Methodist Episcopal Church.
Source: A Standard History of The Hanging Rock Iron Region of Ohio, Vol. II - Illustrated - Published by The Lewis Publishing Company, 1916 - Page 1028

JAMES L. TAYLOR.     In all that represents the highest ethics and most liberal culture in his exacting profession Doctor Taylor has shown forth his strong character, and has been in the most significant sense the friend of humanity.  He has passed the psalmist's allotted span of three score years and ten, and is now retired from the active practice of a profession that has been signally dignified and honored by his character and services.  Not in far away fields where greater self aggrandizement and wider distinction might have been his, has this respected physician directed his energies, but he has been content to study, to read, to write and to offer his benignant ministrations in a rural community, his home having long been maintained at Wheelersburg in Scioto County.  Here he counts as his greatest possession the esteem and good will of the community, where he has practiced a life time, rather than the more than local fame that has come to him as a representative physician and surgeon of his native state.
     Doctor Taylor is a scion of a prominent pioneer family in this county, and was born at Franklin Furnace on the first of February, 1840. His  father was Landon Taylor who married Jane Vincent in 1837, daughter of the original French settler of that name who located in Little French Grant, and two sons were born to the Taylor family, one of whom died in childhood.  The Taylor family were of English lineage, and became established in New England during colonial times, whence they passed from the Connecticut Valley to Chemung County, New York, prior to 1800.  This must have been near revolutionary times for it is of record that one, Elisha Taylor, married a Miss Vanavery, a Dutch girl, in Chemung County, New York, who brought him considerable money, and a black servant to wait on her.  As negro slavery was abolished in New York State by the Act of 1799, it must have been earlier in 1700 that the colored maid was held as property.  From having been pioneers near Elmira (then called Newtown), during the eighteenth century, they migrated to Scioto County in 1818, bought lands and settled on Little Scioto, where Sarah Taylor, who had married Abijah Batterson, lived until a few years ago, her husband, beginning in the '30s, having held the position of associate judge of Scioto County for seven years.  Some years later Mrs. Batterson's brother James, whose family comprised seven sons and a daughter, also came  from New York and bought a Dogwood Ridge Farm located near his sister's.  Four of these sons, including Landon who was the doctor's father, afterwards became Methodist ministers, thus following in the footsteps of their father who had preached and helped build up Methodist churches near his old home in Elmira.  Soon after his marriage Landon took a position in the office at Franklin Furnace, then running night and day to turn out pig iron at the rate of six to eight tons in twenty-four hours.  When iron making ceased to be profitable and the furnace closed, he turned to school teaching at $25 a month as an expedient prior to his ordination into the ministry.  During the forty years devoted to ministerial work he held many important appointments in his conference.  After retiring on account of ill health, he published, in 1883, an autobiography of some 500 pages of which two editions were disposed of, and which was entitled "The Battlefield Reviewed," in which he recounts occasional ministrations at nearly every furnace in the Hanging Rock Iron Region, as an important part of his life work.  Life's close came to both husband and wife during the same week in 1885 at the home of Doctor Taylor in Wheelersburg, and together they lie in the same lot in that beautiful cemetery.
       Owing to the confirmed invalidism of his mother, Doctor Taylor soon after birth was adopted into the home of his maternal aunt, Mrs. J. S. Baccus, on a farm near Wheelersburg.  The country schoolhouse of that district was nearly two miles away, and thither the boy repaired daily during the three winter months, despite rain or storm or roads of un broken snow, to the old log schoolhouse requiring to he rechinked and daubed anew nearly every winter.  A huge fireplace filled nearly one whole end of the house, and the remaining three sides were occupied by long benches mostly without backs, with just one desk in the room that would accommodate two pupils at a time for writing.  No black board, no place for ink, goose quills, nor copy-books, for modern school desks had not yet been invented.  A new teacher complained of the lack of conveniences for teaching writing, and a nearby resident volunteered to get a broad slab from a saw-mill close to the school, which he fitted across one side of the room, flat side up, on three long pins bored into a house log.  That was a great innovation, and the whole school was very proud of its slab.  For back logs to burn in the fireplace, the patrons of the school would "snake in" to the school lot long logs without limbs, and the large boys would take turns in chopping them into back logs.  At that time the State of Ohio had not yet enacted the organization of a township school system, and there was very little public money available to pay teachers, who had to depend on rate bills assessed on the parents of the attending pupils.  The teachers themselves, many of them were of extremely limited attainments, very few being competent to solve average examples in partial payments, or even intricate propositions in common and decimal fractions.  Their outfit comprised a spelling book, and a reader for the small children, and for the older ones a writing book, an arithmetic, a ruler, and in most cases a hickory whip behind the door.
     But notwithstanding the early lack of educational advantages, Doctor Taylor succeeded in getting a teacher's county certificate at the age of fifteen, and at sixteen taught his first school in the Kettles District in a log house of the old type, equipped only with long benches, but without even the flat side of a slab to accommodate writing books.  For several years he taught school and went away to school alternately, until he secured a diploma from the University of Michigan in the class of 1863, being the first Scioto County man to obtain a bachelor's degree from that institution, where students now congregate for an education from all parts of the world.  For a time the doctor held a position on the county board of school examiners with Dr. Erastus Burr and John Bolton, being appointed by Judge A. C. Thompson to fill the vacancy caused by Capt. N. W. Evans' resignation.  After attending courses of medical lectures at Ann Arbor and Cincinnati, he graduated at the Medical College of Ohio in 1872, and succeeded Dr. A. Titus in his medical practice and property at Wheelersburg. Ohio.  For thirty-three years he stood faithfully at his post, dispensing his professional skill alike to all who came, whether the cases promised big fees or no fees, and many, many accounts were never presented for collection.  He was in close affiliation with the local medical societies, the state and national associations, the American Academy of Medicine, of which he was vice president from 1901-2, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  His strictly medical papers appeared from time to time ill the Journal of the American Medical Association, while those pertaining to sociology were published in the Bulletin of the American Academy of Medicine.   He wrote widely on medical, agricultural, educational, financial and scientific topics, but it was to his medical calling that he brought the best products of his labors.
     On the 26th of December, 1867, Doctor Taylor was married to Miss Melissa Folsom (daughter of James Smith Folsom), who was born at Junior Landing, Scioto County, in 1835, and who completed her youthful education at the high school in Ironton, Ohio.  She is a member of the widely disseminated Folsom family scattered throughout the United States, all of whom are descended from the progenitor, John, who came from England to Massachusetts in the new world with his wife and servants in 1634, not long after the Mayflower.  The family genealogy, a book of nearly 300 pages, printed in 1882, shows her to be number seven in the line of descent from ancestor John, and the hundreds of Folsom names recorded there clearly indicate that the Folsom family has been highly prolific.  While many families tend towards extinction, and finally do disappear altogether, other families tend to multiply so as to replenish the earth, and to this latter class the Folsom family evidently belongs.  To this one ancestor, John, all the Folsoms of this broad land can look back, much as the Jews look back to Abraham.  Already the name Folsom with its combinations, appears in the names of sixteen or eighteen towns, villages, railway stations and postoffices throughout the United States, and it would be extremely interesting to know exactly on what natural endowments this tendency to increase or to become extinct really depends, and why virile tenacity accompanies only some families through many generations.
     Dr. Wesley Taylor was born and received his early education at Wheelersburg, Ohio, and is the only survivor of three children, two sons and a daughter, born to James L. and Melissa Taylor.   After getting what training the Wheelersburg schools provided, he spent two years in the Ann Arbor High School preparatory to entering his father's alma mater, the University of Michigan, where he continued six years longer in obtaining his B. S. & M. D. degrees, graduating in arts and in medicine with the class of 1899.  After graduation he secured an internship on the surgical staff of Lakeside Hospital, Cleveland, where he remained for eighteen months as house surgeon in that institution.   From Cleveland he went abroad and stopped first at Göttingen, Germany, where he secured quarters in an educated private family to learn colloquial German, and remained there for six months, avoiding the English speaking colony, reading, writing, studying and talking nothing but German.  So that when he entered the medical clinics at Vienna later, he was accounted the best German scholar among all the Americans attending there.  After a profitable tutoring from the distinguished medical teachers in Vienna for eleven months, he went to Paris and took a place on the staff of Doctor Dejerine at the Salpetriere, with a view to specializing in mental and nervous diseases.  Here he remained for fourteen months under a master teacher, assisting at the largest and most famous nervous disease clinic in the world. From there he next spent some months in the hospitals of London and Berlin, having remained abroad nearly four years under the instruction of the foremost living teachers of modern medicine.  He is now located in Detroit in a lucrative medical practice, is a member of the staff of Harper Hospital where he conducts daily a large nervous disease clinic, belongs to the American Neurological Society, is member of the faculty, and lecturer on nervous, and mental diseases in Detroit Medical College, and is recognized as standing in the front ranks of the medical profession in Michigan.
Source: A Standard History of The Hanging Rock Iron Region of Ohio, Vol. II - Illustrated - Published by The Lewis Publishing Company, 1916 - Page 1241

LAFAYETTE TAYLOR.     The monotony which frequently ensues from the continuous following of a single line of endeavor has never been a feature of the career of Lafayette Taylor.  The fortunate possessor of versatile talents, he has not alone achieved a success in diversified lines of business life, but has also been able to contribute materially to the advancement of his community's civic interests through his knowledge of men, methods and subjects of importance.  At the present time he is a resident of Rarden, in the Hanging Rock Region of Ohio, and is justly accounted one of his town's most substantial men.
     Mr. Taylor is a Pennsylvanian by nativity, born Dec. 25, 1855, a son of William and Mary E. (Kelley) Taylor, both natives of the Keystone State.  Of their twelve children, six are living.  Lafayette Taylor's early education was secured in the public schools of Pennsylvania, the schoolhouse being three miles from his home.   During the short winter terms he trudged daily to and fro this distance in the pursuit of a mental training until he was sixteen years of age, in the meantime working on the home farm during the summer months.  For three years he was employed in the timber region, and thus gradually established himself in the business, in which he engaged at Rarden in 1887.  In 1884 he was married to Miss Almeida McNeal, of Pike County, Ohio, who was reared and educated there, and to them there has been born one child: Volney S., a graduate of the high school, who attended the State University of Columbus, Ohio, and graduated from the scientific department, married Virginia Wells, of Paintsville, Kentucky.
     After coming to Rarden, Mr. Taylor expanded his business interests, and gradually has entered other lines of endeavor, so that he has taken a foremost position among the men who have maintained Rarden 's standing as a live, energetic business community.  He is president of the Scioto County Good Roads Organization, president of the Scioto County Agricultural Society, president of the Otway Savings Bank, at Otway, and president of the McDermott Stone Company; is extensively engaged in the mercantile business, with a trade attracted from all over the surrounding territory, is engaged in the lumber and timber business in partnership with his son, and is the owner of 1,000 acres of finely developed farming land in Scioto County.  While his business interests are very extensive and demand a great deal of his time and attention, he has also found the leisure and the inclination to take hold of big projects not alone for his own betterment, but for the welfare of the community, and in the widest sense is a progressive and public-spirited citizen.  Having himself succeeded, he has ever been ready to lend a helping hand to others who are trying to succeed, for none knows better the difficulties and discouragements of the working-man than he.  A pleasant man, easily approached, he has numerous friends in all classes, and has fairly won the confidence of the community through his signal services in behalf of the general welfare.
     Mr. Taylor is essentially a home-loving man,  but is not indifferent to the pleasure of association with his fellows in fraternal life, and is one of the popular members of the Portsmouth Lodge of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.
Source: A Standard History of The Hanging Rock Iron Region of Ohio, Vol. II - Illustrated - Published by The Lewis Publishing Company, 1916 - Page 1302