Samuel Wallace Durham
DURHAM, EWING, WOLCOTT, TILLOTSON
Posted By: CJeanealogy (email)
Date: 1/9/2018 at 14:22:26
The Marion Sentinel Thursday May 13, 1909
Obituary of Col. S.W. Durham
Col. Samuel Wallace Durham, the subject of our sketch, was born in Vallonia, Indiana, March 7, 1817. He was the son of Jesse B. and Elizabeth Ewing Durham. He died May 2, 1909, at the age of 92 years. He was married Dec. 12, 1843, to Miss Ellen Wolcott. Their married life of fifty-eight years was terminated by her death October 19, 1901. Five of their children survive them, Canfield Durham, of Marion, Iowa; Mrs. F.L. Tillotson, of Moorhead, Minn.; Mary Durham, of Washington, D.C.; Ben H. Durham, of Minneapolis, Minn., and Louise Durham, of Marion, Iowa. The eldest son, Jefferson, served in the war of the Rebellion, and died in this city in 1869.
Col. Durham came of a family of Kentucky pioneers. His grandfather, John Durham, after serving in the Revolutionary war, crossed the wilderness between Virginia and Kentucky in 1783, nine years after the first settler, Daniel Boone, penetrated its wilds. He traveled with the Rev. Francis Clark, who established the first Methodist church in Kentucky, near the present site of Danville, and made John Durham its first class leader.
In 1815 John Durham's son Jesse B. Durham, emigrated to Indiana, then a wilderness inhabited by Indians who harassed the hardy settlers and often massacred them. Jesse B. Durham took an active part in the settlement of Indiana. He was a member of the state legislature, he was one of the three commissioners appointed by the governor to locate the state capital, and upon the site they selected is located the present city of Indianapolis.
On March 7, 1817, Samuel W. Durham was born on his father's farm near Vallonia, Indiana. He thus in his earlier years, participated, in some measure, in the stirring events which always make the history of the early settlers. The Revolutionary war was still a vivid recollection, and while reading of Washington he decided as a boy to study surveying. Later, as a young man, his active mind and imagination led him to make his way, as his father and forefathers had done, into new and unbroken territory.
In 1839 he journeyed on horseback, through western Indiana and Illinois, across the great Mississippi river, into the wilds of Iowa. He loved to speak of those times, when the first settlers were thrilled and impressed by the grandeur and sublimity of the scenes on the unbroken prairies, when viewed in their native solitude. He loved to dwell in thought upon those pioneer days, when every man was every other man's brother and quick to respond to every need. To the last day of his life he held that spirit, and was unable to adjust himself to the more modern ideas.
In those early days' Col. Durham was active in all that goes to make the duties of the good citizen. He was a member o the first constitutional convention, and its secretary. He surveyed large portions of northern and northwestern Iowa and Minnesota under government contract, and became a large landowner. For seventy years he was a citizen and taxpayer of this state. He believed that a man should be proud to own land and live upon it, proud to make himself part of a community, to take root there. He thought that the homes men make should be kept in the family from one generation to another.
A few moments before his death he was reading the daily papers. His fine mind and almost perfect memory, his wide reading and interest in history and politics and the events of the day, as well as his love of poetry and music, made him a most entertaining conversationalist and writer. He was almost as well posted, even to his very latest years, in European politics as in the politics of his own country, and in Grecian history as in American history. A few months since, speaking of one of Scott's novels, he sketched the plot and named the characters, with no failure of memory or pause for adequate expression. Poems of the older poets he could quote entire. He loved Whitcomb Riley's work. At the last meeting of the Old Settler's Association of Linn County he closed his brief remarks by reading Riley's "Tale of the Airley Days."
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9325828/samuel-wallace-durham
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