John P. Hendricks (1858-1910)

HENDRICKS, POYNEER

Posted By: Dorian Myhre (email)
Date: 2/21/2017 at 11:48:45

From Nevada Representative December 16, 1910 (front page)

Suicide of Former Superintendent

John T. Hendricks, who was formerly a prominent educator of Tama county and who was once elected superintendent of the Nevada city schools, suicided early in this month at Waukesha, Wisconsin. Mr. Hendricks was born in 1858 and educated at Ames and Toledo. In the middle '80s he was county superintendent in Tama county and quite prominent in Iowa educational gatherings. He was up to Nevada in one or two county normals, and in the spring of 1886 he was elected by the school board to the superintendency of the city schools. He accepted the tender and entered into contract for the next school year. During the summer, however, the school board at Cedar Rapids, where Prof. Weld had been in charge for the previous year got into a deadlock over the superintendency there, and the deadlock was finally adjusted by the three Weld men on that board voting for Hendricks as a compromise and Hendricks virtually turning over to Weld the position to which the former had been elected at Nevada. It was thus that Mr. Hendricks, although never actually becoming identified with the Nevada schools, tendered them very great service through his instumentality in introducing Prof. Weld in Nevada where the latter served so acceptably for eleven years. Mr. Hendricks served for three or four years at Cedar Rapids and then went far west. He taught a while out there, became a mining promoter, accumulated a considerable fortune or at least the appearance of one-- removed to Chicago where he is reported as having lived in much elegance, and finally broke down and was sent to a sanitarium at Waukesha. He escaped from the sanitarium, and after being missing for several days he was found under a culvert with a bullet through his head. He was a son-in-law of A. N. Poyneer, who served two terms in the state senate from Tama county and was elected lieutenant-governor in 1889. He was buried Tuesday at Toledo.