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Our classmate fitted for college in the public schools of Quincy, entered our Class
in September, 1859, and remained with us until the end of Sophomore year. While in
college, he was a member of the 'Logian Literary Society; also a member and treasurer of
the Greylock Baseball Club. After leaving our Class, he studied medicine at Rush Medical
College, Chicago, Illinois, from which he was graduated in 1863. Very shortly after, he
passed examination before the Illinois State Medical Board, and was commissioned as
assistant surgeon of the Eighth Illinois Veteran Regiment of Cavalry, and immediately
joined his regiment in the Army of the Potomac. He was on duty without a day's sickness
or leave of absence until mustered out with his regiment, July 23, 1865, in Chicago.
After six months' study in Bellevue Medical College and service in the Bellevue
Hospital wards, in New York City, Nelson located in Chatsworth, Illinois, and there followed
his profession for a number of years. Later he removed to Pittsfield, Illinois, where, in 1872,
he married Ella F. Greene, daughter of R. R. Greene and his wife, Lucy (Seymour) Greene,
of that place. From Pittsfield he removed to Caneron, Missouri, where he followed his
profession two years, when he again removed to Walker, Missouri, which has been his home
for the past twenty-seven years. In a letter to Davenport, written a little less than twenty
years ago, Nelson wrote of himself after this manner: "It seems as though I were as settled,
subjugated, quieted, and hurried a carrier of a physician's saddlebags as was ever ordained
a ruling elder in the Old School Presbyterian Church where I am anchored." He then
reported six children, and one has been added to his family since the date of his letter. Of
these seven children, five are living. Their names and dates are as follows:
1. Eugene Greene Nelson, born January 7, 1873. He was graduated from Illinois
College, Jacksonville, in 1900. He is in the railway service; is married.
2. Edward Seymour Nelson, born in 1874. He studied medicine at the College of
Physicians and Surgeons, Kansas City, Kansas; was graduated in 1898, and since that date
has practiced medicine at Bryant, Illinois. In 1895, he married Mary Edna Nelson, who also
was graduated at the same time and from the same college with himself, and practices
medicine with her husband. They have one child four years old, Roy Frank Nelson.
3. Roy France Nelson, born in 1876. He was educated at Santa Rosa, California,
and died at Eureka, California, of heart disease in 1901, never being able to enter a
profession or to engage in business.
4. Ellen Frances Nelson, born in 1880. A graduate of the high school in Pittsfield,
Illinois. She is living with her parents.
5. Mabel Evelyn Nelson, born in 1882. She was educated in the schools of Walker,
Missouri; and in 1900 she was married to Mr. H. S. Forman, of her native town.
6. Sidney Roberts Nelson, born in 1883 and died in 1886.
7. Harvey Rowland Nelson, born in 1888. He is a pupil in the high school of
Springfield, Missouri, and resides with his parents, and is preparing for Drury College,
Springfield, Missouri.
Since writing the above sketch, the material for which was secured from our old Class
reports and from members of our classmate's family, a characteristic letter has been received
from Nelson, and without again going over the ground already surveyed, I am happy to give
the following selections with the necessary connecting phrases. Our classmate is obliged to
tarry in California for the time being on account of an invalid sister, and he regrets his
inability to occupy two places at the same time, and adds: "What a rare treat I do miss in
not seeing for myself what time has done for and against what's left of that typical, purely
American crowd (save Cairns) that I wonderingly watched assemble on Williams' campus
in September, 1859! I recall them as then possessing every conceivable possibility as a whole
except that of being called handsome. Their environments, aims, possibilities, as diverse and
many colored as Laban's kine. I see them now, in mind; they may stand as the embodiment
of defiant force, character, resistance to Sophomoric insolence - but never for handsome;
never then, but later, what a change! Your legion of questions - I must try to answer some
of them. That about myself is the hardest task.
"First, my health is and always has been good - a total stranger to melancholia,
hypochondria, pessimism, and all forms of mental and spiritual colics. Never had a
prolonged sickness, nothing more than shakes,' which all true Westerners will gravely assure
you, with absolute certainty, They don't amount to much.' I know nothing except hard work
in the practice of my profession; never take holidays of any length; always eat plain food,
all I want and no more; eat and sleep with scrupulous regularity as to time, but what and
how long is never clothed with iron rules.
"As to my family and my early childhood: I was born about 1840, in the woods, in
log cabin days, near Quincy, Illinois, my mother's sixth son and the twelfth living child,
father having been driven by a proslavery mob from our older settled home in Missouri,
near Marion College, where he and a number of his college students had circulated,
preached, and justified Lovejoy's abolition sheet, Garrison's Boston Liberator, and other
antislavery incendiary documents. Also he had freed all his slaves, put all his boys in their
places to clear his land and drive oxen. Hence my life was commenced in the new clearing'
forest, the sickliest, weakliest' child in a family of twelve healthy children - so I was called
of my elders. Death seemed so imminent that I had to be baptized into the church very
early - the Presbyterian, of course. Father, thinking Oliver Cromwell the highest type of a
God-fearing, cant-hating man, proposed to give one of his sons an historical name. Mother
pleaded delay, and meant, secretly, no! My name was fixed long after baptism, and Oliver
Cromwell omitted; father, consenting to mother's selection, named me after a Dr. La
Fon, of Virginia, a deist of Huguenot descent, converted at one of father's old rousing camp
meetings, and the doctor had gone as a missionary, years before, to the then new field of
the Sandwich Islands. An old Doctor Cornelius, from somewhere in Yankeedom, had come
out to Kentucky, and in one sermon set my father's mind on fire on foreign missions,' back
in 1820 or thereabouts, I believe, and he was hotter than ever at his death, in 1844, and was
the ultimate cause of mother's decision, in 1859, that Mark Hopkins was the only man in
Unitarianized New England by whom she would trust me to be religiously indoctrinated.
Hence my advent at Williams. . . . Father's death when I was five years old left me with a
vast stock of absolute freedom, restlessness, reckless impulse, tempered with considerable
conscience. Plenty of swamp duck hunting, fishing, skating, logging with oxen, plowing, etc.,
together with cow's milk, corn bread, fat possum,' hominy, and wild honey, brought me out
to where I can truthfully say, I remember no prolonged sickness.' First and last, my father
turned his back on over $30,000 worth of slaves, when that sum stood for wealth out in the
Southwest, and the jolt down from the odious pride, conceit, and sickly selfishness of Aristoi
in the South prostrated some of the older members of our family, and they never quite
recovered healthy environments. As for myself, I was born in and breathed the air of
Demoi, and never wanted better; prefer spelling Character with a large C, and riches with
a little r."
Source:
Class of Sixty-Three Williams College Fortieth Year Report, by
the Class Historian, Thomas Todd Printer, Boston, 1903
Nelson
Surname Genealogy
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