American humorist and lecturer, born in Greensboro, PA, on the 30th of July 1844. He was educated in the public schools of Peoria, IL, and in 1862 enlisted as a private in the Forty-seventh Illinois volunteers, and served through the war. He was connected with the Peoria Transcript in 1869, afterward with the Review, and later he started, with friends, a new paper, which was unsuccessful. He became associate editor of the Burlington Hawkeye, of Iowa, and his humorous sketches in this paper were widely copied, and made him known to the newspaper-reading world. His fun was never coarse or vulgar. In 1877 he began to deliver lectures, which were only moderately successful, and most of which have since been compiled with fugitive pieces and published in book-form; as, The Rise and Fall of the Mustache, and Other Hawkeyetems; Hawkeyes; and Life of William Penn. He was licensed by the Baptist denomination to preach, and during vacation trips supplied destitute country churches. See also “The Romance of the Carpet,” etc.
