Lived to an Old Age: Thomas Lewis Died at the Age of Ninety-Two: Had a Remarkable Career: Practice of Law Crowned His Life'[s Ambition: Was a Friend of Abraham Lincoln: Championed His Cause When He Was Wooing Mary Todd: President of Old Men's Club.
Thomas Lewis, one of the oldest citizens of Kansas City, president of the Old Men's association and a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, died yesterday morning at his home, 3337 Troost avenue, at the age of 92 years.
Mr. Lewis' death was directly the result of a fall he received on the back stairs of his home last March. He was seriously injured and his great age had so dissipated his once strong constitution that he was unable to rally from the shock. He began sinking, and for the past few weeks had been confined to his room.
Although Mr. Lewis retired from active business some three years ago, he felt at the time that his one great ambition had never been satisfied. He wanted to be a practicing attorney, and after a few months of vacation from business cares began the legal study which he had left off nearly forty years before. He had been afflicted in his youth with some trouble that affected his speech, and it was not until he was 36 years old that he regained control over his speaking faculties.
The press of business never gave him the opportunity he wished for, so that he was 90 years old before he found time to take up his chosen profession. He opened an office in the Temple building some two years since, and practiced in the courts as much as his health and great age would permit. He was unusually strong and robust for a man of his years and doubtless had not an accident befallen him he would have reached the entury mark.
President of the Old Men's Club. Mr. Lewis was elected president of the Old Men's association when it was formed and always took great interest in its affairs. He was greatly beloved and admired by his fellow members and his death will be a sad blow to the society.
The funeral will be held from the family home on Troost avenue this afternoon at 4 o'clock. The Rev. S.M. Nest, pastor of the Central Presbyterian church, of which denomination Mr. Lewis had been a member for eighty years, will conduct the services. The remains will be taken back to Springfield, Ill., where they will be interred by the side of the body of Mrs. Lewis in the family lot.
The life of Mr. Lewis was one of unceasing activity. In 1897, at the age of 89, he retired from active business pursuits, never before having taken a vacation. His restless nature, coupled with his energy, however, soon forced him once more into the rank of workers engaged in the practice of law.
There are few lines of business in which Thomas Lewis, at one time or another in his life, was not engaged. Apprenticed in his boyhood to the trade of a shoemaker, he was successively a mill builder, a real estate dealer and a lawyer. He founded a number of corporations and had been the financial genius of banking, railroad, mining and publishing enterprises. In these undertakings he had in all the co-operation of twenty-five different partners, and only in one instance, he claimed, did he ever have a serious misunderstanding with any of them.
Like many another man who outlived his three score and ten years, Mr. Lewis always attributed his splendid physical condition in the last years of his life to the strictest habits of temperance. In the last seventy years of his life he never indulged in the use of liquor or tobacco. During nearly sixty years he devoted every day an average of sixteen hours out of the twenty-four to business and reading.
An Ancestor Came in the Mayflower. Thomas Lewis was a lineal descendant of Edward Doty, who was a passenger on the Mayflower when it landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. His grandmother, Anna Doty, was that Pilgrim's great-granddaughter. Captain G. McCoy, who was a celebrated soldier in the revolutionary war, was his grandfather.
Mr. Lewis was born in Bernard's township, Somerset county, New Jersey, July 9, 1808. It was there he cast his first presidential vote for Andrew Jackson, in 1828, when Jackson received all the votes of the township except four that were cast for John Quincy Adams. He was always a Jacksonian democrat, and believed with all his strength in the principles of democracy. He always took an interest in politics, and ....... proud boast that he never missed an opportunity to cast his vote for his party's candidate.
When Mr. Lewis was 16 years old he left home to learn the trade of a shoe maker. He succeeded in earning from $8 to $10 a week for over work, and after the first year began the study of law. His brother Joseph was the largest shoe manufacturer in New Brunswick, N.J. at the time when he finished his term as an apprentice. This brother also owned a grocery store, and this Mr. Lewis conducted for him. He was afterward manager of the shoe manufactory, and several years later became its owner.
"Westward Ho" Appeals To Him. - The young and rapidly developing west attracted the attention of the young merchant, and in 1836 he left his New Jersy home and toured the country on a prospecting trip. He visited several western cities. Springfield, Ill. appeared to offer him the most promising future, and when he returned east, in 1837, it was with the determination to sell out his business in New Brunswick and move to that city. His brothers Ephraim and Joseph decided to go with him. They traveled in a wagon train, twenty-four in the party. When they arrived in the city of their destination there was not a store room of any kind to be had, and in order to rent one he was obliged to buy out the only shoe store in town. There were three small shoe manufacturing shops in the city, and in less than a year he had bought them all and had their former owners working for him.
He First Meets Lincoln. - It was in Springfield, Ill., that Mr. Lewis first made the acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln, then a struggling young lawyer, whose eccentricities of apparel and homely face and figure made him the butt of much of the quiet ridicule of the town. The friendship arising between the young merchant and the man destined to rise to the highest office in the gift of the American people was continued in bonds of intimacy until the tragic death of the latter. It was the proudest boast that Thomas Lewis made that he often championed the cause of Abraham Lincoln when the latter was laying siege to the heart of Mary Todd.
"Mary was a good deal as other young girls had been before her, and always will be," said he, in referring to this one day when he was in a reminiscent mood. She had an ideal, and Lincoln fell farther short of it than almost any man in the world. When she announced one day to my wife and me that she had determined, when she was a little lass, that she would never marry unless she could marry a handsome man, but that it seemed to be her fate to marry the homeliest man in the world, we knew that the handsome Mary Todd was to be Lincoln's wife.
An Incident at the White House. - It was while Lincoln was occupying the White house that one of the happiest incidents in the life of Mr. Lewis occurred. He used to tell the story himself with almost boyish pleasure.
"I visited Washington in 1862," he would say,"to call on my friend, Lincoln. I arrived at the White house about 9 o'clock at night, thinking that the president would then be a leisure. To my surprise, there were a dozen people ahead of me, waiting to see him. The door keeper told me I would have to wait my turn. I asked him to take in my card, which he died. Immediately he came back and ushered me into the presence of the president. Lincoln was engaged, but as he shook hands with me he said: "You see there are a number of people waiting to see me. Go to Mary's room and keep her company until I come and then we will talk old Springfield over. It may be midnight before I can get away from here."
I was taken to Mrs. Lincoln's apartments. At 11 o'clock the president came and we talked about affairs at home until 2 o'clock in the morning. That was the last time I ever saw Lincoln alive."
Mr. Lewis lived in Springfield until 1892, when he came to Kansas City. He accumulated considerable property in the Illinois city and when he left there he was quite wealthy. He was one of the promoters of the Sangamon and Alton railroad and was for years public administrator of Sangamon county.
Thomas Lewis was the father of three children, only of whom, Mrs. Adeline Ayers, is a resident of this city. The other two are Albert Lewis, a grain dealer in Cairo, Ill., and William T. Lewis of Americus, Kan. All of the children were notified of the death in time to reach the bedside before the end came. They will accompany the remains back to Illinois.
Contributed by: Badger 47542057
Death of Thomas Lewis: Pioneer of Illinois Dies at Kansas City. One of the First to Build Up Springfield and Once Owner of Property in the Heart of Chicago – Was Early Associate of Abraham Lincoln – When Nearly 90 Resumes Practice of Law, for Which He Was Always Ambitious. Special.) -
Kansas City, Mo., Feb 3.-(Springfield) – Thomas Lewis, President of the Old Men’s association of this city once a legal associate of Lincoln, died early this morning at 3337 Troost avenue. He was 92 years old. Not long ago he fell down a stairway at his home, and, though he escaped with no broken bones, the shock was too great for him to survive.
Two years ago, at the age of 90, Mr. Lewis resumed the practice of law. He had been educated for the law in his youth, but owing to an impediment of speech had not recently practiced his profession. Instead he entered upon a mercantile career.
At the age of 35 his affliction left him, and from that date the ambition to return to the career of a practicing attorney grew,. His business, however, was so prosperous, that until his retirement from its active management at het age of 90 he was never able to satisfy his life ambition to be an attorney at the bar.
Undeterred by age, he opened an office the Temple Block here and tried a number of cases of varying degrees of importance before the local courts. It was not until a fall a few months ago compelled him to remain at home that he gave up his law practice and his office.
Before coming to Kansas City eight years ago Mr. Lewis lived in Sringfield, Ill., where he had engaged in business since 1840. He was an intimate friend of Abraham Lincoln, whom he greatly admired.
Mr. Lewis was born at Basking Ridge, N.J. July 9, 1808. His father was a farmer.
Three children survive him. There are Mrs. Adeline Ayers of this city, Albert Lewis, a grain dealer of Cairo, Ill, and William T. Lewis, a farmer of America City, Kas.
Began At Shoemaking.—At the age of 16 he started out of life as a shoemaker in Basking Ridge, and after serving his apprenticeship, he entered the shoe department of the store of his brother, Joseph Lewis. In 1819 his uncle, Dr. Jacob Lewis, who had led a colony from New Jersey to Illinois, persuaded him to go West, but business prevented him from starting until 1836. His first trip was for the purpose of finding the best place to settle. He went down the Ohio River to Cairo, then to St. Louis, form there to Chicago, through Illinois, and then home. When he passed through St Louis it had a population of 6,000 and Chicago 4,000. In a book of his life which he published a few years ago, he states that Chicago was a “dismal, cold, muddy town,” which did not impress him favorably.
In 1837 Mr. Lewis returned to Illinois with his wife, settling at Springfield. There was practically no town there then; only a few houses. Mr. Lewis opened a shoe store there and for years was the only shoe dealer in town. It was in Springfield that he became intimately acquainted with Abraham Lincoln, then a young lawyer, and Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s opponent.
In 1896,Mr. Lewis published a history of his life. It treats of his career, politics, and history. In the book Mr. Lewis says: “I cast my first Presidential vote for Andrew Jackson, and have never voted for Presidential electors or Congressmen except those on the Democratic ticket. I voted against my old friend Abraham Lincoln, and for Uncle Peter Cartwright, the old Methodist preacher, for Congress.
“For any office beneath that I have voted upon the Jackson qualifications. When an applicant was proposed to General Jackson his first inquiry was, “Is he honest?” Is he capable?” If he lacked either qualification he could not be appointed.
“When Abraham Lincoln was a candidate on the Republican ticket for the State Legislature there was a candidate on the Democratic of an immoral character, hence I voted for Lincoln.”
Mr. Lewis’ remains will be taken to Springfield, Ill, for burial.
Thomas Lewis, one of the oldest citizens of Kansas City, president of the Old Men's association and a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, died yesterday morning at his home, 3337 Troost avenue, at the age of 92 years.
Mr. Lewis' death was directly the result of a fall he received on the back stairs of his home last March. He was seriously injured and his great age had so dissipated his once strong constitution that he was unable to rally from the shock. He began sinking, and for the past few weeks had been confined to his room.
Although Mr. Lewis retired from active business some three years ago, he felt at the time that his one great ambition had never been satisfied. He wanted to be a practicing attorney, and after a few months of vacation from business cares began the legal study which he had left off nearly forty years before. He had been afflicted in his youth with some trouble that affected his speech, and it was not until he was 36 years old that he regained control over his speaking faculties.
The press of business never gave him the opportunity he wished for, so that he was 90 years old before he found time to take up his chosen profession. He opened an office in the Temple building some two years since, and practiced in the courts as much as his health and great age would permit. He was unusually strong and robust for a man of his years and doubtless had not an accident befallen him he would have reached the entury mark.
President of the Old Men's Club. Mr. Lewis was elected president of the Old Men's association when it was formed and always took great interest in its affairs. He was greatly beloved and admired by his fellow members and his death will be a sad blow to the society.
The funeral will be held from the family home on Troost avenue this afternoon at 4 o'clock. The Rev. S.M. Nest, pastor of the Central Presbyterian church, of which denomination Mr. Lewis had been a member for eighty years, will conduct the services. The remains will be taken back to Springfield, Ill., where they will be interred by the side of the body of Mrs. Lewis in the family lot.
The life of Mr. Lewis was one of unceasing activity. In 1897, at the age of 89, he retired from active business pursuits, never before having taken a vacation. His restless nature, coupled with his energy, however, soon forced him once more into the rank of workers engaged in the practice of law.
There are few lines of business in which Thomas Lewis, at one time or another in his life, was not engaged. Apprenticed in his boyhood to the trade of a shoemaker, he was successively a mill builder, a real estate dealer and a lawyer. He founded a number of corporations and had been the financial genius of banking, railroad, mining and publishing enterprises. In these undertakings he had in all the co-operation of twenty-five different partners, and only in one instance, he claimed, did he ever have a serious misunderstanding with any of them.
Like many another man who outlived his three score and ten years, Mr. Lewis always attributed his splendid physical condition in the last years of his life to the strictest habits of temperance. In the last seventy years of his life he never indulged in the use of liquor or tobacco. During nearly sixty years he devoted every day an average of sixteen hours out of the twenty-four to business and reading.
An Ancestor Came in the Mayflower. Thomas Lewis was a lineal descendant of Edward Doty, who was a passenger on the Mayflower when it landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. His grandmother, Anna Doty, was that Pilgrim's great-granddaughter. Captain G. McCoy, who was a celebrated soldier in the revolutionary war, was his grandfather.
Mr. Lewis was born in Bernard's township, Somerset county, New Jersey, July 9, 1808. It was there he cast his first presidential vote for Andrew Jackson, in 1828, when Jackson received all the votes of the township except four that were cast for John Quincy Adams. He was always a Jacksonian democrat, and believed with all his strength in the principles of democracy. He always took an interest in politics, and ....... proud boast that he never missed an opportunity to cast his vote for his party's candidate.
When Mr. Lewis was 16 years old he left home to learn the trade of a shoe maker. He succeeded in earning from $8 to $10 a week for over work, and after the first year began the study of law. His brother Joseph was the largest shoe manufacturer in New Brunswick, N.J. at the time when he finished his term as an apprentice. This brother also owned a grocery store, and this Mr. Lewis conducted for him. He was afterward manager of the shoe manufactory, and several years later became its owner.
"Westward Ho" Appeals To Him. - The young and rapidly developing west attracted the attention of the young merchant, and in 1836 he left his New Jersy home and toured the country on a prospecting trip. He visited several western cities. Springfield, Ill. appeared to offer him the most promising future, and when he returned east, in 1837, it was with the determination to sell out his business in New Brunswick and move to that city. His brothers Ephraim and Joseph decided to go with him. They traveled in a wagon train, twenty-four in the party. When they arrived in the city of their destination there was not a store room of any kind to be had, and in order to rent one he was obliged to buy out the only shoe store in town. There were three small shoe manufacturing shops in the city, and in less than a year he had bought them all and had their former owners working for him.
He First Meets Lincoln. - It was in Springfield, Ill., that Mr. Lewis first made the acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln, then a struggling young lawyer, whose eccentricities of apparel and homely face and figure made him the butt of much of the quiet ridicule of the town. The friendship arising between the young merchant and the man destined to rise to the highest office in the gift of the American people was continued in bonds of intimacy until the tragic death of the latter. It was the proudest boast that Thomas Lewis made that he often championed the cause of Abraham Lincoln when the latter was laying siege to the heart of Mary Todd.
"Mary was a good deal as other young girls had been before her, and always will be," said he, in referring to this one day when he was in a reminiscent mood. She had an ideal, and Lincoln fell farther short of it than almost any man in the world. When she announced one day to my wife and me that she had determined, when she was a little lass, that she would never marry unless she could marry a handsome man, but that it seemed to be her fate to marry the homeliest man in the world, we knew that the handsome Mary Todd was to be Lincoln's wife.
An Incident at the White House. - It was while Lincoln was occupying the White house that one of the happiest incidents in the life of Mr. Lewis occurred. He used to tell the story himself with almost boyish pleasure.
"I visited Washington in 1862," he would say,"to call on my friend, Lincoln. I arrived at the White house about 9 o'clock at night, thinking that the president would then be a leisure. To my surprise, there were a dozen people ahead of me, waiting to see him. The door keeper told me I would have to wait my turn. I asked him to take in my card, which he died. Immediately he came back and ushered me into the presence of the president. Lincoln was engaged, but as he shook hands with me he said: "You see there are a number of people waiting to see me. Go to Mary's room and keep her company until I come and then we will talk old Springfield over. It may be midnight before I can get away from here."
I was taken to Mrs. Lincoln's apartments. At 11 o'clock the president came and we talked about affairs at home until 2 o'clock in the morning. That was the last time I ever saw Lincoln alive."
Mr. Lewis lived in Springfield until 1892, when he came to Kansas City. He accumulated considerable property in the Illinois city and when he left there he was quite wealthy. He was one of the promoters of the Sangamon and Alton railroad and was for years public administrator of Sangamon county.
Thomas Lewis was the father of three children, only of whom, Mrs. Adeline Ayers, is a resident of this city. The other two are Albert Lewis, a grain dealer in Cairo, Ill., and William T. Lewis of Americus, Kan. All of the children were notified of the death in time to reach the bedside before the end came. They will accompany the remains back to Illinois.
Contributed by: Badger 47542057
Death of Thomas Lewis: Pioneer of Illinois Dies at Kansas City. One of the First to Build Up Springfield and Once Owner of Property in the Heart of Chicago – Was Early Associate of Abraham Lincoln – When Nearly 90 Resumes Practice of Law, for Which He Was Always Ambitious. Special.) -
Kansas City, Mo., Feb 3.-(Springfield) – Thomas Lewis, President of the Old Men’s association of this city once a legal associate of Lincoln, died early this morning at 3337 Troost avenue. He was 92 years old. Not long ago he fell down a stairway at his home, and, though he escaped with no broken bones, the shock was too great for him to survive.
Two years ago, at the age of 90, Mr. Lewis resumed the practice of law. He had been educated for the law in his youth, but owing to an impediment of speech had not recently practiced his profession. Instead he entered upon a mercantile career.
At the age of 35 his affliction left him, and from that date the ambition to return to the career of a practicing attorney grew,. His business, however, was so prosperous, that until his retirement from its active management at het age of 90 he was never able to satisfy his life ambition to be an attorney at the bar.
Undeterred by age, he opened an office the Temple Block here and tried a number of cases of varying degrees of importance before the local courts. It was not until a fall a few months ago compelled him to remain at home that he gave up his law practice and his office.
Before coming to Kansas City eight years ago Mr. Lewis lived in Sringfield, Ill., where he had engaged in business since 1840. He was an intimate friend of Abraham Lincoln, whom he greatly admired.
Mr. Lewis was born at Basking Ridge, N.J. July 9, 1808. His father was a farmer.
Three children survive him. There are Mrs. Adeline Ayers of this city, Albert Lewis, a grain dealer of Cairo, Ill, and William T. Lewis, a farmer of America City, Kas.
Began At Shoemaking.—At the age of 16 he started out of life as a shoemaker in Basking Ridge, and after serving his apprenticeship, he entered the shoe department of the store of his brother, Joseph Lewis. In 1819 his uncle, Dr. Jacob Lewis, who had led a colony from New Jersey to Illinois, persuaded him to go West, but business prevented him from starting until 1836. His first trip was for the purpose of finding the best place to settle. He went down the Ohio River to Cairo, then to St. Louis, form there to Chicago, through Illinois, and then home. When he passed through St Louis it had a population of 6,000 and Chicago 4,000. In a book of his life which he published a few years ago, he states that Chicago was a “dismal, cold, muddy town,” which did not impress him favorably.
In 1837 Mr. Lewis returned to Illinois with his wife, settling at Springfield. There was practically no town there then; only a few houses. Mr. Lewis opened a shoe store there and for years was the only shoe dealer in town. It was in Springfield that he became intimately acquainted with Abraham Lincoln, then a young lawyer, and Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s opponent.
In 1896,Mr. Lewis published a history of his life. It treats of his career, politics, and history. In the book Mr. Lewis says: “I cast my first Presidential vote for Andrew Jackson, and have never voted for Presidential electors or Congressmen except those on the Democratic ticket. I voted against my old friend Abraham Lincoln, and for Uncle Peter Cartwright, the old Methodist preacher, for Congress.
“For any office beneath that I have voted upon the Jackson qualifications. When an applicant was proposed to General Jackson his first inquiry was, “Is he honest?” Is he capable?” If he lacked either qualification he could not be appointed.
“When Abraham Lincoln was a candidate on the Republican ticket for the State Legislature there was a candidate on the Democratic of an immoral character, hence I voted for Lincoln.”
Mr. Lewis’ remains will be taken to Springfield, Ill, for burial.
Lived to an Old Age: Thomas Lewis Died at the Age of Ninety-Two: Had a Remarkable Career: Practice of Law Crowned His Life'[s Ambition: Was a Friend of Abraham Lincoln: Championed His Cause When He Was Wooing Mary Todd: President of Old Men's Club.
Thomas Lewis, one of the oldest citizens of Kansas City, president of the Old Men's association and a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, died yesterday morning at his home, 3337 Troost avenue, at the age of 92 years.
Mr. Lewis' death was directly the result of a fall he received on the back stairs of his home last March. He was seriously injured and his great age had so dissipated his once strong constitution that he was unable to rally from the shock. He began sinking, and for the past few weeks had been confined to his room.
Although Mr. Lewis retired from active business some three years ago, he felt at the time that his one great ambition had never been satisfied. He wanted to be a practicing attorney, and after a few months of vacation from business cares began the legal study which he had left off nearly forty years before. He had been afflicted in his youth with some trouble that affected his speech, and it was not until he was 36 years old that he regained control over his speaking faculties.
The press of business never gave him the opportunity he wished for, so that he was 90 years old before he found time to take up his chosen profession. He opened an office in the Temple building some two years since, and practiced in the courts as much as his health and great age would permit. He was unusually strong and robust for a man of his years and doubtless had not an accident befallen him he would have reached the entury mark.
President of the Old Men's Club. Mr. Lewis was elected president of the Old Men's association when it was formed and always took great interest in its affairs. He was greatly beloved and admired by his fellow members and his death will be a sad blow to the society.
The funeral will be held from the family home on Troost avenue this afternoon at 4 o'clock. The Rev. S.M. Nest, pastor of the Central Presbyterian church, of which denomination Mr. Lewis had been a member for eighty years, will conduct the services. The remains will be taken back to Springfield, Ill., where they will be interred by the side of the body of Mrs. Lewis in the family lot.
The life of Mr. Lewis was one of unceasing activity. In 1897, at the age of 89, he retired from active business pursuits, never before having taken a vacation. His restless nature, coupled with his energy, however, soon forced him once more into the rank of workers engaged in the practice of law.
There are few lines of business in which Thomas Lewis, at one time or another in his life, was not engaged. Apprenticed in his boyhood to the trade of a shoemaker, he was successively a mill builder, a real estate dealer and a lawyer. He founded a number of corporations and had been the financial genius of banking, railroad, mining and publishing enterprises. In these undertakings he had in all the co-operation of twenty-five different partners, and only in one instance, he claimed, did he ever have a serious misunderstanding with any of them.
Like many another man who outlived his three score and ten years, Mr. Lewis always attributed his splendid physical condition in the last years of his life to the strictest habits of temperance. In the last seventy years of his life he never indulged in the use of liquor or tobacco. During nearly sixty years he devoted every day an average of sixteen hours out of the twenty-four to business and reading.
An Ancestor Came in the Mayflower. Thomas Lewis was a lineal descendant of Edward Doty, who was a passenger on the Mayflower when it landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. His grandmother, Anna Doty, was that Pilgrim's great-granddaughter. Captain G. McCoy, who was a celebrated soldier in the revolutionary war, was his grandfather.
Mr. Lewis was born in Bernard's township, Somerset county, New Jersey, July 9, 1808. It was there he cast his first presidential vote for Andrew Jackson, in 1828, when Jackson received all the votes of the township except four that were cast for John Quincy Adams. He was always a Jacksonian democrat, and believed with all his strength in the principles of democracy. He always took an interest in politics, and ....... proud boast that he never missed an opportunity to cast his vote for his party's candidate.
When Mr. Lewis was 16 years old he left home to learn the trade of a shoe maker. He succeeded in earning from $8 to $10 a week for over work, and after the first year began the study of law. His brother Joseph was the largest shoe manufacturer in New Brunswick, N.J. at the time when he finished his term as an apprentice. This brother also owned a grocery store, and this Mr. Lewis conducted for him. He was afterward manager of the shoe manufactory, and several years later became its owner.
"Westward Ho" Appeals To Him. - The young and rapidly developing west attracted the attention of the young merchant, and in 1836 he left his New Jersy home and toured the country on a prospecting trip. He visited several western cities. Springfield, Ill. appeared to offer him the most promising future, and when he returned east, in 1837, it was with the determination to sell out his business in New Brunswick and move to that city. His brothers Ephraim and Joseph decided to go with him. They traveled in a wagon train, twenty-four in the party. When they arrived in the city of their destination there was not a store room of any kind to be had, and in order to rent one he was obliged to buy out the only shoe store in town. There were three small shoe manufacturing shops in the city, and in less than a year he had bought them all and had their former owners working for him.
He First Meets Lincoln. - It was in Springfield, Ill., that Mr. Lewis first made the acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln, then a struggling young lawyer, whose eccentricities of apparel and homely face and figure made him the butt of much of the quiet ridicule of the town. The friendship arising between the young merchant and the man destined to rise to the highest office in the gift of the American people was continued in bonds of intimacy until the tragic death of the latter. It was the proudest boast that Thomas Lewis made that he often championed the cause of Abraham Lincoln when the latter was laying siege to the heart of Mary Todd.
"Mary was a good deal as other young girls had been before her, and always will be," said he, in referring to this one day when he was in a reminiscent mood. She had an ideal, and Lincoln fell farther short of it than almost any man in the world. When she announced one day to my wife and me that she had determined, when she was a little lass, that she would never marry unless she could marry a handsome man, but that it seemed to be her fate to marry the homeliest man in the world, we knew that the handsome Mary Todd was to be Lincoln's wife.
An Incident at the White House. - It was while Lincoln was occupying the White house that one of the happiest incidents in the life of Mr. Lewis occurred. He used to tell the story himself with almost boyish pleasure.
"I visited Washington in 1862," he would say,"to call on my friend, Lincoln. I arrived at the White house about 9 o'clock at night, thinking that the president would then be a leisure. To my surprise, there were a dozen people ahead of me, waiting to see him. The door keeper told me I would have to wait my turn. I asked him to take in my card, which he died. Immediately he came back and ushered me into the presence of the president. Lincoln was engaged, but as he shook hands with me he said: "You see there are a number of people waiting to see me. Go to Mary's room and keep her company until I come and then we will talk old Springfield over. It may be midnight before I can get away from here."
I was taken to Mrs. Lincoln's apartments. At 11 o'clock the president came and we talked about affairs at home until 2 o'clock in the morning. That was the last time I ever saw Lincoln alive."
Mr. Lewis lived in Springfield until 1892, when he came to Kansas City. He accumulated considerable property in the Illinois city and when he left there he was quite wealthy. He was one of the promoters of the Sangamon and Alton railroad and was for years public administrator of Sangamon county.
Thomas Lewis was the father of three children, only of whom, Mrs. Adeline Ayers, is a resident of this city. The other two are Albert Lewis, a grain dealer in Cairo, Ill., and William T. Lewis of Americus, Kan. All of the children were notified of the death in time to reach the bedside before the end came. They will accompany the remains back to Illinois.
Contributed by: Badger 47542057
Death of Thomas Lewis: Pioneer of Illinois Dies at Kansas City. One of the First to Build Up Springfield and Once Owner of Property in the Heart of Chicago – Was Early Associate of Abraham Lincoln – When Nearly 90 Resumes Practice of Law, for Which He Was Always Ambitious. Special.) -
Kansas City, Mo., Feb 3.-(Springfield) – Thomas Lewis, President of the Old Men’s association of this city once a legal associate of Lincoln, died early this morning at 3337 Troost avenue. He was 92 years old. Not long ago he fell down a stairway at his home, and, though he escaped with no broken bones, the shock was too great for him to survive.
Two years ago, at the age of 90, Mr. Lewis resumed the practice of law. He had been educated for the law in his youth, but owing to an impediment of speech had not recently practiced his profession. Instead he entered upon a mercantile career.
At the age of 35 his affliction left him, and from that date the ambition to return to the career of a practicing attorney grew,. His business, however, was so prosperous, that until his retirement from its active management at het age of 90 he was never able to satisfy his life ambition to be an attorney at the bar.
Undeterred by age, he opened an office the Temple Block here and tried a number of cases of varying degrees of importance before the local courts. It was not until a fall a few months ago compelled him to remain at home that he gave up his law practice and his office.
Before coming to Kansas City eight years ago Mr. Lewis lived in Sringfield, Ill., where he had engaged in business since 1840. He was an intimate friend of Abraham Lincoln, whom he greatly admired.
Mr. Lewis was born at Basking Ridge, N.J. July 9, 1808. His father was a farmer.
Three children survive him. There are Mrs. Adeline Ayers of this city, Albert Lewis, a grain dealer of Cairo, Ill, and William T. Lewis, a farmer of America City, Kas.
Began At Shoemaking.—At the age of 16 he started out of life as a shoemaker in Basking Ridge, and after serving his apprenticeship, he entered the shoe department of the store of his brother, Joseph Lewis. In 1819 his uncle, Dr. Jacob Lewis, who had led a colony from New Jersey to Illinois, persuaded him to go West, but business prevented him from starting until 1836. His first trip was for the purpose of finding the best place to settle. He went down the Ohio River to Cairo, then to St. Louis, form there to Chicago, through Illinois, and then home. When he passed through St Louis it had a population of 6,000 and Chicago 4,000. In a book of his life which he published a few years ago, he states that Chicago was a “dismal, cold, muddy town,” which did not impress him favorably.
In 1837 Mr. Lewis returned to Illinois with his wife, settling at Springfield. There was practically no town there then; only a few houses. Mr. Lewis opened a shoe store there and for years was the only shoe dealer in town. It was in Springfield that he became intimately acquainted with Abraham Lincoln, then a young lawyer, and Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s opponent.
In 1896,Mr. Lewis published a history of his life. It treats of his career, politics, and history. In the book Mr. Lewis says: “I cast my first Presidential vote for Andrew Jackson, and have never voted for Presidential electors or Congressmen except those on the Democratic ticket. I voted against my old friend Abraham Lincoln, and for Uncle Peter Cartwright, the old Methodist preacher, for Congress.
“For any office beneath that I have voted upon the Jackson qualifications. When an applicant was proposed to General Jackson his first inquiry was, “Is he honest?” Is he capable?” If he lacked either qualification he could not be appointed.
“When Abraham Lincoln was a candidate on the Republican ticket for the State Legislature there was a candidate on the Democratic of an immoral character, hence I voted for Lincoln.”
Mr. Lewis’ remains will be taken to Springfield, Ill, for burial.
Thomas Lewis, one of the oldest citizens of Kansas City, president of the Old Men's association and a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, died yesterday morning at his home, 3337 Troost avenue, at the age of 92 years.
Mr. Lewis' death was directly the result of a fall he received on the back stairs of his home last March. He was seriously injured and his great age had so dissipated his once strong constitution that he was unable to rally from the shock. He began sinking, and for the past few weeks had been confined to his room.
Although Mr. Lewis retired from active business some three years ago, he felt at the time that his one great ambition had never been satisfied. He wanted to be a practicing attorney, and after a few months of vacation from business cares began the legal study which he had left off nearly forty years before. He had been afflicted in his youth with some trouble that affected his speech, and it was not until he was 36 years old that he regained control over his speaking faculties.
The press of business never gave him the opportunity he wished for, so that he was 90 years old before he found time to take up his chosen profession. He opened an office in the Temple building some two years since, and practiced in the courts as much as his health and great age would permit. He was unusually strong and robust for a man of his years and doubtless had not an accident befallen him he would have reached the entury mark.
President of the Old Men's Club. Mr. Lewis was elected president of the Old Men's association when it was formed and always took great interest in its affairs. He was greatly beloved and admired by his fellow members and his death will be a sad blow to the society.
The funeral will be held from the family home on Troost avenue this afternoon at 4 o'clock. The Rev. S.M. Nest, pastor of the Central Presbyterian church, of which denomination Mr. Lewis had been a member for eighty years, will conduct the services. The remains will be taken back to Springfield, Ill., where they will be interred by the side of the body of Mrs. Lewis in the family lot.
The life of Mr. Lewis was one of unceasing activity. In 1897, at the age of 89, he retired from active business pursuits, never before having taken a vacation. His restless nature, coupled with his energy, however, soon forced him once more into the rank of workers engaged in the practice of law.
There are few lines of business in which Thomas Lewis, at one time or another in his life, was not engaged. Apprenticed in his boyhood to the trade of a shoemaker, he was successively a mill builder, a real estate dealer and a lawyer. He founded a number of corporations and had been the financial genius of banking, railroad, mining and publishing enterprises. In these undertakings he had in all the co-operation of twenty-five different partners, and only in one instance, he claimed, did he ever have a serious misunderstanding with any of them.
Like many another man who outlived his three score and ten years, Mr. Lewis always attributed his splendid physical condition in the last years of his life to the strictest habits of temperance. In the last seventy years of his life he never indulged in the use of liquor or tobacco. During nearly sixty years he devoted every day an average of sixteen hours out of the twenty-four to business and reading.
An Ancestor Came in the Mayflower. Thomas Lewis was a lineal descendant of Edward Doty, who was a passenger on the Mayflower when it landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. His grandmother, Anna Doty, was that Pilgrim's great-granddaughter. Captain G. McCoy, who was a celebrated soldier in the revolutionary war, was his grandfather.
Mr. Lewis was born in Bernard's township, Somerset county, New Jersey, July 9, 1808. It was there he cast his first presidential vote for Andrew Jackson, in 1828, when Jackson received all the votes of the township except four that were cast for John Quincy Adams. He was always a Jacksonian democrat, and believed with all his strength in the principles of democracy. He always took an interest in politics, and ....... proud boast that he never missed an opportunity to cast his vote for his party's candidate.
When Mr. Lewis was 16 years old he left home to learn the trade of a shoe maker. He succeeded in earning from $8 to $10 a week for over work, and after the first year began the study of law. His brother Joseph was the largest shoe manufacturer in New Brunswick, N.J. at the time when he finished his term as an apprentice. This brother also owned a grocery store, and this Mr. Lewis conducted for him. He was afterward manager of the shoe manufactory, and several years later became its owner.
"Westward Ho" Appeals To Him. - The young and rapidly developing west attracted the attention of the young merchant, and in 1836 he left his New Jersy home and toured the country on a prospecting trip. He visited several western cities. Springfield, Ill. appeared to offer him the most promising future, and when he returned east, in 1837, it was with the determination to sell out his business in New Brunswick and move to that city. His brothers Ephraim and Joseph decided to go with him. They traveled in a wagon train, twenty-four in the party. When they arrived in the city of their destination there was not a store room of any kind to be had, and in order to rent one he was obliged to buy out the only shoe store in town. There were three small shoe manufacturing shops in the city, and in less than a year he had bought them all and had their former owners working for him.
He First Meets Lincoln. - It was in Springfield, Ill., that Mr. Lewis first made the acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln, then a struggling young lawyer, whose eccentricities of apparel and homely face and figure made him the butt of much of the quiet ridicule of the town. The friendship arising between the young merchant and the man destined to rise to the highest office in the gift of the American people was continued in bonds of intimacy until the tragic death of the latter. It was the proudest boast that Thomas Lewis made that he often championed the cause of Abraham Lincoln when the latter was laying siege to the heart of Mary Todd.
"Mary was a good deal as other young girls had been before her, and always will be," said he, in referring to this one day when he was in a reminiscent mood. She had an ideal, and Lincoln fell farther short of it than almost any man in the world. When she announced one day to my wife and me that she had determined, when she was a little lass, that she would never marry unless she could marry a handsome man, but that it seemed to be her fate to marry the homeliest man in the world, we knew that the handsome Mary Todd was to be Lincoln's wife.
An Incident at the White House. - It was while Lincoln was occupying the White house that one of the happiest incidents in the life of Mr. Lewis occurred. He used to tell the story himself with almost boyish pleasure.
"I visited Washington in 1862," he would say,"to call on my friend, Lincoln. I arrived at the White house about 9 o'clock at night, thinking that the president would then be a leisure. To my surprise, there were a dozen people ahead of me, waiting to see him. The door keeper told me I would have to wait my turn. I asked him to take in my card, which he died. Immediately he came back and ushered me into the presence of the president. Lincoln was engaged, but as he shook hands with me he said: "You see there are a number of people waiting to see me. Go to Mary's room and keep her company until I come and then we will talk old Springfield over. It may be midnight before I can get away from here."
I was taken to Mrs. Lincoln's apartments. At 11 o'clock the president came and we talked about affairs at home until 2 o'clock in the morning. That was the last time I ever saw Lincoln alive."
Mr. Lewis lived in Springfield until 1892, when he came to Kansas City. He accumulated considerable property in the Illinois city and when he left there he was quite wealthy. He was one of the promoters of the Sangamon and Alton railroad and was for years public administrator of Sangamon county.
Thomas Lewis was the father of three children, only of whom, Mrs. Adeline Ayers, is a resident of this city. The other two are Albert Lewis, a grain dealer in Cairo, Ill., and William T. Lewis of Americus, Kan. All of the children were notified of the death in time to reach the bedside before the end came. They will accompany the remains back to Illinois.
Contributed by: Badger 47542057
Death of Thomas Lewis: Pioneer of Illinois Dies at Kansas City. One of the First to Build Up Springfield and Once Owner of Property in the Heart of Chicago – Was Early Associate of Abraham Lincoln – When Nearly 90 Resumes Practice of Law, for Which He Was Always Ambitious. Special.) -
Kansas City, Mo., Feb 3.-(Springfield) – Thomas Lewis, President of the Old Men’s association of this city once a legal associate of Lincoln, died early this morning at 3337 Troost avenue. He was 92 years old. Not long ago he fell down a stairway at his home, and, though he escaped with no broken bones, the shock was too great for him to survive.
Two years ago, at the age of 90, Mr. Lewis resumed the practice of law. He had been educated for the law in his youth, but owing to an impediment of speech had not recently practiced his profession. Instead he entered upon a mercantile career.
At the age of 35 his affliction left him, and from that date the ambition to return to the career of a practicing attorney grew,. His business, however, was so prosperous, that until his retirement from its active management at het age of 90 he was never able to satisfy his life ambition to be an attorney at the bar.
Undeterred by age, he opened an office the Temple Block here and tried a number of cases of varying degrees of importance before the local courts. It was not until a fall a few months ago compelled him to remain at home that he gave up his law practice and his office.
Before coming to Kansas City eight years ago Mr. Lewis lived in Sringfield, Ill., where he had engaged in business since 1840. He was an intimate friend of Abraham Lincoln, whom he greatly admired.
Mr. Lewis was born at Basking Ridge, N.J. July 9, 1808. His father was a farmer.
Three children survive him. There are Mrs. Adeline Ayers of this city, Albert Lewis, a grain dealer of Cairo, Ill, and William T. Lewis, a farmer of America City, Kas.
Began At Shoemaking.—At the age of 16 he started out of life as a shoemaker in Basking Ridge, and after serving his apprenticeship, he entered the shoe department of the store of his brother, Joseph Lewis. In 1819 his uncle, Dr. Jacob Lewis, who had led a colony from New Jersey to Illinois, persuaded him to go West, but business prevented him from starting until 1836. His first trip was for the purpose of finding the best place to settle. He went down the Ohio River to Cairo, then to St. Louis, form there to Chicago, through Illinois, and then home. When he passed through St Louis it had a population of 6,000 and Chicago 4,000. In a book of his life which he published a few years ago, he states that Chicago was a “dismal, cold, muddy town,” which did not impress him favorably.
In 1837 Mr. Lewis returned to Illinois with his wife, settling at Springfield. There was practically no town there then; only a few houses. Mr. Lewis opened a shoe store there and for years was the only shoe dealer in town. It was in Springfield that he became intimately acquainted with Abraham Lincoln, then a young lawyer, and Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s opponent.
In 1896,Mr. Lewis published a history of his life. It treats of his career, politics, and history. In the book Mr. Lewis says: “I cast my first Presidential vote for Andrew Jackson, and have never voted for Presidential electors or Congressmen except those on the Democratic ticket. I voted against my old friend Abraham Lincoln, and for Uncle Peter Cartwright, the old Methodist preacher, for Congress.
“For any office beneath that I have voted upon the Jackson qualifications. When an applicant was proposed to General Jackson his first inquiry was, “Is he honest?” Is he capable?” If he lacked either qualification he could not be appointed.
“When Abraham Lincoln was a candidate on the Republican ticket for the State Legislature there was a candidate on the Democratic of an immoral character, hence I voted for Lincoln.”
Mr. Lewis’ remains will be taken to Springfield, Ill, for burial.
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