From Jefferson County IN Death Record:
Arnold Scott Custer
b. 25 Dec 1851, Bryantsburg, IN
d. 30 Oct 1928, Madison Township
Age: 76
Father: Arnold S. Custer, Sr., b. IN
Mother: Not listed
Burial: Springdale Cemetery
Funeral Director: George C. Vail & Sons
Physician: C. C. Copeland, MD
Cause of death: Pthisis pulmonalis
=================
b. 24 Dec 1851 Monroe Twp., Jefferson Co., IN
d. 30 Oct 1928, Green Rd., Madison, Jefferson Co., IN
-------------------------
A.S. Custer's legacy was no small thing - a $1,000 donation that 100 years later is still paying prizes for an oratorical contest, though the winners no longer are awarded gold pieces.
His $1,000 donation grew during years when interest rates were high, but has not been growing much in recent years, said Charlene O'Connell, the Madison Consolidated Schools treasurer. Still, the account balance is $41,000.
The prizes have grown considerably since Custer's day. In the beginning, the total amount of the prizes was $60 in gold pieces, with the winner receiving the most, the second-place winner receiving less, and the rest divided among the other three contestants, whom Custer insisted all be of equal rank and never third, fourth and fifth.
This year, first place will have a $700 prize, second place will get $350 and the other contestants will receive $175 each. The three judges will receive $50 each.
When preparations were under way to announce Custer's donation for an oratory contest in 1911, Custer wrote to Superintendent Donald DuShane, "... I would not presume to outline the manner of your announcement of the gift to the High School, but would prefer to have as little said about the donor as is consistent with the ideas of yourself and the Board of Education."
Building onto the Custer legacy
The Custer Prize, however, was not enough for Custer, who wanted to show his fondness for Madison and at the same time ensure that "my name will be more widely and favorably known than now."
He wrote in his will that he had been considering for many years how he could "do a good thing for the public and perpetuate our family name."
Fifteen years after five high school seniors delivered oratories on a stage in the first Custer Contest in 1912, Custer had devised an idea that he thought would make Madison the "eighth wonder of the world." His plan will take 416 more years to come to fruition, or not.
Whether he was a visionary, an eccentric or something else, he put thought into what he wanted Madison to be like in 500 years. He wrote it down and it was published as a front-page letter to the editor Nov. 8, 1927. It is reprinted today on page A5.
Later, Custer would refer to the published letter as a codicil, or addition, to his will. And although he even later changed a few things about how his money was to be invested, his final will and codicil, written early in the year he died, still contained the grand plans he had laid out in the newspaper piece and the way the money would be available.
As for the money in accounts accumulating interest to make his plans a reality, it is unclear if they survived the Great Depression and everything that has happened since. The only other account that O'Connell knows about is some kind of account with Custer's name on it and the school district's name on it.
The account statements come in regularly, and she has no idea what the money is supposed to be used for. The account has a little over $400.
Custer died Oct. 30, 1928, a few days short of a year after the Courier published his letter.
When his will and codicil were filed for probate, the probable value of his entire estate was $10,000, according to the probate record at the Jefferson County clerk's office.
Custer left the area as a child to work
Custer was born Albert Scott Custer on Dec. 24, 1851, in a log cabin 12 miles north of Madison in Monroe Township, according to a biography he wrote at the top of his will.
"My mother died when I was six years of age," he wrote in his will, which is kept in the vault at the Madison Consolidated Schools administration building. Both his handwritten copy, written in pencil on paper that has yellowed and turned fragile, and the typed copy are there.
"My father and his boys resided on the farm until I was eleven years old, and then I was taken to live with my married brother at Shannondale, Indiana, for about one year. And at the age of twelve I went out into the world to make my own way."
Custer wrote that he worked in the summers to be able to pay for school in the winters.
"At the age of 19 my health failed and I have not been physically able to do a day's manual labor since," he wrote in his final will.
He wrote that he got enough education to get a license to teach in public schools, and was in the profession for 17 years, the last seven at Crawfordsville High School south of Lafayette.
In a letter to the Madison schools superintendent in 1911 on the letterhead of the vault and safe company where he then worked, however, Custer had written, "I taught school in Indiana for ten years, the last five years of which as principal of the Crawfordsville, Indiana, High School."
The autobiography in his will tells about the end of his career in education.
"In my seventeenth year of school work my health became so poor from long close confinement that I had to seek more outside work," Custer wrote.
He established a Custer Prize oratorical contest at Crawfordsville High School the same year Madison's contest began, but it apparently did not endure.
Custer got the idea for an oratorical competition from Wabash College in Crawfordsville, which has had the Baldwin Prize for oratory each year since 1875.
In Custer's letter to the editor and later will, he said he hoped that one day there would be enough prize money to have a Custer Contest at the junior high school in Madison. There was such a competition, named the Little Custer Contest, that began in 1987. The last one written about in the Courier archives was in 2004.
After Custer left teaching, he became a traveling salesman for Hall Safe and Lock Co. in Cincinnati, Ohio, which later became Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co.
Custer traveled for 18 months, then was the company's branch manager in Cleveland, Ohio, for five years, followed by being the branch manager in St. Louis, Mo., for three years. His next promotion was to manager of the bank vault department at the company's factory in Hamilton, Ohio, which is near Cincinnati.
"I held this position until I had been with the company in all twenty five years and then my voice failed and I retired from business and have since made my home with my cousins, the Moores," he wrote in his will.
Even when he was living in Cincinnati, he wrote in a letter in 1911, his legal address was 438 Green Road, North Madison - then a separate entity from Madison - where his cousin Frank Moore lived. Two sisters who were also his cousins, Theodosia Moore and Amelia Moore, also lived there when he retired.
Custer's will provided for Theodosia to receive interest money adding up over time to $1,000, which he wrote "is what is actually due her for waiting on me during the last years of my life."
He died at the house on Green Road, and Vail mortuary held his funeral there.
His obituary in the Courier was small and on an inside page, and although it relayed that he founded the Custer Prize, there was no mention of his 500-year plan, even though it had been detailed in the newspaper less than a year before.
He asked in his will that his will and the codicil to it be published in The Madison Courier every 25 years starting in 1950. It never happened.
One grave, lots of grass around it
Custer was buried in Springdale Cemetery. His other relatives are buried at Hebron Cemetery.
In 1921 he traded four lots he owned at Springdale and paid the cemetery association $290, and in exchange got Lot 21 in the Oakdale section at Springdale.
Lot 21 appears to be about the size of four ordinary graves. A block of rock marks his grave in the center of his lot. There are no graves around it. He never married, and was the last in his line of Custer family members.
He had asked in his letter to the editor and in his will that a 10-by-20-foot flower bed be planted on his grave, and that probably was allowed in the cemetery then. His grave doesn't have flowers now, if it ever did.
He also had wanted a bronze tablet 6 feet high, 3 feet wide and three-eighths of an inch thick to be placed on a tripod on his grave, and the legs of the tripod be sunk in concrete.
He was talked out of that before he died. Instead, a large plaque on the rock has three lines that read: A.S. Custer/1851-1928/Donor of Custer Prize.
-------------------------
-info & bio contributed by Karen Phillips (#46884884)
Arnold Scott Custer
b. 25 Dec 1851, Bryantsburg, IN
d. 30 Oct 1928, Madison Township
Age: 76
Father: Arnold S. Custer, Sr., b. IN
Mother: Not listed
Burial: Springdale Cemetery
Funeral Director: George C. Vail & Sons
Physician: C. C. Copeland, MD
Cause of death: Pthisis pulmonalis
=================
b. 24 Dec 1851 Monroe Twp., Jefferson Co., IN
d. 30 Oct 1928, Green Rd., Madison, Jefferson Co., IN
-------------------------
A.S. Custer's legacy was no small thing - a $1,000 donation that 100 years later is still paying prizes for an oratorical contest, though the winners no longer are awarded gold pieces.
His $1,000 donation grew during years when interest rates were high, but has not been growing much in recent years, said Charlene O'Connell, the Madison Consolidated Schools treasurer. Still, the account balance is $41,000.
The prizes have grown considerably since Custer's day. In the beginning, the total amount of the prizes was $60 in gold pieces, with the winner receiving the most, the second-place winner receiving less, and the rest divided among the other three contestants, whom Custer insisted all be of equal rank and never third, fourth and fifth.
This year, first place will have a $700 prize, second place will get $350 and the other contestants will receive $175 each. The three judges will receive $50 each.
When preparations were under way to announce Custer's donation for an oratory contest in 1911, Custer wrote to Superintendent Donald DuShane, "... I would not presume to outline the manner of your announcement of the gift to the High School, but would prefer to have as little said about the donor as is consistent with the ideas of yourself and the Board of Education."
Building onto the Custer legacy
The Custer Prize, however, was not enough for Custer, who wanted to show his fondness for Madison and at the same time ensure that "my name will be more widely and favorably known than now."
He wrote in his will that he had been considering for many years how he could "do a good thing for the public and perpetuate our family name."
Fifteen years after five high school seniors delivered oratories on a stage in the first Custer Contest in 1912, Custer had devised an idea that he thought would make Madison the "eighth wonder of the world." His plan will take 416 more years to come to fruition, or not.
Whether he was a visionary, an eccentric or something else, he put thought into what he wanted Madison to be like in 500 years. He wrote it down and it was published as a front-page letter to the editor Nov. 8, 1927. It is reprinted today on page A5.
Later, Custer would refer to the published letter as a codicil, or addition, to his will. And although he even later changed a few things about how his money was to be invested, his final will and codicil, written early in the year he died, still contained the grand plans he had laid out in the newspaper piece and the way the money would be available.
As for the money in accounts accumulating interest to make his plans a reality, it is unclear if they survived the Great Depression and everything that has happened since. The only other account that O'Connell knows about is some kind of account with Custer's name on it and the school district's name on it.
The account statements come in regularly, and she has no idea what the money is supposed to be used for. The account has a little over $400.
Custer died Oct. 30, 1928, a few days short of a year after the Courier published his letter.
When his will and codicil were filed for probate, the probable value of his entire estate was $10,000, according to the probate record at the Jefferson County clerk's office.
Custer left the area as a child to work
Custer was born Albert Scott Custer on Dec. 24, 1851, in a log cabin 12 miles north of Madison in Monroe Township, according to a biography he wrote at the top of his will.
"My mother died when I was six years of age," he wrote in his will, which is kept in the vault at the Madison Consolidated Schools administration building. Both his handwritten copy, written in pencil on paper that has yellowed and turned fragile, and the typed copy are there.
"My father and his boys resided on the farm until I was eleven years old, and then I was taken to live with my married brother at Shannondale, Indiana, for about one year. And at the age of twelve I went out into the world to make my own way."
Custer wrote that he worked in the summers to be able to pay for school in the winters.
"At the age of 19 my health failed and I have not been physically able to do a day's manual labor since," he wrote in his final will.
He wrote that he got enough education to get a license to teach in public schools, and was in the profession for 17 years, the last seven at Crawfordsville High School south of Lafayette.
In a letter to the Madison schools superintendent in 1911 on the letterhead of the vault and safe company where he then worked, however, Custer had written, "I taught school in Indiana for ten years, the last five years of which as principal of the Crawfordsville, Indiana, High School."
The autobiography in his will tells about the end of his career in education.
"In my seventeenth year of school work my health became so poor from long close confinement that I had to seek more outside work," Custer wrote.
He established a Custer Prize oratorical contest at Crawfordsville High School the same year Madison's contest began, but it apparently did not endure.
Custer got the idea for an oratorical competition from Wabash College in Crawfordsville, which has had the Baldwin Prize for oratory each year since 1875.
In Custer's letter to the editor and later will, he said he hoped that one day there would be enough prize money to have a Custer Contest at the junior high school in Madison. There was such a competition, named the Little Custer Contest, that began in 1987. The last one written about in the Courier archives was in 2004.
After Custer left teaching, he became a traveling salesman for Hall Safe and Lock Co. in Cincinnati, Ohio, which later became Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co.
Custer traveled for 18 months, then was the company's branch manager in Cleveland, Ohio, for five years, followed by being the branch manager in St. Louis, Mo., for three years. His next promotion was to manager of the bank vault department at the company's factory in Hamilton, Ohio, which is near Cincinnati.
"I held this position until I had been with the company in all twenty five years and then my voice failed and I retired from business and have since made my home with my cousins, the Moores," he wrote in his will.
Even when he was living in Cincinnati, he wrote in a letter in 1911, his legal address was 438 Green Road, North Madison - then a separate entity from Madison - where his cousin Frank Moore lived. Two sisters who were also his cousins, Theodosia Moore and Amelia Moore, also lived there when he retired.
Custer's will provided for Theodosia to receive interest money adding up over time to $1,000, which he wrote "is what is actually due her for waiting on me during the last years of my life."
He died at the house on Green Road, and Vail mortuary held his funeral there.
His obituary in the Courier was small and on an inside page, and although it relayed that he founded the Custer Prize, there was no mention of his 500-year plan, even though it had been detailed in the newspaper less than a year before.
He asked in his will that his will and the codicil to it be published in The Madison Courier every 25 years starting in 1950. It never happened.
One grave, lots of grass around it
Custer was buried in Springdale Cemetery. His other relatives are buried at Hebron Cemetery.
In 1921 he traded four lots he owned at Springdale and paid the cemetery association $290, and in exchange got Lot 21 in the Oakdale section at Springdale.
Lot 21 appears to be about the size of four ordinary graves. A block of rock marks his grave in the center of his lot. There are no graves around it. He never married, and was the last in his line of Custer family members.
He had asked in his letter to the editor and in his will that a 10-by-20-foot flower bed be planted on his grave, and that probably was allowed in the cemetery then. His grave doesn't have flowers now, if it ever did.
He also had wanted a bronze tablet 6 feet high, 3 feet wide and three-eighths of an inch thick to be placed on a tripod on his grave, and the legs of the tripod be sunk in concrete.
He was talked out of that before he died. Instead, a large plaque on the rock has three lines that read: A.S. Custer/1851-1928/Donor of Custer Prize.
-------------------------
-info & bio contributed by Karen Phillips (#46884884)
From Jefferson County IN Death Record:
Arnold Scott Custer
b. 25 Dec 1851, Bryantsburg, IN
d. 30 Oct 1928, Madison Township
Age: 76
Father: Arnold S. Custer, Sr., b. IN
Mother: Not listed
Burial: Springdale Cemetery
Funeral Director: George C. Vail & Sons
Physician: C. C. Copeland, MD
Cause of death: Pthisis pulmonalis
=================
b. 24 Dec 1851 Monroe Twp., Jefferson Co., IN
d. 30 Oct 1928, Green Rd., Madison, Jefferson Co., IN
-------------------------
A.S. Custer's legacy was no small thing - a $1,000 donation that 100 years later is still paying prizes for an oratorical contest, though the winners no longer are awarded gold pieces.
His $1,000 donation grew during years when interest rates were high, but has not been growing much in recent years, said Charlene O'Connell, the Madison Consolidated Schools treasurer. Still, the account balance is $41,000.
The prizes have grown considerably since Custer's day. In the beginning, the total amount of the prizes was $60 in gold pieces, with the winner receiving the most, the second-place winner receiving less, and the rest divided among the other three contestants, whom Custer insisted all be of equal rank and never third, fourth and fifth.
This year, first place will have a $700 prize, second place will get $350 and the other contestants will receive $175 each. The three judges will receive $50 each.
When preparations were under way to announce Custer's donation for an oratory contest in 1911, Custer wrote to Superintendent Donald DuShane, "... I would not presume to outline the manner of your announcement of the gift to the High School, but would prefer to have as little said about the donor as is consistent with the ideas of yourself and the Board of Education."
Building onto the Custer legacy
The Custer Prize, however, was not enough for Custer, who wanted to show his fondness for Madison and at the same time ensure that "my name will be more widely and favorably known than now."
He wrote in his will that he had been considering for many years how he could "do a good thing for the public and perpetuate our family name."
Fifteen years after five high school seniors delivered oratories on a stage in the first Custer Contest in 1912, Custer had devised an idea that he thought would make Madison the "eighth wonder of the world." His plan will take 416 more years to come to fruition, or not.
Whether he was a visionary, an eccentric or something else, he put thought into what he wanted Madison to be like in 500 years. He wrote it down and it was published as a front-page letter to the editor Nov. 8, 1927. It is reprinted today on page A5.
Later, Custer would refer to the published letter as a codicil, or addition, to his will. And although he even later changed a few things about how his money was to be invested, his final will and codicil, written early in the year he died, still contained the grand plans he had laid out in the newspaper piece and the way the money would be available.
As for the money in accounts accumulating interest to make his plans a reality, it is unclear if they survived the Great Depression and everything that has happened since. The only other account that O'Connell knows about is some kind of account with Custer's name on it and the school district's name on it.
The account statements come in regularly, and she has no idea what the money is supposed to be used for. The account has a little over $400.
Custer died Oct. 30, 1928, a few days short of a year after the Courier published his letter.
When his will and codicil were filed for probate, the probable value of his entire estate was $10,000, according to the probate record at the Jefferson County clerk's office.
Custer left the area as a child to work
Custer was born Albert Scott Custer on Dec. 24, 1851, in a log cabin 12 miles north of Madison in Monroe Township, according to a biography he wrote at the top of his will.
"My mother died when I was six years of age," he wrote in his will, which is kept in the vault at the Madison Consolidated Schools administration building. Both his handwritten copy, written in pencil on paper that has yellowed and turned fragile, and the typed copy are there.
"My father and his boys resided on the farm until I was eleven years old, and then I was taken to live with my married brother at Shannondale, Indiana, for about one year. And at the age of twelve I went out into the world to make my own way."
Custer wrote that he worked in the summers to be able to pay for school in the winters.
"At the age of 19 my health failed and I have not been physically able to do a day's manual labor since," he wrote in his final will.
He wrote that he got enough education to get a license to teach in public schools, and was in the profession for 17 years, the last seven at Crawfordsville High School south of Lafayette.
In a letter to the Madison schools superintendent in 1911 on the letterhead of the vault and safe company where he then worked, however, Custer had written, "I taught school in Indiana for ten years, the last five years of which as principal of the Crawfordsville, Indiana, High School."
The autobiography in his will tells about the end of his career in education.
"In my seventeenth year of school work my health became so poor from long close confinement that I had to seek more outside work," Custer wrote.
He established a Custer Prize oratorical contest at Crawfordsville High School the same year Madison's contest began, but it apparently did not endure.
Custer got the idea for an oratorical competition from Wabash College in Crawfordsville, which has had the Baldwin Prize for oratory each year since 1875.
In Custer's letter to the editor and later will, he said he hoped that one day there would be enough prize money to have a Custer Contest at the junior high school in Madison. There was such a competition, named the Little Custer Contest, that began in 1987. The last one written about in the Courier archives was in 2004.
After Custer left teaching, he became a traveling salesman for Hall Safe and Lock Co. in Cincinnati, Ohio, which later became Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co.
Custer traveled for 18 months, then was the company's branch manager in Cleveland, Ohio, for five years, followed by being the branch manager in St. Louis, Mo., for three years. His next promotion was to manager of the bank vault department at the company's factory in Hamilton, Ohio, which is near Cincinnati.
"I held this position until I had been with the company in all twenty five years and then my voice failed and I retired from business and have since made my home with my cousins, the Moores," he wrote in his will.
Even when he was living in Cincinnati, he wrote in a letter in 1911, his legal address was 438 Green Road, North Madison - then a separate entity from Madison - where his cousin Frank Moore lived. Two sisters who were also his cousins, Theodosia Moore and Amelia Moore, also lived there when he retired.
Custer's will provided for Theodosia to receive interest money adding up over time to $1,000, which he wrote "is what is actually due her for waiting on me during the last years of my life."
He died at the house on Green Road, and Vail mortuary held his funeral there.
His obituary in the Courier was small and on an inside page, and although it relayed that he founded the Custer Prize, there was no mention of his 500-year plan, even though it had been detailed in the newspaper less than a year before.
He asked in his will that his will and the codicil to it be published in The Madison Courier every 25 years starting in 1950. It never happened.
One grave, lots of grass around it
Custer was buried in Springdale Cemetery. His other relatives are buried at Hebron Cemetery.
In 1921 he traded four lots he owned at Springdale and paid the cemetery association $290, and in exchange got Lot 21 in the Oakdale section at Springdale.
Lot 21 appears to be about the size of four ordinary graves. A block of rock marks his grave in the center of his lot. There are no graves around it. He never married, and was the last in his line of Custer family members.
He had asked in his letter to the editor and in his will that a 10-by-20-foot flower bed be planted on his grave, and that probably was allowed in the cemetery then. His grave doesn't have flowers now, if it ever did.
He also had wanted a bronze tablet 6 feet high, 3 feet wide and three-eighths of an inch thick to be placed on a tripod on his grave, and the legs of the tripod be sunk in concrete.
He was talked out of that before he died. Instead, a large plaque on the rock has three lines that read: A.S. Custer/1851-1928/Donor of Custer Prize.
-------------------------
-info & bio contributed by Karen Phillips (#46884884)
Arnold Scott Custer
b. 25 Dec 1851, Bryantsburg, IN
d. 30 Oct 1928, Madison Township
Age: 76
Father: Arnold S. Custer, Sr., b. IN
Mother: Not listed
Burial: Springdale Cemetery
Funeral Director: George C. Vail & Sons
Physician: C. C. Copeland, MD
Cause of death: Pthisis pulmonalis
=================
b. 24 Dec 1851 Monroe Twp., Jefferson Co., IN
d. 30 Oct 1928, Green Rd., Madison, Jefferson Co., IN
-------------------------
A.S. Custer's legacy was no small thing - a $1,000 donation that 100 years later is still paying prizes for an oratorical contest, though the winners no longer are awarded gold pieces.
His $1,000 donation grew during years when interest rates were high, but has not been growing much in recent years, said Charlene O'Connell, the Madison Consolidated Schools treasurer. Still, the account balance is $41,000.
The prizes have grown considerably since Custer's day. In the beginning, the total amount of the prizes was $60 in gold pieces, with the winner receiving the most, the second-place winner receiving less, and the rest divided among the other three contestants, whom Custer insisted all be of equal rank and never third, fourth and fifth.
This year, first place will have a $700 prize, second place will get $350 and the other contestants will receive $175 each. The three judges will receive $50 each.
When preparations were under way to announce Custer's donation for an oratory contest in 1911, Custer wrote to Superintendent Donald DuShane, "... I would not presume to outline the manner of your announcement of the gift to the High School, but would prefer to have as little said about the donor as is consistent with the ideas of yourself and the Board of Education."
Building onto the Custer legacy
The Custer Prize, however, was not enough for Custer, who wanted to show his fondness for Madison and at the same time ensure that "my name will be more widely and favorably known than now."
He wrote in his will that he had been considering for many years how he could "do a good thing for the public and perpetuate our family name."
Fifteen years after five high school seniors delivered oratories on a stage in the first Custer Contest in 1912, Custer had devised an idea that he thought would make Madison the "eighth wonder of the world." His plan will take 416 more years to come to fruition, or not.
Whether he was a visionary, an eccentric or something else, he put thought into what he wanted Madison to be like in 500 years. He wrote it down and it was published as a front-page letter to the editor Nov. 8, 1927. It is reprinted today on page A5.
Later, Custer would refer to the published letter as a codicil, or addition, to his will. And although he even later changed a few things about how his money was to be invested, his final will and codicil, written early in the year he died, still contained the grand plans he had laid out in the newspaper piece and the way the money would be available.
As for the money in accounts accumulating interest to make his plans a reality, it is unclear if they survived the Great Depression and everything that has happened since. The only other account that O'Connell knows about is some kind of account with Custer's name on it and the school district's name on it.
The account statements come in regularly, and she has no idea what the money is supposed to be used for. The account has a little over $400.
Custer died Oct. 30, 1928, a few days short of a year after the Courier published his letter.
When his will and codicil were filed for probate, the probable value of his entire estate was $10,000, according to the probate record at the Jefferson County clerk's office.
Custer left the area as a child to work
Custer was born Albert Scott Custer on Dec. 24, 1851, in a log cabin 12 miles north of Madison in Monroe Township, according to a biography he wrote at the top of his will.
"My mother died when I was six years of age," he wrote in his will, which is kept in the vault at the Madison Consolidated Schools administration building. Both his handwritten copy, written in pencil on paper that has yellowed and turned fragile, and the typed copy are there.
"My father and his boys resided on the farm until I was eleven years old, and then I was taken to live with my married brother at Shannondale, Indiana, for about one year. And at the age of twelve I went out into the world to make my own way."
Custer wrote that he worked in the summers to be able to pay for school in the winters.
"At the age of 19 my health failed and I have not been physically able to do a day's manual labor since," he wrote in his final will.
He wrote that he got enough education to get a license to teach in public schools, and was in the profession for 17 years, the last seven at Crawfordsville High School south of Lafayette.
In a letter to the Madison schools superintendent in 1911 on the letterhead of the vault and safe company where he then worked, however, Custer had written, "I taught school in Indiana for ten years, the last five years of which as principal of the Crawfordsville, Indiana, High School."
The autobiography in his will tells about the end of his career in education.
"In my seventeenth year of school work my health became so poor from long close confinement that I had to seek more outside work," Custer wrote.
He established a Custer Prize oratorical contest at Crawfordsville High School the same year Madison's contest began, but it apparently did not endure.
Custer got the idea for an oratorical competition from Wabash College in Crawfordsville, which has had the Baldwin Prize for oratory each year since 1875.
In Custer's letter to the editor and later will, he said he hoped that one day there would be enough prize money to have a Custer Contest at the junior high school in Madison. There was such a competition, named the Little Custer Contest, that began in 1987. The last one written about in the Courier archives was in 2004.
After Custer left teaching, he became a traveling salesman for Hall Safe and Lock Co. in Cincinnati, Ohio, which later became Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co.
Custer traveled for 18 months, then was the company's branch manager in Cleveland, Ohio, for five years, followed by being the branch manager in St. Louis, Mo., for three years. His next promotion was to manager of the bank vault department at the company's factory in Hamilton, Ohio, which is near Cincinnati.
"I held this position until I had been with the company in all twenty five years and then my voice failed and I retired from business and have since made my home with my cousins, the Moores," he wrote in his will.
Even when he was living in Cincinnati, he wrote in a letter in 1911, his legal address was 438 Green Road, North Madison - then a separate entity from Madison - where his cousin Frank Moore lived. Two sisters who were also his cousins, Theodosia Moore and Amelia Moore, also lived there when he retired.
Custer's will provided for Theodosia to receive interest money adding up over time to $1,000, which he wrote "is what is actually due her for waiting on me during the last years of my life."
He died at the house on Green Road, and Vail mortuary held his funeral there.
His obituary in the Courier was small and on an inside page, and although it relayed that he founded the Custer Prize, there was no mention of his 500-year plan, even though it had been detailed in the newspaper less than a year before.
He asked in his will that his will and the codicil to it be published in The Madison Courier every 25 years starting in 1950. It never happened.
One grave, lots of grass around it
Custer was buried in Springdale Cemetery. His other relatives are buried at Hebron Cemetery.
In 1921 he traded four lots he owned at Springdale and paid the cemetery association $290, and in exchange got Lot 21 in the Oakdale section at Springdale.
Lot 21 appears to be about the size of four ordinary graves. A block of rock marks his grave in the center of his lot. There are no graves around it. He never married, and was the last in his line of Custer family members.
He had asked in his letter to the editor and in his will that a 10-by-20-foot flower bed be planted on his grave, and that probably was allowed in the cemetery then. His grave doesn't have flowers now, if it ever did.
He also had wanted a bronze tablet 6 feet high, 3 feet wide and three-eighths of an inch thick to be placed on a tripod on his grave, and the legs of the tripod be sunk in concrete.
He was talked out of that before he died. Instead, a large plaque on the rock has three lines that read: A.S. Custer/1851-1928/Donor of Custer Prize.
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-info & bio contributed by Karen Phillips (#46884884)
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