Portrait and Biographical Album of Fulton County,
Illinois: containing full page portraits and biographical sketches of
prominent and representative citizens of the county: together with
portraits and biographies of all the presidents of the United States,
and governors of the state; Biographical Pub. Co., Chicago, IL; 1890;
page 500-503; Transcribed by Margaret Rose Whitehurst
Rev. Alexander H. Widney. For more than thirty years this
gentleman has been aiding in the spread of the gospel, devoting himself
with assiduity and loving zeal to the work of the ministry. The center
of his present field of labor is the town of Cuba, where he has held a
pastorate for over two years. He is a man of broad intelligence,
decided literary ability, and the dignified yet winning manners so
thoroughly in keeping with his profession.
The ancestors of our subject settled in Ireland in the year
1688, John Widney having been a colonel in the army of William, Prince
of Orange, and having received a valuable estate in County Tyrone, in
consideration of services rendered in the war between William and
James. John Widney, father of our subject, was born at Ernyvale,
Ireland, in the year 1779, and at the age of five years was brought by
his father to America. The family settled in the upper part of Path
Valley, Franklin County, Pa., whence the descendants of the two
brothers and three sisters who settled in this rugged region together,
scattered to various portions of the United States.
Our subject was born July 29, 1834, in Toboyne Township, Perry
County, Pa., and is the youngest son in a family of eleven children. At
the age of three years he lost his father by death, and the family soon
after following the spirit of adventure, became identified with the
early settlement of Northeastern Indiana. They made a home on the
Little St. Joseph River, DeKalb County, Ind. There an older brother,
who had received a good education in the East, became a school-teacher
for the early pioneers, and would often take his younger brother on his
back and carry him a distance of two or three miles through the
unbroken forest to the log schoolhouse where he taught.
In the year 1848, at the age of fourteen, our subject left his
widowed mother, and returned to the old home in Pennsylvania, where for
five years he apprenticed himself to his eldest brother, who was the
proprietor of a wagon shop. Returning to Indiana in 1853, he began his
struggle for an education by teaching a district school at $15 a month,
he to have his board among the people. But boarding around was not
pleasant, and he took the only alternative, securing his own boarding
place. His pedagogical labors were followed by two years of close
application to study at the LaGrange Institute at Ontario, Ind., and he
then began in a small way the work of the ministry in the Methodist
Protestant Church.
For thirteen years Mr. Widney pursued his chosen profession in
Indiana, traveling the extensive circuits of that day, and often
preaching five or six times each week. During the fall of 1858, while
on a circuit in Fountain County, he was seized with the terrible
disease known as "milk sick," and nearly lost his life. In the struggle
through which the church passed in 1857-58 over the slavery question,
Mr. Widney was branded as an Abolitionist, and the doors of one of the
churches on his charge were shut against him. In 1869 he removed to
Illinois, wherein, with the exception of three years, his subsequent
life has been spent and his labors expended.
During the three years, from 1877 to 1880, the Rev. Mr. Widney
was settled in Copiah County, Miss., on what is now the Illinois
Central Railroad. The removal to the South was for the benefit of his
health, his throat having become diseased. In those years Mr. Widney
improved a small fruit farm, and traveled extensively through the
"piney woods," preaching whenever called upon to do so, and writing up
that country for the Northern press. In 1880 he returned to Illinois,
since which time he has been pastor at Lima and Ursa, Adams County, for
two years, DeLand and Weldon, DeWitt County, four years, one year each
at Foosland and Clinton, and is now for the third year at Cuba.
Mr. Widney has been for over thirty years a contributor to the
religious press, chiefly of his own church, and occasionally to the
secular papers. At present he is editor of the Cuba Journal, an
independent paper in the village where he holds his pastorate. He
enjoys the full confidence of the church in which for thirty-four years
he has been a minister, and has been honored with membership in the
General Conference, has been for four years a member of the Board of
Missions, etc., etc. The good which the Rev. Mr. Widney has
accomplished in the uplifting of humanity can only be measured when
time shall be no more.
Mr. Widney has been twice married. His first union was
solemnized in 1856, his bride being Miss Martha A. Wigent, who died in
1866, leaving six children. The second union was with Mrs. Susan E.
Norton, who is the mother of one son by Mr. Widney. Of the various
members of his family, one daughter is a milliner, one son and one
daughter are teachers, one son is managing a newspaper, one is a recent
graduate of the Law School at Ann Arbor, and located at Denver, Colo.,
and one is clerking. The eldest son died at the age of fifteen years.
