WILLIAM A. BARTHOLAMEW
Page 172

Was born Sept. 14, 1842, at Zanesville, Ohio. His ancestors were French Huguenots during the religious persecutions of the sixteenth century; left the vine-clad hills of sunny France, and their youthful home, and with an abiding faith in an over-ruling Providence, entrusted themselves and their families to the mercy of the winds, and the waves of the mad Atlantic. With their faces toward the setting sun, they sought and found an Asylum, in happy, free America, where they were free from religious persecution. They settled in the State of Maryland. The branch of the family to which our subject belongs, settled at an early day in western Ohio. In the fall of 1852 his father came with his family to Montgomery county, Illinois, but returned to Ohio the following autumn. In the spring of 1860 he moved with his family to Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The spring of 1861 found them again in Ohio, when William A., in his eighteenth year, enlisted under the first call for troops, and was mustered in on the 22d of April, 1861. He remained in the army until 1864, and saw service under Generals Buell, Rosecrans and Sherman, and was in some of the hardest fought battles of the war, and, on his individual merit, made his way from the ranks to Captain. He entered the Sophomore class, of 1866, at Wittemberg College, at Springfield, Ohio, and graduated with the class, in 1869. The third of July, that year, found him in Mason City, Illinois. That fall he registered himself a law student, with Isaac R. Brown, Esq., of that city. At that time some friends, in Ohio, desired him to look after their interests in California. The offer was too tempting to meet with opposition on his part, so Blackstone was laid aside for awhile, and in October, 1870, he was admiring the sublime and the beautiful scenery of the Pacific slope. Stopping in Kansas, on his return from California, he became acquainted with and married Miss Lillie, daughter of Hon. George H. Strouse, of Pennsylvania. In September, 1873, he was back in Mason City, and again took up Blackstone, in the office of Mr. Brown. He was admitted to the bar, in June, 1875, and formed a co-partnership with Mr. Brown, for the practice of law, in Mason City. He is personally a man of pleasant address, a fluent speaker and writer, a rising young attorney, with a rapidly increasing practice, and bids fair to become a leading attorney in central Illinois.

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