MALBOURN A. ANGIER, born November 30, 1820; died December 29, 1900. His birthplace, his home and his last resting place are within a mile of each other. In this neighborhood he saw many wonderful changes wrought, and he did more than his part in shaping them. For four-score years his life was an open book to all men, and there is not a page with a blot on it. The people among whom he came and went know that he was a tender husband and an affectionate and trusting father. The gentle modesty and deference of his home life cannot be better illustrated than by recalling that he always addressed his wife as "Miss Jane," just as he had done before they were married. When, in the closing days of December, 1900, he laid down the burdens of life, those of his own blood grieved and wept, and the community sorrowed deeply for its own sake as well as in sympathy. But it is with the life of Malbourn A. Angier in its larger relation to the community that this writing has to do, and there the governing tone of his activity was his life-long association with the rare virtue of justice.

He was in the commission of justice of the peace for a full half century. Think of this! Holding the scales of justice true among his neighbors for fifty years! There is no sufficient reason to suppose that he deliberately chose this career, but from the days of his employment as a clerk in Pratt's store, on the old Raleigh and Salisbury stage road, until he owned the store, he had developed in himself and impressed upon the hard common sense of his neighbors his mastery of accuracy, painstaking wisdom and just judgment. Insensibly they made him the man to take up the difficulties of others. If the interest was to be calculated on a note, or settlement made of a question of wages or values, the final appeal was generally made to "Squire Angier," as he began to be called. Usage enlarged the title by abbreviating it into "The Squire." There were squires and squires, but in the Pratt store country of that day and in the great city of Durham of today there was but one Squire. Judge and colonel and major sound quite commonplace in such good old English company. Back of this intuitive faith of his neighbors in him was, of course, the quality of unselfishness. Never too busy selling his wares to stop and untangle the business skeins of those who had neither the knack, the knowledge nor the diligence to do it for themselves, he composed the differences growing out of bad blood and checked with a firm hand the broils of a population often violent, untrained and always impatient of restraint. To those who had his friendship it would not be necessary to bring proof of this characteristic, but to the stranger reader a single incident will suffice to show the unbounded confidence in his integrity.

A wild, reckless blade who had been defeated in a suit before the "Squire" was abusing him to others on the street. A common friend silenced him with this question: "If you were told that you were going to die, and had no time in which to make a will, whom would you choose to take care of your family and estate?" After evading the question, he finally with an oath replied, "The Squire, of course, but it isn't fair to make me say so."

Not only was the sense of justice strong and inborn in him, but he had the unusual power of applying its rules not only to others, but to himself, in such a manner as to convince and satisfy.

In politics he was a partizan Democrat; his convictions on governmental questions were arrived at by earnest thought and became part of the man himself.   A genuine pity was his feeling for those who had not been able to keep the faith, and he could not understand why those who had been brought up in another school could not conclude as he had done. If he had applied himself to the literature of politics, he would have made a senator the State would have been proud to have represent it.

The vexatious restraints of office were not suited to his disposition, and honors of this sort, when placed upon him, were accepted by him through a conscientious desire to shirk no duty; so in the revival of factional opposition to his party, led by the able and restless Josiah Turner, he was turned to by his party, in the year 1878, to save its power in Orange, and after a fierce campaign waged particularly against him, he was elected to the legislature by the greatest vote given any candidate for the office, on account of confidence and affection for him as the man and not the candidate. His service was honorable to himself and his constituency and valuable to the affairs of the State.

Governor Scales, in making selections for able business men to sit in the directorate of the North Carolina Railroad, the largest property owned by the State, invited Mr. Angier among the first to a seat on the board, and he exhibited a capacity for this new business which justified the high opinions of him.

Although he was now nearly three-score years of age, responsibilities were heaped upon him that might have sat heavily on the shoulders of a younger man. While he presided for years as chairman of the Board of County Commissioners, devising ways and means for governing a new county, as Durham was then laying the foundations of a broad growth, he was also president of the Fidelity Savings and Trust Company. When not of the Board of Aldermen of the young city, fast becoming the admiration of the State, and known around the world, he was its mayor. To catalogue the positions of trust he held would only be redundant proof of the confidence of his fellow-citizens and would show not what he might have for the asking, but what positions the electorate persuaded him to occupy.

Mr. Angier was never a member of any church organization, and there is much reason to believe this was because he could not give his assent to all the doctrines of any one of them. His sturdy sense of right and loyalty would have required this of him, but that religion which "puffeth not up" and gives quickly and abundantly of solid comforts to the needy and sweet pleasure to the giver he practiced during a lifetime.

The governing quality of his character was honesty—not merely honesty of action, but of thought and speech. Scrupulously exact and punctual in the fulfilling of all pecuniary obligations, he would no more have taken what was not his own or withheld what was another's than he would, even in the heat of controversy, have advanced an argument or given a reason which he did not fully and in every detail believe to be not only sound, but fair and just. Earnest a partizan as he was, positive in all things, he would have no advantage which did not come by just and direct methods and through transparent channels. Rigid in his adherence to his promises, whether direct or implied, he lived and acted up to the mark that others had reason to expect him to touch. His word once given was irrevocable. He was literally "he that sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not."

There should hang in the public hall of the city he loved so well a portrait of his sturdy, square-built figure, clad in his simple garb, with his ruddy, wholesome complexion and honest eyes and amiable expression, to let those who come after him know how this man, out of whose mouth nothing common or unclean ever came, looked to those who knew him. In doing his duty he was a Roman of the best traditions; in practicing private and gentle virtues he seems like one of those men who come to mind when we speak of "that other disciple."
W. W. Fuller.
(Source: Biographical History of North Carolina from Colonial Times to Present, By Samuel A. Ashe, Vol. III, published 1906