Montgomery County PA Biographies
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ACKER, Ephraim Leister, a Representative from Pennsylvania; born in Marlboro Township, Montgomery County, Pa., January 11, 1827; attended the common schools and the academy at Sumneytown; was graduated from Marshall College, Mercersburg, Pa., September 8, 1847; taught school for two years; was graduated in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia in March 1852; editor and publisher of the Norristown Register 1853-1877; superintendent of the schools of Montgomery County from June 1854 to June 1860; appointed postmaster of Norristown, Pa., in March 1860 by President Buchanan and after serving eleven months was removed by President Lincoln; served as inspector of Montgomery County Prison for three years; elected as a Democrat to the Forty-second Congress (March 4, 1871-March 3, 1873); unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1872 to the Forty-third Congress; resumed the publication of his newspaper until 1877, when he began the study of law; was admitted to the bar and practiced until his death in Norristown, Pa., May 12, 1903; interment in Norris City Cemetery, Norriton Township, Montgomery County, Pa.
(Source: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1771-Present; contributed by A. Newell)
Mrs. Alice Bennett
BENNETT, Mrs. Alice, doctor of medicine, born in Wrentham, Mass., 31st January, 1851. She was the youngest of six children born to Francis I. and Lydia Hayden Bennett. She was educated in Day's Academy, in her native town, and taught in the district schools there from her seventeenth to her twenty-first year. During that period she prepared herself for the step which, at that place and time, was a sort of social outlawry, and at the age of twenty-one she entered the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, from which she was graduated in March, 1876. One of the intervening years was spent as interne in the New England Hospital, Boston, under Dr. Susan Dimock. After her graduation Dr. Bennett went into dispensary work, living in the slums of Philadelphia for seven months. In October, 1876, she became demonstrator of anatomy in the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania and during four years devoted herself to the study and teaching of anatomy, in connection with private practice. At the same time she was pursuing a course of scientific study in the University of Pennsylvania, and received the degree of Ph.D. from that institution in June, 188o. Her graduating thesis upon the anatomy of the fore-limb of the marmoset received honorable mention. In the same month she was elected to the important position she still occupies as superintendent of the department for women of the State Hospital for the Insane, in Norristown, Pa. The trustees of that hospital, then just completed and about to be opened, did a thing without precedent in placing a woman physician in absolute and independent charge of their women insane, and dire predictions were made of the results of that revolutionary experiment. At the end of twelve years that hospital is the acknowledged head of the institutions of its kind in the State, if not in the country, and from its successful work the movement, now everywhere felt, to place all insane women under the care of physicians of their own sex, is constantly gaining impetus. Since Dr. Bennett entered upon her work, with one patient and one nurse, 12th July, 1880, more than 2,825 insane women have been received and cared for, new buildings have been added, and the scope of her work has been enlarged in all directions. In 1892 there were 950 patients and a force of 95 nurses under her direction, subject only to the trustees of the hospital. Dr. Bennett is a member of the American Medical Association, of the Pennsylvania State Medical Society, of the Montgomery County Medical Society, of which she was made president in 1890, of the Philadelphia Neurological Society, of the Philadelphia Medical Jurisprudence Society, and of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She has twice received the appointment to deliver the annual address on mental diseases before the State Medical Society, and she was one of the original corporators of the Spring Garden Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, established by Charles G. Ames. She has recently been appointed by Governor Pattison, of Pennsylvania, one of the board of five commissioners to erect a new hospital for the chronic insane of the State.
(American Women Fifteen Hundred Biographies, Volume 1, Publ. 1897. Transcribed by Marla Snow)
William Lewis Detwiler
William Lewis Detwiler is a veteran westerner, having.lived in several of the states beyond the Mississippi for forty years. His early career was that of a railroad man, and he was in the rairoad service during the Civil war. He was one of the early settlers and home teaders in the Oklahoma Panhandle country and is now engaged in the real estate and loan business at Knowles in Beaver County.
His birth occurred at Pottstown, Pennsylvania, October 1, 1844. His parents, William H. and Mary (Longabaugh) Detwiler, were born in Pennsylvania of German stock. William L. was the first of their five children. John Barton is now deceased; Mary Jane is the wife of Joseph Perkins; Laura is the wife of Rev. John Gallagher; Josephine is the wife of Fred Clinton.
The early life of W. L. Detwiler was spent in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he attended the local schools. That was before West Virginia was a state. At the age of seventeen he took up railroading, entering the service of that pioneer railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio, and during the Civil war was advanced to the position of a conductor. He followed railroading actively both in the East and West for twenty years. His home has been in the West since 1876, and in that year he conducted the first passenger train running west of Lincoln, Nebraska, over the Burlington Railroad. For a number of years he also followed prospecting for gold in the Rocky Mountains.
Mr. Detwiler came to Oklahoma in 1900, locating on a tract of Government land in Beaver County. That land is still in his possession and has been greatly improved from the condition in which he first found it. He has employed his energies and capital in cattle raising, farming and also in selling real estate, and his operations as a real estate man included participation in the founding of the Town of Knowles, where he now has his office. A democrat in politics, he has never been a candidate for office, though he has done much in the way of local betterment in his home town. Mr. Detwiler is a thirty-second degree Scottish Rite Mason and a Mystic Shriner, and also belongs to the Knights of Pythias.
In 1886, at Linneus, Missouri, he married Miss Martin A. Dail, a native of Linn County, Missouri. Mr. and Mrs. Detwiler have no children of their own, but adopted a son, Chester, who was born in 1898.
Source: “A Standard History of Oklahoma” Volume V; by Joseph B. Thoburn; copyright 1916; Transcribed by Andaleen Whitney]
William Alexanger Smith
SMITH, William Alexander, financier, was born at Pottstown, Montgomery Co., Pa., Sept. 9, 1820. At the age of thirteen, after an ordinary education, he began his business career in Philadelphia. He settled in New York in 1844, and the following year became junior partner in the Wall street house of Coit, Smith & Co. He advanced rapidly in the business world, and is now head of the well-known firm of Wm. Alexander Smith & Co., bankers. He was president of the New York Stock Exchange, 1861-65, and its president in 1866-67. He has risen to distinction in business circles, and is continually being honored with offices of trust and responsibility. In the meantime he has not lost sight of his opportunity to benefit his fellowmen. In 1848 he was elected treasurer of the Bible Society, which office he held until 1851. He is now vice-president of the Sheltering Arms and Protestant Episcopal City Mission, trustee and treasurer of the General Clergy Relief Fund and of the Parochial Fund of the Diocese of New York; trustee of the Permanent Fund of the Orphans' Home and Asylum, and one of the advisory council of that institution; manager of the Home for Incurables of St. Luke's Hospital; the Society for the Promotion of Religion and Learning, and chairman of the trustees of the Building Fund of the Midnight Mission, and other charities.
{Source: The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume 2; Publ. 1906, by James T. White, George Derby; Pgs. 140-193; Transcribed and submitted by Andrea Stawski Pack.}
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