CHAPTER X.

HONORABLE MENTION.

MEN WHO LEFT THE IMPRESS OF CHARACTER ON THE COMMUNITY-FIRST SECRETARY TO GOVERNOR LUCAS, LAWYER, HISTORIAN, MASTER MASON-ECCENTRIC AND BRILLIANT METHODIST PREACHER, A “COPPERHEAD”—HISTORIANS OF MUSCATINE COUNTY AND MEN OF THE "RIGHT SPIRIT"-OTHER NOTABLE PIONEERS.

THEODORE SUTTON PARVIN.

Theodore Sutton Parvin attained distinction in many walks of life, but possibly of all his titles to fame the most clearly established was his right to take rank as an untiring and almost universal collector. The generality of these collectors are a close handed sort of folk. Things must be retained or there can be no collection. But Mr. Parvin, although so earnest and devoted a collector himself, was always generous and helpful to others engaged in the same work. On more than one occasion he has been known to hand over rare and cherished objects to a brother collector, who seemed to be looking upon them with longing eyes. He was anxious that other state collections besides the one which was the object of his chief solicitude should be kept growing. Neither selfishness nor envy entered into his mental constitution.

To the library of the Davenport Academy of Sciences, the library of the State University, the State Library, the State Historical Society, the State Historical Department, and the Aldrich Collection he was an open handed, liberal contributor and to all but the two last named, for a longer period than the life time of a generation.

His memory will be perpetuated in all the directions named. The memories of men stand little chance of preservation unless they are embalmed in printed books which are gathered into public libraries. If memories are not so perpetuated they speedily perish. But in the libraries I have named the reader in future (and distant) years, will find most precious gifts from the free and ever generous hand of the patriarch and nestor of the state. No other resident in Iowa has built for himself so many, or such permanent and abiding monuments, and if, to use the words of Daniel Webster, when speaking of himself, "the mold shall gather upon his memory," there will be a legion of students of Iowa history, both general and Masonic, to compete for the distinction of scraping the moss from the inscriptions.

Theodore Sutton Parvin was born in Cedarville, Cumberland county, New Jersey, January 15, 1817. His death occurred at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, June 28, 1901. He had therefore entered upon his eighty-fifth year.

When a mere child, Mr. Parvin was afflicted with rheumatism, which from his fifth to his seventeenth year compelled him to walk with crutches and entailed a permanent lameness. But what to the lad and his friends must have seemed an intolerable affliction, was not without its compensating advantages. Debarred from the usual sports of boyhood and youth, he was thrown back on sedentary enjoyments, and thus was begun a course of omnivorous reading which continued throughout life. His memory was also unusually retentive and habits of order and classification, early formed, made all the treasures of gathered fact and stored sentiment available for the work of later years.

In the fall of 1829 his father and family removed to Cincinnati, then the metropolis of the west. Here young Parvin, who had exhausted the educational facilities of his native village, at once entered the public schools. His aptitude for acquiring knowledge was so great as to command the high respect of his teacher, who gave him special instruction in the classics and the higher mathematics, in both of which the youthful scholar excelled. At the closing examination of his course of study, a wealthy gentleman present proposed, first of all to the teacher, and afterward to the parents, to send the boy to college. The offer was accepted and therefore through the kindness of a stranger young Parvin was enabled to pursue in the first instance a classical course and subsequently to secure a legal education, after which he selected the law as his vocation in life, and in 1837 began the practice of his profession.

In the following year, at the house of a mutual friend in Cincinnati, he met General Robert Lucas, who had retired from the governorship of Ohio, receiving from President Martin Van Buren the appointment of first governor of the new territory of Iowa. Governor Lucas was at once most favorably impressed with the young man, whom he invited to accompany him to Iowa as his private secretary. The offer was accepted and Mr. Parvin went with the Governor to Burlington, where they arrived in the early summer of 1838. In August of the same year, and while still private secretary to Governor Lucas, Mr. Parvin was admitted to practice law in the territorial courts and in connection with this event an anecdote has been related which is of interest as throwing a sidelight on the men and manners of the time.

Upon his arrival at the then little village of Dubuque, Mr. Parvin repaired at once to the residence of Judge Wilson. On knocking at the door, it was opened by a very young man, a mere boy in appearance. After the first greeting the caller asked: "Is your father at home?" "He is not here," was the reply, "but what do you wish?" "Why, I came to see Judge Wilson." "Well, sir, I am Judge Wilson. What can I do for you?" Quickly recovering from his surprise, the other said: "I came to apply for admission to the practice of the law." He was at once and cordially invited to come in. None of the particulars of the examination have come to us but when the budding lawyer left the house he carried with him a certificate of admission "to practice in all courts of record in the territory aforesaid."

During the same year (1838) Governor Lucas appointed his young secretary to the position of territorial librarian and the latter was sent to Cincinnati and Philadelphia, where he succeeded in obtaining a valuable collection of booksthe nucleus of the present State Library-for which he paid $5,000 in cash.

Here it will be permissible to digress for a moment with the remark, that from the date of his executing the commission with which he had been entrusted in 1838, until the day on which he drew his last breath, Mr. Parvin was the custodian of books, either as state librarian, librarian of the university, or as "Castellan" of the imposing structure at Cedar Rapids, where is enshrined the magnificent collection which it was his life's labor to amass, for the instruction and delectation of the society which had the first place in his thoughts.

The next position to which Mr. Parvin was appointed was that of district attorney for the middle district of Iowa in the year 1839. In the following year he was elected secretary of the territorial council. From 1847 to 1857 he was clerk of the United States district court. In 1840-50 he was county judge.

This was in those days a position of much power and responsibility, as these so-called judges not only exercised all the duties of surrogates or probate judges, but also, with more of real power, discharged most of the functions now exercised by the boards of county supervisors. They could lay out county roads, build bridges or court houses and run their counties into almost any depth of indebtedness. Some northwestern counties were more than twenty years paying the debts incurred in the reign of the county judges. The eastern counties happily had little or no difficulty in that direction. Mr. Parvin's administration was both stainless and successful. He was for one term registrar of the state land office, in 1857-8.

It would almost seem that the activities already enumerated would suffice to fill the entire period of one man's usefulness. But as yet I have only touched on the period of preparation, and with the aim of following the order in which the subject of this sketch placed the importance of his life's work. The office holding portion of his career passed away when he took up the more congenial duties of an educator. In the law he was well skilled, a born fighter, and a splendid advocate. In the arena of politics his zeal was perhaps not always tempered by discretion and while his language towards political opponents was always forceful, it often lacked the gentle touch which deprives even the most cutting words of a portion of their sting. But it was in the quieter atmosphere of the class room and in the realms of literature that the best that was in the man was developed into a living force, and this will have an influence upon Iowa schools and Iowa culture long after the memory of "Professor Parvin" shall have faded to merely an honored name upon the rolls of her teachers.

In 1859 he retired from the state land office and was appointed one of the trustees of the then new Iowa State University, becoming in the following year a member of its faculty. For more than twenty years as founder, regent, curator, librarian, member of the executive committee, or professor of history, he was active in the university life. From 1869 to the date of his death, while no longer officially connected with the university, he continued, nevertheless, to be its firm friend and its constant benefactor. He bestowed upon it valuable collections and presented it with complete sets of rare works. Day by day he added some benefaction unknown to the world at large but known to the students and professors there.

The indefatigable zeal displayed by the subject of this memoir as a collector and preserver of books has already been, in part, referred to, and it next be

comes my duty to record that he was also a writer of great elegance, accuracy and force. A bibliography, however, of his literary work, even if the files of periodicals for the past sixty years (in which they are principally contained) were readily accessible, would carry me too far, and necessitate the expansion of what is only designed to be a slight sketch of a remarkable personality, into a formal biography.

I shall restrict myself, therefore, to a survey of his writings as connected with the literature of the craft and these are so closely interwoven with the varied stages of his long and distinguished career as a Free Mason, that the convenience of the reader will be most effectually ensured by my proceeding in the first instance with a recital of the successive steps by means of which Mr. Parvin became in the commonwealth of Iowa, the foremost representative of our society. Theodore Sutton Parvin was raised to the degree of a Master Mason at Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1838. He was a founder of the first lodge, Des Moines, No. 1, in Iowa, 1840, and of the second lodge, Iowa No. 2, at Muscatine, 1841. In the latter he filled the offices of senior deacon, worshipful master and secretary. At the organization of the grand lodge of Iowa in 1844, he was elected grand secretary and held the office continuously until his demise, with the exception of one year, 1852, during which time he occupied the station of grand master. In his first term as grand secretary (1844) he founded the grand lodge library, was appointed grand librarian and held the position without a break during the remainder of his life. He was grand master in 1852; reporter on foreign correspondence, 1845-52, 1857, 1859, and 1878-92; and grand orator on the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the grand lodge, 1863, again on the laying of the corner stone of the library building at Cedar Rapids, 1884, and lastly, at the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the grand lodge in 1894.

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The Masonic library of Iowa is, however, Mr. Parvin's most enduring monument. To it he gave the best years and the best endeavors of his life. With one poor volume, perhaps the only Masonic work in the state, he began his task and was privileged to witness the full fruition of his labors. * * Through his timely and persistent efforts the library of the grand lodge was established in its present permanent headquarters at Cedar Rapids in 1885. A fund of some $20,000 had been accumulated and this was wisely devoted to the erection of a large fire proof grand lodge museum and library building. * * The literary labors of Mr. Parvin which fall within the scope of these remarks have their greatest and best exemplar in the Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Iowa, the whole of which he edited and compiled. In 1859-60 he edited the Western Freemason, at Muscatine and the Evergreen at Davenport in 1871-2. He was the editor of the Iowa department of Gouley's Magazine, published at St. Louis in 1873, and the author of Templarism in the United States, which forms one of the Addenda to the "American Edition" of my own History of Freemasonry.

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In May, 1843, Mr. Parvin was united in marriage to Miss Agnes McCully, whose death a few years ago brought a burden of sorrow from which he never fully recovered. He is survived by three sons: Newton R., for many years his deputy and now his successor in office as grand secretary; Theodore W. and

Frederick O., who are engaged in railroad and mining engineering in Mexico; and Mrs. J. Walter Lee, of Chicago. A beautiful memorial window in Close Hall commemorates a daughter who died some years ago.

HENRY CLAY DEAN.

Henry Clay Dean was born in Fayette county, Pennsylvania, October 27, 1822. He was a graduate of Madison College, Pennsylvania, taught for a time and studied law. In 1845 he joined the Methodist Episcopal conference of Virginia and began to preach in the mountain region of that state, where he remained for four years. In 1850 he removed to Iowa, locating at Pittsburg, Van Buren county, where he preached to the Keosauqua circuit, joining the Fairfield conference. It was a short time after that that he was stationed at Muscatine. He preached here but a short time but made a lasting impression. The Methodist church was not a large one at that time but Dean would fill it every Sunday. Through the influence of General George W. Jones, one of the first United States senators from Iowa, he was chosen as chaplain of the senate. He was one of the trustees of the Iowa Wesleyan University at Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. Mr. Dean was admitted to the bar but did not practice law. He was a public speaker of rare eloquence and was frequently invited to deliver lectures, among which was a Reply to Ingersoll, The Constitution, Declaration of Independence and many other topics. During the Civil war he was arrested for disloyal utterances and confined in prison for several months by order of government officials. Upon his release he wrote and published a book with the title Crimes of the Civil War. It was a bitter assault upon President Lincoln and the administration in the great work of subduing the rebellion. He removed to a farm in Putnam county, Missouri, which he named Rebel Cove. It was four miles from a station on the Burlington railroad, where a postoffice was named Dean. There he spent his last days, reading and writing. His great library was destroyed by fire at that place. He died on his farm in 1887, and thus passed a great character of history.

PECULIARITY OF DRESS.

One of the greatest peculiarities possessed by Dean was the manner in which he dressed. He was never "dressed up." His usual raiment consisted of a pair of trousers coming to about four inches above his shoe tops. His shoes were of the coarsest leather. He wore a homespun shirt and a long linen duster, with one button at the top. On state occasions he wore a worn out and battered up silk hat. Around home he went barefooted most of the time and a hickory shirt and pair of overalls were all he had on. The story is told that at one time the graduating class of the State University at Iowa City invited him to make the annual address. They appeared in their best "bib and tucker," but were somewhat chagrined to find their orator attired in a homespun with no coat or vest, but a linen duster and a slouch hat. But when he arose before them and began to talk, all thoughts of the appearance of the man left and his mighty eloquence swayed the vast audience.