My Genealogy Hound

SAMUEL DAVIS HARSH.
Sam D. Harsh, as he was familiarly known and as he encouraged others to call him, was born in Galesburg, Knox county, Illinois, May 26, 1870. He was the eldest child of J. B. Harsh and Anna Eliza (Slater) Harsh. He was named for his grandfather, Dr. Samuel Davis Slater, a prominent physician of central Illinois, who was killed in a railway accident the day before Sam was born.

Sam early gave promise of the possession of an unusually active and analytical mind. During his grammar school days in Creston his writings in The Creston Gazette, then owned by his father, attracted attention to the young man and his later labor in this line fully justified the prediction of competent critics that he would become a writer of merit and distinction. He was by nature a student and his reading was wide and varied, covering almost every known field of literature.

He entered college at the age of fifteen years and at once took high rank among students who have since won distinction in many avocations of life. He graduated from Lombard College, in the city of his birth, June 6, 1890. His oration on graduation stamped him as a deep thinker and orator and is still spoken of by those who heard it as a master production of a superior and cultivated mind. Returning home from college he became owner of The Creston Daily and Weekly Gazette, to which he devoted his whole time and attention. What had been an ordinary country newspaper soon sprung into more than state prominence. It was a power for good wherever known and it was widely known. Soon after his death the paper was sold at a figure which indicated the high standing to which its young owner and editor had raised it while engaged on its columns. Sam had a liking for politics and served his party in many capacities. He was once chairman of the republican county committee and delegate to the convention at Buffalo of the National Republican Leagues. Had he lived he promised fair to be prominent in national affairs. He died in Creston, March 3, 1893. Many people from abroad attended his funeral; his Alma Mater town furnishing nearly a carload of people who came to testify their appreciation of his worth as a man and scholar.