My Genealogy Hound

SOLOMON F. HENNINGER, a prominent and influential farmer of Sharon township, Buffalo county, is a native of Trumbull county, Ohio, and was born January 3, 1833. He comes of Pennsylvanian parentage, his father, Solomon Henninger, and his mother, Catherine Lawrence, both being natives of the “Keystone State.” They were married in their native state and moved West in 1830, settling in Trumbull county, Ohio, where they afterwards lived and died, both passing away in the year 1864, the father at the age of sixty-four and the mother at the age of sixty-three. They spent their entire lives on the farm, engaged in the peaceful pursuit of agriculture. They were among the early settlers of the locality where they lived and saw much of the hardships as well as many of the pleasures of pioneer life. They belonged to the industrious, thrifty, sturdy class of people by whom the middle states were mainly settled, and they exemplified in their lives many of the best qualities of the race, that race peculiar to the American frontier. Carrying the Bible in one hand and the ax in the other, they subdued the savagery of nature and made the waste places blossom with the best fruits of an advanced civilization. Solomon and Catherine Henninger were devout members of the Lutheran church and died strong in the faith by which they had lived. They left a family of seven children, of whom the subject of this notice is the third, the others being Christopher, Priscilla, William, Nathan, who was killed at the battle of Atlanta, in the Union army, July 22, 1864, Polly and Jacob.

Solomon F. Henninger was reared on his father’s farm in Trumbull county, Ohio, and received an ordinary common-school education, such as could be obtained in his day from the district schools where he grew up. Having something of a mechanical turn of mind and his father being able to spare his services from the farm, young Henninger, while yet a lad, took it into his head to learn the miller’s trade, a thing which he successfully accomplished and after wards devoted himself to the calling for some years. In 1855 he married Miss Barbara A. Coffman, a daughter of Isaac Coffman, then of Trumbull county, Ohio, but formerly of Pennsylvania. In the summer of 1861, when the clouds of the Civil war had fully burst upon his unhappy country and calls were being made for volunteers to defend the Union, Mr. Henninger, with a cheerfulness and alacrity born of the patriotism in him, responded promptly to the call and enlisted in Company H, Twentieth Ohio infantry. The organization of his regiment having been completed in Sept., 1861, it moved at once to the front and began active service. Mr. Henninger was with it from that time on till the surrender. He participated in the Vicksburg campaign, his regiment being one of four that sustained the heaviest losses at Raymond, Miss., losing at that place in killed and wounded sixty-eight men. It was also in the Atlanta campaign and sustained heavy losses in the assault on Kenesaw and in the attack on Atlanta; its casualties in these two engagements in killed and wounded being two hundred and twenty-seven. Mr. Henninger was in the service till the surrender, being mustered out at Camp Dennison, Ohio, in September, 1865. Returning to Trumbull county, he purchased a farm of forty acres and settled down to the peaceful pursuits of life, which he followed as zealously and with as much success as attended his military career. With an increasing family growing up around him, he decided, in 1872, to move West, where land was more plentiful and opportunities for giving his children a fair start were better, and in the spring of that year he came to Nebraska and settled in Buffalo county, in what is now Sharon township, taking a homestead of one hundred and sixty acres, where he has since lived. From a modest, not to say humble, beginning he has grown to be one of the most prosperous farmers in the locality where he lives, owning a tract of five hundred and sixty acres of land, most of which he has purchased with means accumulated since settling in the county. He has his land in a good state of cultivation, making it all yield him a revenue in some shape. He has stuck steadily to farming, allowing no interests of a conflicting nature to interfere with the prosecution of his chosen calling. It could not happen, however, that a man of his extensive interests and well known business qualifications should not be called on to fill some positions of trust in connection with the administration of local affairs. He has served his township two years as assessor and is now serving as township supervisor. In politics he is a democrat, and, his township being largely republican, it is needless to add that the positions he has filled he has been called to because of his recognized fitness for them and not through political favors. He made the canvass a few years for the legislature, running on the democratic ticket, and was beaten by only about eighty votes in the county, as largely republican as Buffalo county is.

Being an old soldier, Mr. Henninger affiliates with the G. A. R. boys, being a member of Joe Hooker, Post at Shelton. As a citizen he is popular with everybody. He weighs over two hundred pounds and is as kind-hearted, jolly, good-natured a man as lives within the borders of Buffalo county. He has an interesting family of children growing up around him, some of whom are married. In these and his pleasant home he naturally finds much of the pleasure of this life. His children, in the order of their ages, are Annie Mariah, now wife of Walter J. Steven, a sketch of whom appears in this work; Stephen, A. D., Monroe, Isaac, Minerva and Cora.