My Genealogy Hound

L. A. Palmer, editor of the Ripley Enterprise, was born February 22, 1840, aboard the ship “Henry G. Pressley,” in the East Indies. His father was a native of England, and followed the sea for fifty-four years, being master of a vessel the most of the time. His mother, Isabella Wise, was also a native of England, and a great-granddaughter of Sir George Grenville; she spent a great deal of her time on the ocean, and four of the five children born to them, were born on ship-board. She died in 1849, and was buried 86 east longitude, and 3°, 40’ north latitude, and there being no minister on the ship, the bereaved husband read the beautiful and impressive Episcopal burial service, while our subject and his three-year-old sister stood with clasped hands, the only mourners. Having left the sea in 1850, the father lived in Kentucky, and then in Illinois, where he died in 1868, being eighty-eight years old. All of the Palmer family—as far as known—have been seafaring men, and have held responsible positions. Our subject learned his alphabet from a cooking stove that had “Hitchcock & Glassner, manufacturers, Gravesend,” engraved on it. He entered the Bible Publishing House, at New York, to serve an apprenticeship of three years. Mr. Palmer then fired on a railroad engine, and took a trip across the plains and returned, and commenced to learn piloting on a boat; but their boat, the “A. T. Lacy,” burning at Booth’s Point, and destroying many of the passengers, he lost his taste for piloting, but during the war he took an active part for a time as engineer of a Confederate gun-boat. In 1865 he went to sea as steward of a ship, and served in various capacities until 1871. In 1872 he published the Richmond Headlight aboard the steamer “Richmond,” running from New Orleans to Louisville. From 1872 to 1877 he traversed the United States as a journeyman printer, visiting all of the cities of any importance. In 1878 Mr. Palmer was united in marriage to Margaret Hail, by whom he has four children. In 1885 he established the Ripley Enterprise, and the merits of the paper establish his claim as a fine journalist. He has led a varied and romantic life is a man of bright fancies, warm sympathy and unusual energy, and bids fair to rank as one of the brilliant journalists of the new South, and is not void of poetic insight, as the lines below, selected from one of his poems, testify:

Pass on! and leave me standing here alone.
My soul predicts the future holds for thee
Wealth and the fame of men; it hath for me
Life’s humbler duties. Dear, thy every tone
Hath made my pathway brighter. No weak moan
Shall pass my lips because my eyes may see
Thine nevermore on earth, altho’ the tree
Hang leafless o’er my head that once weighed down
With its abundant harvest. Many a ray
From out the golden past shines on the rain;
But for the storm and tears of life, the day
Had never its fair rainbow. Blessed pain,
That makes us trust our Father, till the way
Lead heavenward, friend, and we clasp hands again!