SILAS PALMER ABELL, LEBANON: Farmer
Silas P. Abell was born in Lebanon, August 10, 1822, the youngest of seven children. His father dying in 1825, and the family not being blessed with much of this world’s good, the subject of this sketch when nine years of age was put out to work for his board and clothes, and was to attend school in the winter months until sixteen years of age. At the age of sixteen he made another bargain with his employer, in which he was to stay with him until he was twenty-one years of age, and was to receive in addition to his board and clothes, one hundred and twenty-five dollars. Young Abell, by improving time at school and his evenings at home, was able to teach school two winter terms before he was of age, for which his employer received ninety dollars. During all these years there was no written agreement between the parties. The young man was faithful to his employer, and the latter was as kind as a father to his ward. He attended a select school for one term after his "time was out," and continued to work for his old friend during the summers and to teach school during the winters, until he was married.
Mr. Abell and his wife live on the same farm still, which they have owned since the death of their old friend. The old gentleman (Col. Julius Clark) died in 1868. Mr. Abell married Miss Sophronia Robinson of Lebanon, March 22, 1846. They have had six children, of whom three are still living, viz.: Mrs. C. A. Brown, Mrs. Elisha P. Spafard, and Myron R. Abell. Mr. Abell has been an assessor, a member of the board of relief, selectman, town agent, notary public, justice of the peace, - appointed to the latter office for the first time in 1850 by the legislature. He has probably written more wills than any other person now living in his part of the town, and has settled, either as executor or administrator, nineteen estates of deceased persous in his district and those adjoining. He was a member of the legislature during the sessions of 1860 and 1880. In his early manhood Mr. Abell was a democrat and voted with that party. He has subsequently been identified with the free soil party, the republican, aud the prohibitionists; being led to change his political affiliations first because of his abhorrence of slavery, to which he believed the democratic party to be wedded, and last, for the reason that he held the temperance reform to be paramount in importance to any political party whose platform is not soundly constructed on prohibition principles.
Mr. Abell is an independent thinker, and makes it a point to vote as he thinks. He holds no office at present, except that he is clerk of the Congregational church in Lebanon, of which church he was one of the deacons for eighteen years, until he resigned in 1887.
Source: Illustrated Popular Biography of Connecticut - 1891, Compiled and Published by J. A. Spalding, Hartford Conn., Press of the Case, Lockwood and Brainard Company, 1891
Free Connecticut Genealogy Lookups
Connecticut Counties
Colonial Connecticut
Connecticut Genealogy Data Resources
|