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Whitney Family.
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499
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zealous and liberal supporter of the same sect. He was postmaster of Adrian from 1843 till 1848. He bought, in 1848, the land for Oakwood Cemetery, at Adrian, and for fifteen years had the entire charge of it. He has taken an interest in all that pertained to the improvement of Adrian; and was, in 1875, president of the Union Hall Association, vice-president of the Michigan State Insurance Company, the oldest in the State, and vice-president of the First National Bank of Adrian. He was, from 1859 to 1868, a member of the School Board (most of the time its president), and, during that time, aided in building three of the finest school-buildings in Michigan. He was, for a long time, one of the trustees of Adrian College, assisting it largely with his means. He was a delegate to the Democratic Convention at Baltimore, 1-5 June 1852, which nominated Franklin Pierce for the presidency. During the war of 1861, he aided largely in obtaining recruits to fill the quota of Adrian, advancing to the city large sums of money, fourteen thousand dollars at one time, determined that no one should be forced from his home by a draft, while money could be raised to pay those willing to go for the bounty. He and his brother, William Augustus Whitney, are among the oldest inhabitants of Adrian, having lived there since 1828. In early life he showed the usual versatility of western pioneers, being successively grocer, land-speculator, dry-goods merchant, railway-contractor, dealer in country produce, and banker.
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IV. Rebecca Whitney, b. in Shelby, N. Y., 22 July 1815; moved with her parents, in 1828, to Adrian, Mich., where she married, 31 March 1833, Edmund Burris Brown, a farmer, born 22 Jan. 1809, son of Jacob and Anna (Smith) Brown, the latter residing in Somerset, Mich., at the time of his marriage. In 1834, they settled in Hillsdale Co., Mich., in a log-cabin without door, window or floor, two and a half miles from their nearest neighbor, and five miles from the next; where they cleared, the first year, seven acres of land on which the timber was blown down. Here he killed forty-two deer, chopped one hundred and twenty acres of heavy timber, and heard the nightly howling of the wolves, till Oct 1839, when, having sold the farm for four thousand dollars, they moved to Nottawa, Mich., where he died 17 Nov. 1850. He was an assessor before the towns were organized, and had to visit every inhabitant of Hillsdale Co., following the section-lines with his rifle on his shoulder, and being from home three days at a time. Their nearest grist-mill was twenty-five miles away; and once he had to go sixty miles with an ox-team, taking eight days to go and return, with his grist of corn. She married (2d), in 1852, at Nottawa, Cornelius Kline, a farmer, who was born at Glen, N. Y., 3 March 1817, son of William and Jane (Van der Hoef) Kline. They were still living at Nottawa in June 1877, enjoying an abundant property.
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V. James Whitney, b. in Shelby, N. Y., 30 Jan. 1818; a teacher;
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