WILLIAM AUGUSTUS SCHWARTZ. This leading lawyer, influential citizen and
prominent financier and industrial promoter, whose whole life to this time
(1911), excepting while he was in school and college, has been passed at
Carbondale, seems to have the touch of Midas without the sordidness of that
unhappy monarch. Everything he puts his hand to in a professional or
business way thrives and brings in good returns, but the results are used
for the benefit of others in manifestations of enterprise and public spirit
which show that he is deeply interested in the welfare of his city and
county and the comfort and progress of their people in every worthy and
proper way.
Mr. Schwartz was born on a farm in Elk township, Jackson
county, Illinois, on February 28, 1853, and is a son of William and Sarah
(Kimmel) Schwartz. His father was one of the prosperous and prominent
farmers and stock breeders of Jackson county, and took a considerable
interest in public affairs. He was a member of the state legislature in
1870-71, and died during his term of office, in the height of his usefulness
and in the prime of life.
His son, William Augustus Schwartz, began
his academic education in the public schools, continued it in Carthage
College, and completed it at the Southern Illinois Normal University. After
leaving the last named institution he attended Union Law College in Chicago,
and was admitted to the bar in 1879. Following his admission to the bar he
located in Carbondale, and ever since has been actively engaged in the
practice of his profession in the county of his birth, and adjoining
counties, and for many years also in the higher courts of the state and in
United States Court. He has served one term as state's attorney in this
county, and as school trustee for some years, although his ambition has
never been in the line of public office, but rather in the domain of
financial operations and in the development of large industrial enterprises.
In 1892 he helped to organize the First National Bank of Carbondale, with a
capital stock of fifty thousand dollars and the late F. A. Prickett as
president. Mr. Prickett died August 31, 1903, and directly after that event
Mr. Schwartz, whose influence and service in promoting the interests of the
bank as a director from the start had been very greatly and highly
appreciated, was chosen president to succeed Mr. Prickett. He has held that
office and directed the policy and course of the institution ever since, and
it has grown and prospered under his wise and progressive management. In
1911 the bank had accumulated an undivided surplus amounting to fifteen
thousand dollars, with a much increased and rapidly expanding volume of
business, and a steadily strengthening hold upon the confidence and high
regard of the business world around it. But the exacting claims of the bank
on his time and attention, and those of his large legal practice, were
insufficient to absorb all his energies or completely employ the faculties
of his active and comprehensive mind. In 1897 he found an additional field
for their exercise in helping to organize the Carbondale Trust and Savings
Bank, of which he was made president at the time, and has been ever since.
This institution has also flourished and thriven through his energy and
skill as a financier and his foresight and enterprise as a controlling
force, which have been freely applied to it.
His business capacity
and tireless diligence in the use of it have found still other fruitful
channels of expression through the Carbondale Mill and Elevator Company, the
Carbondale and Marion Telephone Company, the Ohio-Mississippi Valley
Telephone Company, and the Missouri State Life Insurance Company of St.
Louis, all of which he helped to organize, and each of which he has served
zealously for years as a member of its directorate. These institutions have
all been of considerable advantage to him personally and of great benefit to
the public in many ways by means of their ever widening currents of business
and their productive activities.
In his profession Mr. Schwartz
stands deservedly high because of his ability and acumen as a lawyer, his
extensive legal knowledge and his industrious devotion to his professional
duties, notwithstanding the other exhaustive domains of business which lay
him under such heavy tribute by their requirements, all of which he meets
with ease and promptness and in the most successful manner, by reason of the
resourcefulness of his versatile and comprehensive mind and his commanding
genius for close and unremitting application to whatever he has in hand.
In his political faith and allegiance Mr. Schwartz is allied with the
Democratic party, and while he has never been desirous of political honors
or emoluments of office for himself, he has been a faithful worker for the
success of the party because of his strong conviction of the correctness of
its principles. In the early eighties he served as chairman of its county
central committee, and proved himself a valiant and resourceful leader in
its campaign. His religious connection is with the Christian church, and he
is an elder in its organization and government. For the past seventeen years
he has been an officer and an active worker in the Jackson County
Sunday-School Association. Fraternally Mr. Schwartz belongs to the Masonic
order and to its adjunct, the Order of the Eastern Star, in both of which he
is earnest in his interest and energetic and practical in the service he
renders. Mr. Schwartz has never married. He has shared his mother's home all
his life, and his dearest ambition has been to make that home a comfortable
and happy abiding place for her declining years, an ambition which it is
safe to say he has fully realized. He has one brother living, George
Schwartz, and one sister, Mrs. Ellen Hays. Two brothers, Henry and Daniel,
and three sisters, Isabel, Laura and Lucy, died before they reached their
legal majority.
Extracted 16 Jan 2018 by Norma Hass from 1912 A History of Southern Illinois, volume 2, pages 1034-1035.