Sometimes one finds a man who unites in himself the fine moral sense of
a minister of the gospel with the keen business sense of a man who lives
his life among material things. Such a man is of great value to both his
friends and to the community in which he lives, for he is, as a rule,
one of the few truly normal men living today. This unusual combination
is to be found in the person of Walter S. D. Smith, of Pinckneyville,
Illinois. He comes of a long line of educated and cultured men and
women, and it is no wonder that he has the ability to speak words of
weight and influence from the pulpit, for the founder of his family in
this country was a well known Scottish divine. It is less easy to see
where he gets his fine business instincts, but he certainly has them,
having held his present difficult position for upwards of twenty years.
He has not allowed absorption in other things to keep him from observing
closely the political and civic life of the community, and the services
that he has rendered as a public servant have been much appreciated by
the people who repeatedly placed him in positions of trust.
Reverend Walter Scott Dinsmore Smith, or “Elder Smith,” as he is called,
represents one of the earliest of the newer families that settled in
Perry county, his father, Dr. George S. Smith, having settled here in
1862, about the time of the real development of Egypt. This branch of
the Smith family was founded in America about the middle of the
eighteenth century, its founder being Reverend Samuel Smith, who was a
native of Scotland. He had received a very fine education in the
University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and on his arrival in America was
made a tutor in Princeton College. After he had severed his connection
with this famous old institution of learning he taught a select and very
popular school at Rahway, New Jersey, and here he died about 1795. His
wife was a Miss Baker, and Samuel B. Smith was the only child to
perpetuate the family name, his sister, Mary, living and dying a
spinster.
Samuel Baker Smith was born near Princeton, New Jersey,
where his father was engaged in both ministerial and educational work.
The date of his birth was 1790, and he received his early education from
his father. The atmosphere of his home while that of a Presbyterian
minister, of the old school, was yet full of refinement, and if a bit
austere and straight-laced in many respects, yet furnished the lad with
what to him was meat and drink, that is books. He was a soldier in the
War of 1812. He was a man of rare intellectual gifts, which even the
hard life of the backwood's man could not smother. His wife was also
from a family of considerable mental attainments of the old German
stock, being Martha Siegfried, a daughter of the Reverend George
Siegfried, a Baptist minister and editor in Bucks county, Pennsylvania.
Settling in eastern Ohio prior to 1820, these two reared a family of ten
children, of whom two are still living. Mr. Smith died in 1858, at the
age of about sixty-eight, and his wife passed away at the age of
sixty-two, in 1855. Their children were James M., who died in Erie,
Pennsylvania; Dr. George S.; Samuel, who did not live to maturity; Sarah
A., who became the wife of John C. Hess and died at Iowa City, Iowa;
Simeon B., who lost his life during the Civil war, wearing the uniform
of the boys in blue; Nathan M. was a doctor and is buried at Kirksville,
Missouri; Mary, who married Dr. A. C. Moore, and is now living in
Cincinnati, Ohio; Martha, who married Rev. Charles Kimball; William
Wilgus, who was one of the pioneer in telegraphy and went to the Pacific
coast in 1849. Here he built numerous lines of telegraph under contract,
and later went into the dreaded desert country of Nevada with the same
purpose. Here, near Wilgus, a town that was named for him, he was
murdered by a roving band of Indians, his horse being coveted by them.
The two younger children were Benjamin F., who passed his life in
California and Nevada, and Maria J., who became the wife of J. H.
Arnold, of Beallsville, Ohio, where they still live, honored parents of
a numerous family.
Dr. George Siegfried Smith was born in Bucks
county, Pennsylvania, March 23, 1817, and received his literary
education in Mount Pleasant, Ohio. He later received his professional
training in one of the medical schools of Cincinnati, after a course of
study under Dr. James Kirkpatrick. He began to practice as an exponent
of the regular school, but in 1857 he became a converfto the eclectic
system, and continued to uphold the tenets of this school to the end of
his medical career of more than sixty years. In 1858 he left Newport,
Ohio (in which state, at Beallsville, his son Walter was born January
12, 1845), and went to Jefferson City, Missouri. He spent the next four
years practicing his profession near that place, and in 1862 came to
Perry county, Illinois, where, and in Jackson and Williamson counties he
spent the remainder of his life. He married Rachel M. Garvin at Martin's
Ferry, Ohio, March 3, 1840. She was a daughter of James Garvin and Jane
Dinsmore, who lived near Moundsville, West Virginia, all of the closing
years of their lives. Her father was a farmer and she was brought up as
a capable housewife, and became an able assistant to the doctor in his
rather trying profession. Mrs. Smith died near Sand Ridge, Illinois,
December 22, 1866, leaving four children: Jennie, who is the widow of L.
T. Ross, of Pinckneyville, Illinois; Adoniram Judson, of Sand Ridge,
Illinois; Walter Scott Dinsmore; and Friend Smith, who was cashier of
the Murphy- Wall Bank in Pinckneyville for seventeen years and at the
time of his death. Dr. Smith was a Republican in his political beliefs,
and in his religious creed was a Baptist. He died in Pinckneyville April
2, 1902.
The larger number of the boyhood days of Walter S. D.
were spent at Newport, Ohio, and at Saint Mary’s, West Virginia, on the
opposite side of the Ohio river. He recently had the interesting
experience of returning to the haunts of his boyhood after an absence of
fifty years. The old, well remembered scenes had changed much, but here
and there a spot seemed to have stood still, and he could imagine
himself a bare-foot boy again. Not so his old friends, the little girl
whom he had gazed at timidly from behind the refuge of his speller was a
grandmother, and the boy who always used to play Indian with him, and
run faster than any of them, was all doubled up with rheumatism, but
what fun it was to talk over old times with them all.
The common
schools gave Walter Scott Dinsmore Smith his early training and to this
was added a course in Shurtleff College, Alton, Illinois. As a young man
he engaged in farming, later turning to school teaching as a means of
livelihood. Before he was of age he was conscious of a call to the work
of a minister, and at eighteen he was licensed to preach by the
authority of the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist church, of which Rev.
Josiah Lemen was then pastor. He has held different pastorates around
Pinckneyville, and is yet subject to a call from the Nine Baptist
Association, of which body he served many years as clerk. He has been
clerk of the First Baptist church of Pinckneyville for about forty
years.
At the age of twenty-one W. S. D. Smith entered the court
house in Pinckneyville as deputy county clerk, under L. T. Ross, and
remained in this position for eight years. He was then elected to
succeed his chief and was repeatedly re-elected until he had spent
twenty-five years in this office. He retired December 1, 1890, and on
the 1st of January, 1891, became bookkeeper and cashier of the
Pinckneyville Milling Company, a position which he still holds. He is a
Republican, who holds no bitterness against those who do not think as he
does, and in his public service was known far and near for his courtesy
and kindness to everyone.
Reverend Smith was married on the llth
of September, 1868, in Pinckneyville, Illinois, to Laura Ann Gordon. She
was a daughter of James E. Gordon, one of the early settlers of Perry
county and a noted justice of the peace. Her mother was Lucy A. Jones, a
sister of Humphrey B. Jones, the founder of Pinckneyville and first
county and circuit clerk of Perry county, who was appointed in 1827. Of
the Gordon children there were William G. Gordon, deceased; Mary L., the
widow of Matthew Charlton, of Saint Louis; Lucy A., who married William
E. Dunn, a volunteer in the War of the Rebellion, who after the war took
up the shoe-making trade, and became the father of the Dunn Brothers,
merchants of Pinckneyville; and Mrs. Smith, who was born on the 8th of
February, 1851.
The children of the Reverend Smith and his wife
are Elmer Gordon, cashier of the Southern Illinois Milling Company, at
Murphysboro; Arthur C., who is secretary and treasurer of the Bessemer
Coal and Mining Company of Saint Louis; Percy B., who is secretary of
the Egyptian Coal and Mining Company, also of Saint Louis; Elsie, wife
of S. J. Harry Wilson, superintendent of the Pinckneyville schools;
Lucy, who married Charles F. Gergen, president of the Gergen Coal
Company; and Stanley G., editor of the Searchlight, a weekly paper
published at Marissa, Illinois.
Extracted from 1912 A History of Southern Illinois, by George W. Smith, volume 2, page 994.