Hamilton H. Kerr

From M. Cavanagh, "Hamilton H. Kerr," Thirty-Fifth Annual Reunion of the Old Settlers of Johnson County, p. 25. 10 .

In 1839 there came to Johnson county a young unmarried man from the state of Pennsylvania. He made a claim and afterwards entered land in Big Grove township, and with Timothy B. Clark and Paul B. Anders subsequently made a dedication of the original townsite of Solon and gave it the classic name which it bears of the great Athenian lawgiver. He was the first postmaster at Solon, and served as such for a number of years. This man was Hamilton H. Kerr, who departed this life some years since, and it is felt that something should be said here in honor of his memory. Mr. Kerr was a man of most sterling worth and unblemished character, always aligning himself on the side of the right as he understood it against the wrong; a good neighbor, a fast friend, just in all his dealings with his fellow men, a public-spirited citizen and withal so modest and unassuming, so wanting in self-assertion, that people who were not his immediate neighbors knew but little of his intrinsic worth. He lived for many years at the home he first established and then sold out and bought a small farm near Iowa City across the Iowa river, on which he resided several years, until his advanced age and that of his wife made it advisable that they should give up the active operations of the farm, after which they made their home with their daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. J.R. Breese of Union township. This continued to be their home until Mr. Kerr's death in 1897, and it is still Mrs. Kerr's home.

Mr. Kerr was very social in his tastes and highly prized the society of his old friends and neighbors and in the later years of his life made many visits to their homes, where he was always received with the greatest pleasure and cordiality. In short, suffice it to say that his life was a model of domestic, social and civic virtue, and if any man among the pioneers in letter and very spirit kept every one of the command of the decalogue and observed in all its divine beauty the precept of the Golden Rule, that man was Hamilton H. Kerr.

His early life here had all the trials and vicissitudes incident to those pioneer days, but he was called upon to go through a trial and endure a privation that did not necessarily belong to pioneer life.

I said at the outset that when he came here Mr. Kerr was an unmarried man; now, while this was true, it is also true that he came to select a place in which to establisha home which a fair daughter of the old Keystone state had promised to share with him. She, his affianced wife, he left behind him until he should go to the faraway trans-Mississippi country, the land of beautiful Iowa, which was then firing the imagintion of the young men and maidens of that day in the older states, as the place of others in which to seek and build elysian homes for themselves and their offspring.

When Mr. Kerr came it was his purpose to return within a year and ask the young lady who had promised to become his wife to fulfill her promise. He brought with him a sum of money, the savings of his modest earnings for some years. This money would enable him to provide the home which he was looking forward to with so much anticipated happiness, and to pay his expenses back to Pennsylvania and the return with the wedded woman of his heart. But, alas, he had formed the acquaintance of an honest (?) blacksmith of the neighboring county of Cedar, to whom he loaned his money as an accommodation for a few days; but the few days grew into many days, and the days into months and months into years, and his money was still loaned--a permanent investment--and so the years of this painful waiting dragged their weary length along, until the celebrated historical waiting of Jacob for Rachel was threatened with eclipse.

As it was out of the question for Mr. Kerr to get the money he had loaned he was compelled to wait the slow process of earning enough to assist him in carrying out the plans so dear to his heart. But earning money then in Iowa was a slow process at best in any vocation, and Mr. Kerr being an artisan patronized only by those who could afford tailor-made apparel, his patrons were not many and his earnings were necessarily slow.

But at last in 1847, eight long years after he came, Mr. Kerr succeeded in getting his affairs in shape, and as all things are said to have an end, so this long waiting, and he hied himself away to the betrothed of his heart, and as he had withstood the charms and blandishments of the pioneer belles and beauties of Iowa in that early time, and she had kept her plighted troth, they were married; and who shall say that the long enforced separation of this devoted pair, the "hope deferred that maketh the heart sick," has not added zest and bliss to the almost fifty years of their wedded life which followed, for it was amost happy union. Not that they had no sorrow, for that is not possible in the lives of sentient beings like ourselves. For out of a family of six children born of this union four sweetly sleep beside their father, beneath the grassy sod in the little cemetery at Solon. It has been said that "it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved," and is it not better that children be born, though they die in infancy, than that the parents should always have been childless? Fot is not the memory of these departed little ones and the hope of meeting them in the great hereafter a source of sublimated joy and happiness?

I should say that Mrs. Kerr (or rather Miss Brooks, for this was her maiden name) beguiled the tedium of the eight slow-passing years of Mr. Kerr's absence in Iowa before his return to her by teaching school, and that among her pupils who attended her school for a number of terms in her young girlhood was the mother of the Honorable A.B. Cummins, and who shall determine how much this teaching of his mother by Mrs. Kerr has influenced the aspirations and ambitions which have led him to the conspicuous place he occupies in the eyes of the people of Iowa and made him the candidate of the great Republican party for the highest office in their gift?

In jutsice [sic] to Mrs. Kerr I wish to say that she did not know that there was to be anything said here today in relation to her late husband or herself, otherwise I have no doubt her native modesty and disposition to shrink from public observation would have caused her to withhold her consent. I beg her pardon for taking such a liberty, my only justification being that the valuable lesson of their lives should have more publicity.