Tuscola-Benzie County MI Archives Biographies.....Slafter, David G. 1817 - 
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Joy Fisher sdgenweb@yahoo.com February 14, 2007, 6:51 pm

Author: Chapman Bros. (1892)

DAVID G. SLAFTER, President of the First National Bank at Vassar, was born on
New Year's Day, 1817, in Windsor County, Vt., and had his training upon the farm
and his education in the district school, after which he took one year in the
academy at Canaan, N. H. He is the fifth in a family of eight his parents being
John and Persis (Grow) Slafter, who were natives of Connecticut and Vermont
respectively.

  Mr. Slafter was married at the age of twenty-six, February 11, 1843, to Miss
Ann C. Lucas. The young couple remained on the old homestead and with filial
devotion took charge of his father and mother and paternal grandmother, as well
as her father and mother, all these relatives dying there and being buried in
the cemetery at Tuscola. Mr. Slafter came into possession of the farm that was
settled by the grandfather, John Slafter, who was one of the three first white
settlers in Norwich, Vt., and one of the original proprietors of the township,
thus being entitled to land. He helped to build Dartmouth College, when it was
yet a log building and he had been a soldier in the French and Indian wars and
was a Drum-Major in the Revolutionary conflict, being under Gen. Putnam.

  Our subject removed from Vermont and located in Tuscola in 1849. He engaged in
lumbering, and dealt in pine and farming lands, and after being here for some
time he returned to Vermont and disposed of his property there, bringing on his
parents to make their home with him. He has served as Justice of the Peace for
thirty-seven years in Michigan and forty all told, and there is no other Justice
in the county who ranks with him in length of service. For four years, from 1851
to 1855, he served as Probate Judge, and was Deputy United States Marshal during
the War of the Rebellion. In 1863 he was a member of the State Legislature and
the extra session in 1864, and he became one of the organizers of the First
National Bank in Vassar in 1883, and for a number of years served as
Vice-President, becoming President in 1889.

  Mr. Slafter has been the owner of thousands of acres of land and is one of the
six who now own between sixty and seventy thousand acres of pine lands in
Alabama. This is in addition to the five farms which he owns in this section of
the country. In connection with another gentleman he is about to build a sawmill
in Benzie County, Mich., for the manufacture of hardwood lumber. He has been
connected with the Masonic fraternity for some twenty-five or thirty years being
a member of the Blue Lodge. He has been a great traveler both East and West and
has had an interest in the cattle business in Wyoming among the Black Hills. He
has likewise journeyed extensively throughout the South and is a self-made man,
both educationally and financially. He gave to his aged parents such good care
that no word of fault has been found with him by any one in the connection and
the aged people themselves went down to their graves in perfect peace and
comfort for which his wife receives due credit. No children have been granted to
them but they have brought up one girl whom they did not regularly adopt and
adopted one son, Morgan B. Slafter, who was born in Tuscola, May 26, 1855.

  The marriage of Morgan B. Slafter and Miss Carrie M. Smith of Canton, N. Y.,
took place January 14, 1880. This lady was born June 16, 1857, in Canton, and is
a daughter of Jacob and Lovina Smith.

  Our subject is yet actively engaged in his work and takes his place at the
bank each day notwithstanding the frosts of seventy-five years. The paternal
grandmother of Mr. Slafter lived to be ninety-six years old; his mother lived to
be ninety-four years old, and his father died at the age of eighty years.


Additional Comments:
Extracted from:

Portrait and Biographical Record of Genesee, Lapeer and Tuscola Counties,
Michigan, Containing Biographical Sketches of Prominent and Representative
Citizens, Together with Biographies of all the Governors of the State, and of
the Presidents of the United States

Chicago:
Chapman Bros.
1892


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