BIO: Gilbert L. EBERHART, Beaver County, PA Contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by Judy Banja & Joe Patterson Copyright 2005. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/pa/beaver.html http://www.usgwarchives.net/pa/beaver/bios/bbios.htm Index for this bio book. _________________________________________________________________ BOOK OF BIOGRAPHIES. This Volume Contains Biographical Sketches of Leading Citizens of Beaver County, Pennsylvania. Buffalo, N.Y., Chicago, Ill.: Biographical Publishing Company, 1899, pp. 381-386. _________________________________________________________________ MAJOR GILBERT L. EBERHART, of New Brighton, - editor, author, lawyer and soldier, Interesting references to his life and public service. Some of the Eberharts came from Germany to Pennsylvania as early as 1727, landing at Philadelphia on the 16th of October, in that year, on a vessel named "Friendship." All descended in a direct line from the celebrated "Eberhart mit ihm bart," first duke of Wurtemberg. John Adam Eberhart, duke of Elsass, Germany, had four sons (Andrew, George, Martin and Adolphus), all of whom came to America in the ship "Banister," under command of Capt. John Doyle, landing at New York in the fall of 1758. Andrew settled first in Sherman's Valley, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and afterwards removed to Washington County, where he died in August, 1799, on his farm on which he and his wife were buried within three miles of the present location of the court house of that County. His wife was Catherine Elizabeth Mercer, a sister of Brig. Gen. Hugh Mercer, M. D., who fell fatally wounded at the battle of Princeton, N. J., on the second day of January, 1777. Adolphus, youngest brother of Andrew Eberhart, served in the Revolutionary War, although quite young. He was the first man to make glass in America, and went into the business with Albert Gallatin in Fayette County, about 1786. His descendants have continued in the business in the Monongahela Valley to the present day. Andrew Eberhart was the father of two sons and four daughters. His eldest son, John, was born in Cumberland County, Pa., May 9, 1766. He removed from Washington to Beaver County in the year 1804, and settled on a farm within sight of the court house where he lived till his death, November 9, 1831. He was the father of two sons and seven daughters. He called his eldest John, who became a man of fine attainments, al- 382 BOOK OF BIOGRAPHIES though he had no collegiate training. He spent a part of his early life in teaching, and was many years an active business man. He learned the trade of cabinet maker, and specimens of his handiwork, made of native maple, cherry and walnut, are still in use in some of the homes of the children of the older inhabitants of the County. He was an active politician although never a candidate for office; and some of his articles written in behalf of his favorites can yet be found in the files of the county journals of "ante bellum" days. Although but a boy at the time, he enlisted and served in Capt. Thos. Henry's Company in the War of 1812. His wife was Sarah Power, second daughter of Gen. Samuel Power, and sister of James M. Power, who was one of the Canal Commissioners of Pennsylvania, and Minister to Naples and the Kingdom of the two Sicilys. She was a sister, also, of the late Gen. Thos. J. Power, of Rochester, Beaver County, who was a prominent politician and several years Adjutant General of the State. And as a civil engineer, he had much to do, in conjunction with his brother James, in promoting the public works, state and national, in Pennsylvania, notably in the first improvements made in the navigation of the Ohio River from the mouth of the Beaver to Pittsburg. Her father, Gen. Power, was sheriff of Beaver County from 1809 to 1812, and served as a major in the War of 1812, and took a battalion to Lake Erie to protect our frontier from a threatened invasion of the British. He was of Scotch parentage, born in Virginia, and came to Beaver County, Pa., in 1804. Gen. Power afterwards became Adjutant General of the State, which office he held for six years. He was also a member of the House and Senate from 1819 to 1836, and while in the Legislature he took a very active interest in all enterprises that tended to develop the wealth of the state, and advance the welfare of the people. And it was mainly through his vigorous efforts, while a member of that body, that the necessary appropriations were secured to connect Pittsburg and the Ohio River with Lake Erie, at the City of Erie, by canal through the Beaver and Shenango Valleys; and, by means of the Pennsylvania and Ohio canal, through the Mahoning valley, to bring Pittsburg and intermediate towns in closer commercial relations with Cleveland, Ohio, some twenty-five years before the advent of railways into Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio. John Eberhart, Jr., grandson of Andrew Eberhart and Catherine Mercer, was the father of five children by Sarah Power; three boys and two girls. All, except the youngest, now are dead, the eldest, the Rev. Wilford Avery Power Eberhart, having died at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, February 14, 1899. Gilbert Leander Eberhart, the only survivor of the family, and the subject of this sketch, was born in North Sewickley township, Beaver County, Pennsylvania, January 16th, A. D. 1830. His mother died when he was nineteen months old, and he was then taken into the care of his maternal grand- BEAVER COUNTY 383 father's family. His first instructions in letters were received in a select school in the Beaver Academy, and the first public school-house built, in Beaver. His first Sunday school lessons were given him in the old Presbyterian Church that stood on the public square in Beaver, while he was a member of an infant class taught by the late Captain John D. Stokes. Later he received some very wholesome drills in Kirkham's Grammar, the Western Calculator, the English Reader and the New Testament, in a log school-house which stood on the banks of Big Brush run in South Beaver township, where one of his teachers was George McElroy, who made quill pens for his pupils with a razor; and, when needed, stirred them tip to a sense of their duty with a hickory "ox-gad" seven feet long, without leaving the chair he occupied in the centre of the schoolroom. The other was James Bliss. Both were thorough and efficient teachers. In his later school-boy days, Mr. Eberhart was sent to the Academy at Mercer by his uncle, the Hon. Jas. M. Power, who was then a merchant and iron manufacturer at Greenville, in Mercer County. Finally he entered Washington (Pa.) College, where he spent two years. Soon after he left that institution, he engaged in civil engineering on the Erie and Pittsburg railway of which his uncle, Gen. Thos. J. Power, was then President. He pursued that profession some five years, when he engaged in teaching in Greenville, Mercer County, and soon became Superintendent of Public Schools of that county. A short time prior to the outbreak of the Slaveholders' Rebellion, he took charge of the Conneautville (Pa.) Academy, but resigned that position, and on April 17, 1861, he enlisted for a term of three months as a Sergeant in "D" Company in Col. John W. McLane's Erie Regiment. At the expiration of that term, he enlisted in the 8th Regt., Pa. Res. Vol. Corps, and was mustered in for three years at Washington City, July 28, 1861, as a member of the noncommissioned regimental staff. He served in that capacity until August 21, 1862, when Gen. Geo. G. Meade, then commanding the Second Brigade of the Pa. Reserves, assigned him to duty on his staff as his Commissary of Subsistence, and he remained in the Subsistence Department of the Army of the Potomac as long as that army was in the field, and afterward served at Beaufort, S. C., and Jacksonville, Fla., until October, 1865. During the Second Bull Run campaign, he served on the staff of Gen. John F. Reynolds, then commanding the third division (Pa. Reserves) of the Fifth army corps; and was honored and highly complimented by both Reynolds and Meade for the coolness and courage by which, on August 28, 1862, he saved the division trains from capture and destruction during a severe shelling by Rebel artillery. In that action Maj. Eberhart's horse was so badly injured by a shell in the left shoulder that he was obliged to abandon the poor animal to his fate. September 3, 1862, he received a commis- 384 BOOK OF BIOGRAPHIES sion as Quarter Master of the 8th Pa. Reserves, and was mustered to rank as such from July 1st, 1862. November 19, 1862, he became quite ill, and in a few weeks was reduced in weight from one hundred and forty to one hundred and fifteen pounds, as a result of the hard march through rain and snow from the battlefield of Antietam to Brooks Station, near Fredericksburg. Major Eberhart, however, in spite of his severe illness, was present on duty in the field at the battle of Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862, where, by the discharge of a heavy cannon, near the muzzle of which he was standing, he, lost his hearing for a time. When it gradually, but only partially returned, it was discovered that the drum of his right ear was perforated and the hearing totally destroyed. The disease contracted in November, 1862, resulted in chronic disease of the digestive organs, and muscular rheumatism, from which he has been a constant sufferer to the present time; and not until the year 1890, did he regain the twenty-five pounds of flesh lost in the winter of 1862-3. Under date of September 15, 1865, while on duty at Jacksonville, Fla., he received a letter from Maj. Gen. Rufus Saxton, then Asst. Commissioner of the Bureau of Freedmen and Abandoned Lands for the states of South Carolina and Georgia, in which was this sentence: "I am pleased to offer you the position of Superintendent of Freedmen's Schools for the state of Georgia." Maj. Eberhart accepted the offer, and under date at Charleston, S. C., October 2, 1865, he received Special Order No. 18 directing him to "report in person, without delay, to Brig.-Gen. Davis Tillson at Augusta, Ga." October 6, 1865, he was "assigned to duty as Superintendent of Freedmen's Schools for the State of Georgia." He remained on Gen. Tillson's staff until October, 1867, in the meantime having established, in the face of difficulties and menaces which only the military power of the Government could curb and resist, over two hundred and fifty schools for freedmen. In the City of Atlanta and, also, in Savannah, he secured the erection of a fine school-house, the first buildings of the kind ever erected in Georgia for negroes. On his return to civil life, he resumed teaching, and, in the fall of 1867, became Superintendent of the public schools of Rochester. The next year, without his seeking, he was elected Superintendent of the Kittanning Schools, where he organized the first graded schools that City ever had. He held that position four years, when he resigned to enter on the practice of law, having in the meantime read with the late Judge Brown B. Chamberlin. He was admitted to the Beaver bar June 14, 1870, and soon after to Lawrence, Mercer and Butler, and the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. In November, 1876, he was elected to represent Beaver County in the lower house of the General Assembly, and served during the sessions of 1877 and 1878. In 1883, he was elected without any soli- BEAVER COUNTY 385 citation on his part, to the office of Chief Burgess of New Brighton, and re-elected to succeed himself; and, so well pleased were his fellow-citizens with his administration of the office, that they tendered him a third term, but his private business so engrossed his time he was obliged to decline the honor. In 1884, he was a prominent candidate for Congress, for which in all the counties of the district there were aspirants, producing a divisive and somewhat bitter rivalry; and, subordinating his own desires to the good of his party, he withdrew, rather than jeopardize the success of his party. In 1891, he was elected a delegate to represent the senatorial district composed of Beaver and Washington Counties in a proposed convention to amend the State constitution. His popularity in the district, as well as in his own County, was well attested by the fact that he received nine thousand, three hundred and fifty votes out of a total poll of thirteen thousand, one hundred and thirty-three. In 1879, at the earnest solicitation of a number of the young men of New Brighton, he organized a military company of which he was commissioned Captain and which was admitted to the National Guard of Pennsylvania as "B" Company, of the 15th Regiment of Infantry, in 1880, and the next year to the 10th Regiment, - the Hawkins regiment, - which became famous, as well for being the only volunteer regiment east of the Mississippi in the War with Spain in the Philippines, as for its heroism and gallant participation in the battles about Manila after their capture by Admiral Dewey in 1898. Major Eberhart, ever since boyhood, has been a member of the Episcopal Church, and is one of the judges of the Ecclesiastical Court, and a trustee of the diocese of Pittsburg. Among the fraternal orders, he is a Mason, Odd Fellow, and Knight of Pythias as well as a member of the Grand Army of the Republic and the Union Veteran Legion, in all of which he has passed through the highest chairs. He has been twice President of the Law Association of Beaver County, and of the Soldiers and Sailors' Association of Beaver County. His wife is the youngest daughter of the late Dr. Peter Smith, formerly of San Francisco, but latterly of Wimpole street, London, England, where he practiced his profession the last ten years of his life. Their only surviving child is the wife of Dr. H. S. McConnel, of New Brighton, one of the most prominent and successful physicians and surgeons in Pennsylvania. For some eight years Major Eberhart was owner and editor of the Daily and Weekly Tribune of Beaver Falls, and in that capacity distinguished himself as a brilliant writer on all current topics, and gave his paper a wide reputation. His most notable political articles were those on Protection by invitation of the N. Y. World during the Blaine campaign. He has devoted much time to literature, and is the author of a large number of disquisitions on Philology and other scientific subjects. He has established a good practice 386 BOOK OF BIOGRAPHIES in his profession; and, as a public official, made a marked impression upon his constituents for his fidelity to their interests, and the unswerving tenacity with which he adheres to the principles of his party. As a public speaker and lecturer, he is fearless, as well as entertaining and instructive; and he has attained considerable notoriety as a poet, his poems entitled "The Fife," and "Ruth and I," having given him a very wide reputation. A fine collection of his poems appears in Herringshaw's "Poets of America," and many in other anthological publications.