BIOGRAPHY: John Emmet LUCAS, Cambria County, PA 

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From Wiley, Samuel T., ed. Biographical and Portrait Cyclopedia of Cambria 
County, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: Union Publishing Co., 1896, p. 88-90
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JOHN EMMET LUCAS, a skilled and experienced workman, and the senior member of 
the planing mill and contracting firm of Lucas & Saly, of Johnstown, is a son of 
John T. and Sarah (Berry) Lucas, and was born in Johnstown, Cambria county, 
Pennsylvania, June 22, 1851. His paternal great-grandfather, Sergeant George 
Lucas, was a native of Ireland, who came to this country and served through the 
Revolutionary war in the American army, being promoted to orderly sergeant just 
before the siege of Yorktown. He died in Johnstown when nearly a hundred years 
of age. His son, David Lucas, was a native of Bedford county, and in the '30s 
came to Johnstown, where he abandoned his trade of butcher to serve for many 
years as constable and as a section boss on the canal. He was a Methodist, and 
died the day before the presidential election of 1876, when in the eighty-ninth 
year of his age. His son, John T. Lucas, was of Bedford county nativity, who 
came in early life to Johnstown, which he left in the spring of 1852, and went, 
on account of ill-health, to Sacramento, California, where he died in the fall 
of 1852, at the early age of thirty-four years. He ran a boat and was a 
contractor on the old canal. He was a member of the Methodist church, and 
married Sarah Berry, a member of the same church, and who is now, 1896, in the 
seventieth year of her age, and a resident of Johnstown. Her father, John Berry, 
was of Pennsylvania German descent, and a native of Centre county, and after 
serving as a fifer boy in the War of 1812, went to Duncansville, Blair county, 
where he carried on a wagonmaking-shop until his death, in 1866, at eighty years 
of age.
     John Emmet Lucas was reared principally in Johnstown, and at Hollidaysburg, 
in Blair county, and is a natural mathematician, but only received a limited 
education on account of having to go to work at nine years of age. He worked at 
first in the oil house, then in the brickyard of the Cambria Iron works, at 
twenty-five cents per day, then drove in coal mines, etc., and at fifteen years 
of age became   a driver in their carpenter shop, where, two years later, he was 
made foreman of the carpenters putting up building material, which position he 
held for two years. After this he was successfully engaged in putting up 
derricks in the Pennsylvania oil regions, worked on the Canton, Ohio, court 
house, served as foreman of one of the Cambria Iron company's gangs of house-
building carpenters and worked at carpentering and stair-building in 
Indianapolis, Indiana, and Peoria, Illinois. He then returned to Johnstown, 
worked in the Cambria Iron company's car department, traveled through the South 
and West doing carpenter and stair work, and in 1879 formed a partnership with 
W. H. Smith, in Johnstown, in general contracting and stair-building. This 
partnership was of four years' duration, when he sold out his interest to Mr. 
Smith and spent a year in Colorado. He then started a stair shop in Johnstown, 
did draughting for J. J. Strayer for three years, and then was a foreman for S. 
J. Little, in Pittsburg, who was a manufacturer of office and bank fixtures 
until the Great Flood of 1889. In that year he returned to Johnstown as general 
superintendent of estimating work for J. J. Strayer, which position he resigned 
in June, 1894, to form his present partnership with Henry Saly in the planing 
mill and general contracting business.
     On May 18, 1872, Mr. Lucas married Minerva Cover, who was a daughter of 
Daniel Cover, of Johnstown, and who died March, 1882, aged twenty-eight years, 
leaving four children: Emma K., Edith B., Nellie J. and Emmet W. Three years 
later, in 1885, Mr. Lucas wedded for his second wife, Mary Deane, daughter of 
Amos Deane, of Sandy Lake Park, Mercer county. By his second marriage he has no 
children.
     In politics Mr. Lucas is an independent voter. His life has been one of 
varied business activities, and his services are always in demand where skilled 
labor and intelligent management in his line of work are needed.