Biography of Irwin D. Aldrich

	This biography is from "Memorial and biographical record; an 
	illustrated compendium of biography, containing a compendium   
        of local biography, including biographical sketches of...prominent 
	old settlers and representative citizens of South Dakota with a 
	review of their life work... Also a compendium of national biography."
        Publisher: Chicago, G.A. Ogle, 1898. Page 291 

	Scan and OCR by Joy Fisher, 1997. This file may be copied for non-profit 
	purposes. All other rights reserved. 

PROF. IRWIN D. ALDRICH, county superintendent of schools of Grant 
county, is one of the leading business men of the county, being one of 
its early settlers, and has for many years been identified with its 
interests, devoting the most of his life to its educational 
institutions. He was born in Olmstead county, Minnesota, June 3, 1864.

	Mr. Aldrich is a son of Levi 0. Aldrich, who is a native of the 
state of Ohio, but moved to Wisconsin when about ten years of age and 
there grew to manhood. His father, Sylvanus Aldrich, was a native of 
Connecticut and was reared in New York.

He was a lumberman in New York, but removed to Ohio and thence to 
Wisconsin, and entered the first land settled upon in Jefferson county, 
Wisconsin. His father was born in England, and was killed in the war of 
1812 in the American army, at the battle of Lundy's Lane. Our subject's 
mother, whose maiden name was Mary Moore, was a native of New York and 
made that her home until sixteen years of age, when she moved to 
Winona, Minnesota, this being about the year 1858. Her father, Michael 
Moore, was a native of Pennsylvania. He was a machinist in that state, 
and for many years worked at ``The Eagle Furnace," and then traded his 
property for farms in the west, one in Illinois, one in Wisconsin, and 
one in Minnesota, and moved to the Minnesota farm in 1858. His father, 
Samuel Moore, was a native of Pennsylvania, and his father, Michael 
Moore, was born in New Jersey, of Scotch descent.

	Professor Aldrich, the subject of this sketch, is the second 
child and oldest son in the order of birth, of a family of six 
children, four of whom grew to maturity. He was reared in his native 
county and remained at home until sixteen years of age, attending the 
public schools. In 1881, he went to Grant county, South Dakota, with 
his parents, and spent the winters of 1885 and 1886 at Rochester, 
Minnesota, attending the business college of that place, from which he 
graduated in the spring of 1886. He then returned to South Dakota and 
engaged in farming and teaching school until the spring of 1889, when 
he entered the sophomore class of the South Dakota Agricultural college 
and graduated from that institution in 1891, and the same year was 
elected assistant agriculturist of the United States experiment station 
which is connected with the college. The following spring he entered 
the Cornell university at Ithaca, New York, and did post-graduate work 
in botany and entomology, and returned to Dakota in the following 
autumn and was appointed assistant secretary of the state senate, third 
legislature, and the following summer he spent on a farm in Grant 
county. In October, 1893, he went to Chicago to attend the World's Fair 
and remained in that city during the fall and winter in the employ of a 
law firm. In 1894 he returned to Milbank, South Dakota, and was elected 
to the office of superintendent of schools of Grant county, and in 
1896, was re-elected without opposition, the only superintendent in the 
state thus elected.

	Politically, Mr. Aldrich is a stanch Republican, and is a 
prominent member of the Masonic order. In the fall of 1895 he 
established an educational paper, known as "The Country Teacher," of 
which he is still the proprietor and editor, and has worked up for it a 
large circulation. He is a prominent attendant of the Congregational 
church, and is one of the trustees of the same. He is the president 
(1897) of the department of public school superintendents, which is a 
branch of the State Educational Association.

	Mr. Aldrich was married July 23, 1895, to Miss Ella Aldrich, 
daughter of F. L. and Helen (Smith) Aldrich, and their wedded life has 
been blessed to them by the advent of a little daughter, Dorothy, born 
September 29, 1897.