Lincoln County, SD Biographies.....Thompson, Henry 1848 - 
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Joy Fisher http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00001.html#0000031 February 20, 2022, 3:59 am

Source: MEMORIAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD OF Turner, Lincoln, Union and Clay Counties, South Dakota. (1897)
Author: Geo. Ogle & Co.

HENRY THOMPSON. This gentleman is a representative citizen of Lincoln county - a man
who is widely known and highly respected and whose life affords an example well
worthy the emulation of the rising generation. He started in life with no capital
outside of his physical and mental abilities and the good habits which he had
formed, and is to-day one of the solid men of Pleasant township. To such men as he
the entire community owes a debt of gratitude for the labors they have performed in
promoting the development of the country and for the lives which stand out as lights
in a dark place.

In tracing the history of our subject we find that he is a native of county Antrim,
Ireland, and was born in 1848. He grew to manhood in the Emerald isle on a farm and
during his more mature years learned the trade of a weaver. In 1864 he emigrated to
America and located at Janesville, Wis., where he secured employment working on
farms at $11 per month. For five or six years he continued there, working by the
month, and then started for Fillmore county, Minn., where he took a farm 011 shares
and operated that for a couple of years. In 1874 he arrived in Dakota territory and
immediately located on a claim which he entered in section 24 of Pleasant township.
He built a sod house in which he installed his family, and then traded the only span
of horses he had for a yoke of cattle. With the latter he started in to break up his
land and get in a crop. Sixty-five acres yielded to the plow, and from this he got
just seventy-six bushels of wheat - poor grade, too - the grasshoppers consuming the
balance. For several years in succession these little insects applied themselves
industriously to getting fat 011 the result of his labor, but he persevered and in
time reaped the benefit. He then bought a farm in section 14 for which he paid $500,
and to raise this amount he had to sell his pre-emption claim for $125. He hung onto
the new farm, however, for a year, at which time he sold it and took up a homestead
on the southwest quarter of section 12. Here again he was confronted with unbroken
prairie land, and was compelled to erect a sod shanty for shelter, in which he and
his family made their home for four years. At the expiration of that time he bought
for $600, 160 acres in section 13, and after proving up on his homestead removed to
the latter farm. It had a few trees planted and was further embellished with a dirt
shanty, but when our subject settled on it he moved his house from his homestead
claim, and kept adding to it until now he has a nice comfortable residence. Among
the out-buildings he has constructed is a nice dairy and spacious barns, together
with wind-mills and various other improvements in the way of labor saving machinery
for the economical management of the estate. He is essentially a self-made man and
what he now possesses he has acquired through his own industry. His 480 acres of
land are all improved, and what he does not use himself for carrying on his general
farming business, he rents out and derives a nice little income therefrom.

Mr. Thompson was married in 1872 to Miss Mary Anderson Romerine, a native of Norway,
and to this union has been born a family of nine children, viz.: Betsy, Annie, John,
Mollie, Thomas, who died August 10, 1896, from the effects of a kick received from a
horse; Mary, Robert, Emma and Bertha. The children are all being fitted for their
battle of life with good educations, and Mollie is now a student at Augustana
college, Canton.

In politics Mr. Thompson is a stalwart Republican and has held a number of public
offices. He has been a member of the board of school directors and also a road
overseer, as well as a member of the town board. He is public spirited and
progressive, and has helped materially in erecting churches, etc., and stanchly
supports any feasible plan which will tend to advance the public welfare. He is a
valued and respected citizen and a representative man of the community in which he
makes his home.


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