Senator Norman Everson View All Years

HON. NORMAN EVERSON, State Senator in the sessions commencing at Iowa City, December 2, 1850, and December 6, 1852, died at his residence in Washington, Iowa, May 15. He was born on a farm in the town of Vermont, Oneida County, New York, December 27, 1815. At the early age of fourteen, with his father’s consent he started out—a poor boy—to make his own way in the world. He had a grand ambition for a boy of that age, succeeding in working his way into and through Hamilton College, near Utica, New York. He graduated in 1837. After this he taught school in Elizaville and Cynthiana, Kentucky, where he made the acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln, “a tall, awkward, gangling attorney,” who then “gave no special promise of filling the most splendid niche in American history.” He came to Washington, Iowa, in 1841, and resided there until his death. He was very successful as a lawyer and business man, acquiring a handsome fortune by hard work, and becoming one of the leading men of the town and county as well as of that section of the State. “He filled all sorts of positions because people trusted him. Time and again he was alderman and mayor, once a State Senator, an early post-master, carrying the mail in his capacious hat,—a habit he kept up ever afterwards,—letters, papers, notes, bills, law-papers, and all the queer miscellany went into his hat. He seemed to distrust pockets. It was the queerest mail delivery! The ‘Squire would slowly walk around the park with about a bushel of mail more or less, in his hat, unloading at each door, and sometimes a girl or youth would meet him and ask if there was a letter for them,—love-letters, of course,—and he’d salaam to uncover without spilling, and fish out the missive with a comical grimace, and go his way, a sort of combination of Uncle Sam and Santa Claus. In later years he’d laugh and chuckle as memories of that amusing service came back to him.” The old Legislative Journals show that he was a busy and useful Senator. He was “a genuine man, hating injustice and shams and cruelty,—indignant at wrong, disloyalty and treason.” He visited Europe in 1878, but came home better than ever pleased with his adopted State. The Washington Press devotes two columns to an estimate of his career, from which we have condensed this notice.