Representative Orrin Drake Tisdale View All Years
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Orrin Drake Tisdale
Davis County
Born in Jefferson county, New York, June 9th 1822. While very young his parents removed to Lewis county N. Y., where Mr. Tisdale spent his youth on a farm. Quite eerily in life he developed a taste for literature and became an ardent lover of good books, which desire lead him to secure a more than ordinary education. Leaving the haunts and scenes of his youth at the age of twenty four, be turned his foot steps toward the south and spent four years in teaching in Tennessee and Alabama. In 1849 his attention was directed to the young and promising state of Iowa. He came first to Troy, Davis county, where he met an old friend, Henry Briggs, who was there engaged in the mercantile business, in which he was induced to buy an interest. Here he met Miss Harriet N. Baldwin to whom he was married March 6, 1850. In the fall of 1862, Mr. Tisdale removed to Bloomfield, Iowa. Here he taught school for a short time and again engaged in mercantile business. While residing at Bloomfield he took an active part in all matters of local concern, and took an intelligent interest in not only local, but state and national politics. From Davis county he was elected to the legislature and served his county and state with intelligence and credit. He was an ardent and enthusiastic supporter of the Union during the war, and was a great admirer of President Lincoln and his administration. He was a man of very positive convictions upon most questions in which he took an interest, and so taking issue with the Republican party after the close of the war upon certain questions of reconstruction and tariff, he returned to the Democratic party, and in the main supported its principles of public policy. In 1865 he removed from Bloomfield to Ottumwa, and has resided here ever since. He engaged in the mercantile business in Ottumwa down until 1875, than served the city as mayor in 1876 He. then engaged in the hotel business until 1884.
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