Ohio History Journal

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REMINISCENCES

REMINISCENCES

of Isaac Jackson Allen

 

 

edited by JOHN Y. SIMON

 

Isaac Jackson Allen, prominent in Ohio a century ago, is now almost com-

pletely forgotten. Allen began his public career in Mansfield as mayor and

judge of the court of common pleas. In 1853 he was the unsuccessful Whig

candidate for lieutenant governor. The next year he became the president

of Farmers' College, located near Cincinnati, and ultimately was that city's

superintendent of public instruction. From July 1861 to late 1864 he edited

the Columbus Ohio State Journal. In 1865 Lincoln appointed him consul

at Hong Kong. After leaving Hong Kong in 1869 he entered a long period

of obscurity. For sixteen years he lived at Avondale, a suburb of Cincin-

nati; in 1886, he moved to Morristown, New Jersey, where he had been

born seventy-two years before. There he lived into his ninety-third year,

dying in 1906.

In 1904, when approaching his ninetieth birthday, Isaac Allen prepared

a manuscript for a cousin, Mrs. Elizabeth Allen Nichols, which he called

"Memoranda Genealogical and Biographical of the Allen Family." The first

quarter of the manuscript, headed "Note," contains genealogical informa-

tion on the Allen family in New England and New Jersey which is available

elsewhere and of no general interest. The remainder, headed "Memoran-

dum," is Allen's autobiography, and is printed below through the courtesy

of his descendants.1

Isaac Allen was descended from Scottish Covenanters who settled in

Massachusetts Bay in the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the

eighteenth century, Job Allen left Vermont to settle at Danville, New

Jersey, where he established an iron works. There the Allens lived until

1814, when Job Allen, III, a veteran of the War of 1812, moved West with

his wife and nine children. Isaac, the youngest, was six weeks old. Job

Allen and some neighbors had already inspected Ohio; now the Allens and

nine other families packed children and household goods in sturdy "Jersey

wagons" for the forty-five day journey to Ohio. They settled near Freder-

icktown in Knox County, where ultimately two townships came to be

known as the "Jersey settlement."

Beyond what is contained in the "Memorandum," little is known of the

first four decades of Isaac Allen's life. By the early 1850's he began to seek

a reputation as an orator beyond Mansfield. In the earliest of his printed

speeches, "The Relations of Christianity to Civil Polity; Delivered Before

the Literary Societies of Western Reserve College, July 9, 1851," he ob-

 

NOTES ARE ON PAGES 270-271