William Oxley Thompson

Dr. William Oxley3 Thompson (David Glenn2, David1) was born November 05, 1855 in Adams Township, Cambridge, Guernsey County, Ohio, and died December 09, 1933 in Columbus, Ohio. He married (1) Rebecca Jane Allison September 21, 1882 in Odebolt, Iowa. She was born Abt. 1863 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and died August 15, 1886 in Lyons, Colorado. He married (2) Helen Starr Brown October 05, 1887. She was born Abt. 1867, and died January 01, 1891 in Longmont, Colorado. He married (3) Estelle Godfrey Clark June 28, 1894 in Miami, Ohio. She was born February 13, 1862. 

Notes for Dr. William Oxley Thompson:

"I was broght up with the one-room schoolhouse. I have carried my little tin bucket to school, with four peices of bread spread with butter and apple butter, and one hard-boiled egg; enough food to insure that the bucket would be empty when the day was done."

"When I think of my grandmother having come across the Atlantic with her six children and having to get together enough food, preserves, and dried beef, and other things to last through those six weeks, I think that there was something heroic about people who could live that way."

"Dr. Thompson stressed the importance of family stock and inheritance. He noted that his paternal grandfather had settled on 160 acres of land near New Concord, Ohio in Guernsey County, where he lived as a farmer until his death, and that his maternal grandfather had lost most of his property by flood."

"My grandfather cleared away the forest, hewed down the trees, built his own log house and a little later the second one and made it the meeting place of the coummunity."

"Away back in 1872, sixty years ago, I came to Illinois as a young man to teach school in the winter and work on a farm in the summer about twenty-five miles north of Peoria. Two years ago I had an opportunity to visit that area and see all the landscape with which I was very familiear six decades ago. The first house in which I lived still stands looking about as well as it did in 1872. I was surprised to find that all the neighboring houses were still there."

"My memory goes back very vividly to the panic of 1873, when as a young school teacher I was on the prairies of Illinois. prices were much lower than they are now. I remember that corn, the principal product, sold for thirty cents a bushel. Hogs were selling on the market for $2.75 and occasionally $3.00 per hundred..."

"Between August, 1886 and December, 1890, death broke his immediate family circle three times taking, in turn, the first wife, then their baby daughter, and finally the second young wife a week after the birth of their second son."

"One activity of Dr. Thompson in these years of which little seems to have been known later was his authorship of a regular weekly column of comment published in the Greeley, Colorado Sun, of which his brother, Lorain A. Thompson, was editor in 1894. A scrapbook containing fifty-one of these columns from April 15, 1893 to March 31, 1894, is preserved among his papers, numbered and dated in his own hand. From the evidence, they were written as a rule a week before publication."

"On the last page of the 1928 diary he entered a statement of his estate as of February 22, 1927, listing his stock and other holding. He put these at $82,500 which, plus the home at 55 Woodland Avenue, which he had bought after his retirement and which he set down at $20,000 although he noted that he had paid $22,500 for it, brought his estate to a little more than $100,000."

Source: William Oxley Thompson "Evangel Of Education", James E. Pollard, Ohio State University Press, 1955

Biographies of Notable Americans, 1904, Thompson, William Tappan

THOMPSON, William Oxley, educator, was born in Cambridge, Ohio, Nov. 5, 1855; son of David Glenn and Agnes Miranda (Oxley) Thompson; grandson of David and Sarah (Gordon) Thompson and of Joel M. (born 1806) and Nancy (King) Oxley; great-grandson of Andrew and Nancy (Montgomery) King of county Down, Ireland. The Oxleys were from Maryland. He was graduated from Muskingum college, New Concord, Ohio, A.B., 1878, A.M., 1881; from the Western Theological seminary, Allegheny, Pa., 1889, and was ordained in the same year to the Presbyterian ministry. He was missionary and pastor at Odebolt, Iowa, 1882-85; president of Longmont college, Col., 1885-89; pastor there, 1885-91, and president of Miami university, 1891-99. He was married, June 28, 1894, to Estelle Godfrey, daughter of Charles H. and Frances (Pettibone) Clark of Cleveland, Ohio. In 1899 he became president of the Ohio State university. He received the honorary degree of D.D. from Muskingum college, 1891, and that of LL.D. from Western University of Pennsylvania, 1897.

Source: Johnson, Rossiter, ed. Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, - Vol. I-X (10). Boston, MA: The Biographical Society, 1904.

THOMPSON, WILLIAM OXLEY, clergyman, college president, was born Nov. 5, 1855, in Cambridge, Ohio. This eminent presbyterian clergyman has been president of the Miami university of Oxford, Ohio, since 1891.

Source: Herringshaw's Encyclopedia of American Biography of the Nineteenth Century. page 928

More About Dr. William Oxley Thompson:

Cause of Death: Heart attack

Fact 1: Buried in family lot in Greenlawn Cemetery, Columbus, Ohio.

Medical Information: Died at White Cross Hospital, Columbus, Ohio..