My Genealogy Hound

CAMPBELL HARDY, editor and proprietor of the Tamaroa Bugle, published at Tamaroa, Perry County, is a native of La Salle, La Salle County, Ill., and is a son of Isaac Hardy, a sketch of whose life appears above, and who in his day was one of the most prominent and foremost citizens of northern Illinois, a man of marked force and ability, who had the distinction of being the largest contractor on the Illinois & Michigan Canal.

The subject of this sketch was one of a large family, and when a mere child, suffered the misfortune of losing his father, who died at La Salle, September 14, 1864, respected by all. Mr. Hardy’s opportunities for acquiring an education except in the practical school of experience were limited, being confined to advantages offered in the free public schools of Chicago, where he spent his youth and early manhood. At the age of fourteen he left school and entered mercantile pursuits, being employed by the wholesale dry-goods house of Field & Leiter. From boyhood a great lover of reading and books, and possessing literary tastes, he found his employment uncongenial, and a few years afterward embarked in the newspaper business at Omaha, Neb., where, at the age of twenty-one, we find him telegraph editor of the Omaha Herald, edited by that sterling Democrat, Dr. George L. Miller. He has been connected at various times since with the following leading publications: The New York Daily Graphic, Kansas City Journal, Duluth Herald, North American Review, Chicago Dispatch and the Chicago Times.

In January, 1894, Mr. Hardy moved to Perry County and settled at Tamaroa, believing that he recognized in southern Illinois and in Perry County, in whose interests and advancement he takes an active part, a field of usefulness worthy of cultivation. Mr. Hardy is a gentleman of independent thought and action, and in politics is of the Democratic faith. He is broad gauged and charitable in his views of men and public measures. While a protestant in his religious belief, he is a member of no church, but an attendant of the Presbyterian, in whose good works he is interested. The Tamaroa Bugle, of which he is the head, is recognized as among the best newspapers published in southern Illinois.