My Genealogy Hound

GEORGE FORRESTER was born in Lee county, Iowa, May 22, 1843, and is the son of Oliver C. and Elizabeth (Loughhead) Forrester. His father was a Canadian by birth and a farmer by occupation. His mother was a native of northern Ireland and died in 1845. George had not yet reached his majority when he concluded to accept the advice of Horace Greeley and “go West and grow up with the country,” and started out, with Central City, Colo., as his objective point. There he met the frontiersman in all his glory, but he was not delighted with the picture of western life, and, after working for a freighting company some little time, he returned to Iowa. He taught school until the spring of 1864, and then entered the Union army, enlisting in the Forty-sixth Iowa infantry. His regiment was assigned to the duty of guarding railroad property, principally in the South, and he was mustered out in the fall of 1864, after serving the time for which he had enlisted. Returning to Iowa, conscious of having discharged his duty to his country, he attended a school at Tabor for a time, and then followed teaching for several years. In the meantime, however, he had completed a course in a commercial college in Chicago. He had thus thoroughly fitted himself for the transaction of business in the commercial world, and he soon found a position as clerk and manager of the warehouses of the firm of Henry Lee & Co., of Red Oak, Iowa. In the fall of 1879 he met with a most peculiar accident by being struck by lightning, while he was in a granary moving some grain. The lightning melted a hole through his watch case and burned his clothing badly; portions of his body were paralyzed and he was rendered perfectly helpless for some time. Shortly after his recovery a horse fell on him, breaking his leg and crippling him for life.

In the spring of 1883 he came to Nebraska and took a soldier’s claim in Harrison township, Buffalo county. He also took a tree claim, and now has three hundred and twenty acres of good land under a fair state of cultivation, on which he has planted fifteen thousand trees, and erected a commodious frame dwelling, which attests his present prosperity. He was married, September 29, 1875, to Miss Harriet C. Jenkins, a daughter of Thomas and Martha Jenkins, both natives of Kentucky, and they have had six children — Fannie F., Eldafonso B., Raymond R., Marmaduke M., Hazel G. (deceased), and Earl. Mr. Forrester and his estimable wife are active members of the Methodist church. He belongs to the G. A. R., and affiliates with the republican party, although he is no politician.