Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 3.djvu/534

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528
THE CITY OF PORTLAND

class leader. He was also made teacher of the adult Bible class and after being in charge for a few months he, with the assistance of about fifteen members, succeeded in reorganizing it on the new movement plan and received a charter of recognition from the international Sunday schools. It now has a membership of about fifty and Mr. Glass is the author of a plan for teaching a Sunday school lesson which is conceded to be one of the best used by Bible class teachers. He deserves great credit for what he has accomplished, for with no special advantages at the outset of his career he has worked his way steadily upward by reason of his energy, determination and force of character.


JOHN TUCKER SCOTT.

John Tucker Scott was the head and progenitor of that branch of the Scott family in Oregon that has figured prominently in the history of the state. He was born in Washington county, Kentucky, February 18, 1809, and died at Forest Grove, Oregon, September 1, 1880. His parents, James and Frances (Tucker) Scott, were Kentucky pioneers, having removed to that state from North Carolina in the early years of the nineteenth century. Their parents had been among the early settlers of North Carolina, hence the spirit of adventure, the restless spirit that urges men to be up and doing, which in our time and place is known as the pioneer spirit, was his heritage from at least two generations. He left the wilderness of Kentucky in which he was born when a youth of seventeen years. A physical giant, he contended with the forces of nature in his young manhood. Fatigue, sickness and discouragement were to him unknown. Of strong will and persistent purpose, he took no account of obstacles. His father became the first settler of Groveland township, Tazewell county, Illinois, where a man of sturdy integrity and much energy, of keen judgment and unflagging interest in public affairs, he soon became a leader in and authority upon all matters pertaining to the general welfare of the frontier community. His wife possessed boundless courage to which was added the gentle, womanly forces that make and adorn the home. Energetic and ambitious, she stood for the highest ideals in the development of the characters of her children.

Of the seven children born to James Scott and Frances Tucker, his wife, on the frontier of the middle west John Tucker Scott was the eldest and the only son with the exception of a brother who died in early manhood. He was married October 22, 1830, in a little two-room cabin, then the home of the Rev. Neill Johnson, in the wilderness and near the present site of the village of Fremont, Illinois, to Miss Anna Roleofson, whose parents were pioneers of Kentucky. In Henderson county, that state, Mrs. Scott was born July 22, 181 1. She was of German and Irish stock, her father, Lawrence Roleofson, being of German parentage, and her mother, Mary Smith, of Irish descent. Of strict integrity, deep piety and an absolute devotion to duty as they saw it, these immediate progenitors of the Scott family on the maternal side stood for the qualities that underlie the American home and, through the home, the American nation. Earnest, self-denying, enduring, absolutely uncomplaining, Mrs. Scott lived her short span of a little less than forty-one years, and died in the wilderness, a victim of untoward circumstances and inhospitable environment. Her death occurred June 20, 1852, on the old emigrant trail in Wyoming, about eighty miles north of Cheyenne. Taken ill at daybreak, with a malady known as "plains cholera," an ailment that would have readily been dispelled had proper remedies been available, she died at sunset on a June day, in a wilderness surpassingly beautiful but "lone as the sea 'round the northern pole." Her husband and nine children stood beside the grave into which her uncoffined body, tenderly wrapped in simple cerements, was lowered to rest. Her life was a sacrifice to the pioneer spirit that has been a blessing to civilization, though, alas, a sore trial to