My Genealogy Hound

Edwin Darrow, a citizen of Kirksville, was born in Summit County, Ohio, July 28, 1829. He was reared and given a limited common-school education there, and in 1846 the family of which he was the eldest son moved to Lee County, Iowa. After five years in that county and two years in Van Buren County, they moved to near Kirksville, in 1854. His service in the war for the Union commenced first in the State service, in the Fiftieth Regiment Enrolled Missouri Militia, in 1862, afterward in the Second Provisional Regiment State Troops, until the latter part of 1863. In 1864 he was commissioned as first lieutenant of the first company of the first regiment raised in the State under the ten-regiment call of that year—Company A, Thirty-ninth Infantry, Missouri Volunteers, and was mustered out with that rank July 19, 1865, at St. Louis, Mo. He was elected county surveyor during the war, but resigned, and was elected sheriff in 1866, and held the office two terms. At the organization of the First National Bank in Kirksville he was made president, and served for about a year and a half, since which time he has been a director of the Kirksville Savings Bank. By his union to Orrilla F. Seavy, a native of New Hampshire, to whom he was married November 3, 1852, he has had three sons and two daughters, the youngest of the former being deceased. The eldest three of these children are graduates from the State Normal. Charles E., the eldest son, was born in Adair County, March 10, 1860. He became bookkeeper of the Kirksville Savings Bank in 1833, and in September, 1886, was promoted assistant cashier. His wife, Laura Tull, to whom he was married in November, 1885, is also a native of Adair County. Our subject is a member of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion, and of the G. A. R. As to the ancestry, the Darrows came from the Highlands of Scotland about 1680; settling first at New London, moving not long after to Norwalk, in Connecticut; where his great-grandfather, George Darrow, was born in September, 1748. His grandfather, Joseph Darrow, was born in Madison County, N. Y. (to which locality the family had previously moved), in March, 1775. The great grandfather, George Darrow, moved to Hudson, Ohio, in 1800, where he died in November, 1811. His son Joseph, the grandfather, died November 13, 1856. Lyman Darrow, the father, was born in Stow, Ohio, September 9, 1806, and is now one of Adair’s old and respected citizens. His wife, Ann Walker, is also a native of Ohio, and from an old Virginia family. Her father and both her grandfathers were Revolutionary soldiers, one grandfather losing his life at Yorktown. Also one of Edwin’s great grandfathers on the father’s side, by name of Simeon Prior, was a soldier in the Connecticut forces through the Revolution. He was one of the men that guided Washington when he crossed the Delaware River near Trenton just before the battle in December, 1776, an event that he delighted in referring to up to the time of his death in 1837. Lyman and Ann Darrow, father and mother of Edwin Darrow, and one other son, Seth Darrow, now living near them, and who was also a soldier throughout nearly the whole war, are now living on the farm, where they first located in 1854. They were married in Hudson, Ohio, in June, 1827, and are now both over eighty years of age. They are in fairly good health, and with all their faculties seemingly but very little impaired, still continue to work and manage their farm with the energy and interest of their younger years.*
*Since the above sketch was written. Mr. Darrow has died, his death occurring October 27, 1887, aged fifty-seven years and three months.