My Genealogy Hound

ANSON PANGMAN NORTON, real-estate dealer, Pittsburgh, was born in Sangerfield, Oneida county, N. Y., March 11, 1818. His ancestry is traced in a direct line to an officer named Seignior de Norville and who served under William the Conqueror as a constable in the invasion of England in 1068. Constable Seignior de Norville married into the house Valois, which afterward became royal so the Norton family just escaped royalty. This history, compiled by the late Lewis M. Norton, of Goshen, Conn., is now in the hands of his daughter, Mrs. Eliza Norton Gaylord, at the old Norton homestead in Goshen. Among the passengers in the Mayflower who landed on the coast of Massachusetts, December, 1620, were three brothers named Norton, from one of whom the subject of this sketch is descended. His great-grandfather and grandfather lived and died in Goshen, Litchfield county, Conn., at the old Norton homestead, where his father, Theron Norton was born in 1789. The latter married Chloe Pangman, and settled early in the present century at Sangerfield, where he engaged in farming and kept a hotel. Here four of his six children were born—two daughters, two sons (twins) and two more daughters. Alexander C., the brother of Anson P., is now a resident of Boston. The last years of Theron Norton were passed at Auburn, where he died in 1866.

Anson P. Norton remained on the farm till he reached his majority, his education being finished at Clinton liberal Institute. He began life as a mercantile traveler visiting the extreme western frontier. Returning home in June, 1840, he lost his left eye and was otherwise injured by the explosion of some chemicals which he was compounding. On recovering he purchased the patent of a barkmill, and engaged in the manufacture and sale of the mills, and in 1843 he came to Pittsburgh, where he followed the same business for many years. In 1852 he with a partner, bought Carlisle Sulphur Springs, and there they conducted a hotel five years. Mr. Norton then sold his interest in the hotel and carried on a mercantile agency at New York for thirteen years In the meantime his real estate in Pittsburgh had increased considerably in value and returning there in 1867, he began selling off. Subsequently he laid out forty-three acres on Mount Washington in lots, followed with many sales and rapid improvements and later on extending his operations to the Tenth ward of Allegheny City.

Mr. Norton accepts the religious teachings of Swedenborg, and has at times been a temperance worker. Politically he has been a republican from the time of the elder Harrison presidential campaign. Mr. Norton has given much study to the homeopathic system of medicine, and often gives gratuitous treatment to the sick in his neighborhood. Jan. 1, 1852, he married Jane, daughter of Samuel Rowley. Mrs. Norton was born in Ohio and died at Pittsburgh; her father was born in Rensselaer county, N. Y., and died at Lewiston, Fulton county, Ill., in 1883, at the age of ninety-four years. Mr. and Mrs. Norton were the parents of three sons and one daughter, latter of whom died in 1878 aged twenty-one years; the sons reside as follows: Perry C., in Chicago; Alex. A. in Kansas City, and Willshire C., in Pittsburgh.