THE MINNESOTA 
HORTICULTURIST. 
VOL. 28. SEPTEMBER, 1900. No. 9. 
In Memoriam, 
COL. JOHN H. STEVENS, 
LATE OF MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. 
DIED May 28, 1900, In HIs 80th YHar. 
A pioneer of Minnesota and one of the founders of our State Agricul- 
tural and Horticultural Societies, an honored and much beloved life member 
of our society, has gone to his reward. 
Col. John H. Stevens died of pneumonia, at his home in Minneapolis, 
on the afternoon of May 28th, at the ripe age of nearly four score years. 
Greatly beloved by all who knew him and honored by thousands of his 
fellow citizens, his decease is to them a most afflicting event. He was born 
in Vermont, near the line of Canada, June 13, 1820, and received his earlier 
education in the public schools of the east, and later in Wisconsin and 
Illinois, and in the latter state he cast his first vote in 1842. He was in that 
state at the breaking out of the Mexican war and joined the army of in- 
vasion. At the time the writer first met him, in Gen. Scott’s advance from 
Vera Cruz to the City of Mexico, he held a position in the quartermaster’s 
department, and he served in that capacity until the close of the war. He 
was an intimate and trusted friend of Brig.-Gen. Franklin Pierce and Col. 
G. W. Morgan and Maj. Wood, of the 15th United States infantry, and 
greatly respected by all who had business with his department for the liber- 
ality and fairness manifested in the issuance of rations and supplies. 
The close of the war found him, as it did thousands of others, in greatly 
impaired health, and upon his return to Illinois he had contemplated making 
his future home in Texas and only changed his intentions when he had 
reached Galena, en route for Texas. There he met John Catlin, a former 
governor of Wisconsin, who had just returned from a recent visit to St. 
Paul, and became so interested in his accounts of the beauty of the country, 
the healthfulness of the climate and the prospects and advantages this upper 
country offered to settlers, that he resolved to change his course, and so 
he returned to Rockford for the winter. 
Early in the following spring, in company with Henry H. Sibley, Henry 
M. Rice and others, who were leading actors in the early history of this 
