pita 
JOHN A. SAMPSON. 
LATE OF EXCELSIOR, MINN. 
John A. Sampson was born in Maine on June 17, 1846, and died at 
Excelsior, Minn., January 28, 1898. He came to Minnesota with his 
parents when four years of age, traveling by boat via the Ohio and 
Mississippi rivers. Cholera broke out on the boat en route, and the 
family, with the dead body of the mother, were put off at Red Wing, 
then a part of the country inhabited mostly by Indians. She was 
buried on the banks of the river in a rudely constructed pine coffin, 
and the rest of the family was then broken up. The subject of this 
sketch was taken into the family of a friendly Sioux Indian woman, 
with whom he lived for some time, and when seven years of age he 
was bound out to a man who proved himself a very hard task- 
master, and in whose service he remained only one year. Thus from 
the time he was seven years old he buffetted his own way through 
the world, and his whole life proved a continuous although a brave 
struggle with adversity. At the age of eighteen he enlisted under 
the last call for troops made by President Lincoln, but peace being 
soon after declared he never saw actual field service. 
Mr. Sampson was married three times, two children by his first 
and one by his second wife, and his third wife with four children, 
surviving him. For the past twenty-one years he has lived at Ex- 
celsior, where he was engaged in market gardening and fruit grow- 
ing. Eighteen years ago he made a start with fifty Wilson straw- 
berry plants and a handful of Turner raspberry plants, and at the 
time of his death he was one of the largest fruit growers at Lake 
Minnetonka. 
In 1892 he was a candidate for legislative honors on the prohibi- 
tion ticket, and, although defeated, he received liberal support from 
all parties. He united with the Methodist Episcopal church in 
1886, of which he was a member at the time of his death. He was an 
active member of the State Horticultural Society for the last nine 
years of his life, and the various papers written by him and the dis- 
cussions in which he took part, which appear in former reports of 
the society, attest to his deep interest in and practical knowledge of 
horticulture. 
Mr. Sampson was a man of genial nature, of the highest honesty 
and integrity in all his business affairs; of indomitable pluck, with 
“a heart for any fate,” having had a life’s experience in the school of 
adversity, and even when the fatal disease to which he finally suc- 
sumbed attacked him more than three years ago and it seemed to 
Soe 
