6 DAVENPORT ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES. 



to the bar in May, 1847, but remained with his preceptors for two years 

 or more. He then spent a portion of a year with an elder brother, 

 who was practicing law in Georgia, and was afterward for a year or so 

 in New York City, in the office of Gilbert Spier and Stephen P. Nash, 

 both of whom have also been very distinguished members of their pro- 

 fession, Mr. Nash particularly having been for nearly fifty years one of 

 the most famous estate lawyers in America. Returning to Saratoga he 

 in 1853 met at the home of Chancellor Walworth Miss Mary L. 

 Duncan, who later became his wife, and through her influence he soon 

 determined to make his home in the West. 



It is of this period of his life that Mrs. Ellen Hardin Walworth, the 

 gifted historian, and a lifelong friend of the family, has written : "In 

 the last years before the late war there was no young man better known 

 or more kindly considered in Saratoga than Charles E. Putnam. Be- 

 longing to one of the old and honored families of the village and the 

 state, he had grown to manhood in this community an active and 

 lovable boy, an intellectual, genial and fascinating young man, about 

 whom there were varied predictions. His ready smile and charming 

 manner, combined with a slow and easy grace of movement, led the 

 superficial observer to surmise that there was a want of energy and 

 force in his chara< ter. Friends who were nearer to his inner life knew 

 even then that the latent fire of a fixed purpose and the forcefiil will 

 of a strong and gifted man were but casting about for a haven suited 

 to his activities. This was soon found in the great West, where Mr. 

 Putnam rose to eminence as a lawyer, and became one of the leading 

 business men in a vigorous and rapidly increasing city. In the first 

 year of his residence in the West [on December 9th, 1854, at " Elm 

 Grove," the family homestead in Jacksonville, Illinois, | he married 

 Mary Louis i Duncan, the accomplished daughter of Governor Joseph 

 Duncan of Illinois, one of the men who contributed largely to the 

 welfare and progress of that state in its earlier days." 



After making a tour through the West in 1853, '^"'^ visiting the 

 home of his cousin, the late Hon. William H. Clement, at Cincinnati, 

 where he was detained for some time by a severe illness, Mr. Putnam 

 settled in the spring of 1854 at Davenport, Iowa, entering immedi- 

 ately into a partnership in the practice of his profession with Judge 

 Gilbert C. R. Mitchell, a lawyer of eminence and culture, and one of 

 the pioneers of Iowa. From that time to the date of his death Mr. 

 Putnam was actively engaged in the practice of the law in Davenport. 

 His partnership with Judge Mitchell lasted for three years, when the 



