HON. OBED EDSON 



Mr. Edson is descended from Samuel Edson, who emigrated 

 from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and landed at 

 Salem in 1638. His ancestors were prominent in the Council of 

 the Colony, and served in the Colonial and Indian wars before the 

 Revolution which gained the independence of the Colonies, and 

 were conspicuous participants in the War of the American Revolu- 

 tion. He has a distinguished ancestry. He was born at Sinclair- 

 ville, Chautauqua County, February 18th, 1832. His education 

 was obtained in the common schools and the Fredonia Academy. 

 He is a lawyer and obtained his professional education, as was the 

 custom in his youth, in the office of a practicing attorney and the 

 Albany Law School. On being admitted to the bar in 1853 he com- 

 menced to practice in his native village where he has been the trusted 

 and faithful counsellor of his neighbors for more than half a 

 century. 



In the early part of his life work he was employed in civil 

 engineering and assisted in the work of locating the original line of 

 the Erie Railroad to Dunkirk and afterwards of what has since 

 become the Dunkirk, Allegany Valley and Pittsburgh Railroad, 

 so far as it lies in this state. He has been several terms a member 

 of the Board of Supervisors from his native town, where he was 

 an effective leader. In 1874 he was elected to the Legislature, 

 where he drew and procured the passage of the first law making 

 circulating libraries practicable outside of the cities. 



He was one of the organizers of the Chautauqua Society of 

 History and Natural Science, and for its success his labors have been 

 abundant. Hie is a member of the State Bar Association, of the 

 Buffalo Historical Society, and of the National Geographic Society. 

 His tastes have been scholarly and his researches into the history 

 of this region from the period when successive nations or tribes of 

 the aborigines occupied it to the present time have been long con- 

 tinued and are valuable as settling many interesting problems of 

 Indian customs and occupancy. His articles upon these subjects 

 have appear in the magazine of American History. He also has 

 written articles on the glacial period, on the terminal moraine which 

 ends within the limits of our county that have attracted the atten- 

 tion of students because they have settled some points that were in 

 doubt. 



His greatest labors and those best appreciated by his associates 

 and neighbors are those by which he has collected with painstaking 

 perseverance the account of the struggles, hardships and success of 

 the pioneers of his own county and eloquently told in the history 

 of the county from its settlement more than a century since. The 

 toil and privations endured and suffered by our fathers, but for him 

 and his patient services, would not have been known to* the present 

 and future generations. The story that he has graphically but truth- 

 fully written will remain to interest and delight the descendants 

 and successors of the brave pioneers who subdued the wilderness of 

 Western New York. 



