Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 3.djvu/212

206 to the disease and died October 29, 1871. In early manhood he had wedded Pameha H. Archer, a native of Harford county, Maryland, and until her death December 30, 1910, was a resident of Natchez, Mississippi. Her father was Hon. Stevenson Archer, a native of Harford county, who completed his education by graduation from Princeton College in 1805 and afterward entered upon the practice of law. He served in congress from 181 1 to 1817 from Maryland and in the latter year accepted an appointment from President Madison as judge of Mississippi territory with gubernatorial povi^ers and resigned later. From 1819 until 1821 he again represented his district in congress, where he was a member of the committee on foreign affairs. In 1825 he was elected one of the justices of the court of appeals of Maryland, which office he held until his death in 1848, at which time he was chief justice. His father, Dr. John Archer, was a native of Harford county, Maryland, born in 1741. After graduating at Princeton in 1760, he studied for the ministry, but throat trouble rendering pulpit work inadvisable, he turned his attention to medicine. The first medical diploma ever issued in the new world was given to him by the Philadelphia Medical College. He was elected a member of the convention which framed the constitution and bill of rights of Maryland. At the commencement of the Revolutionary war he had command of a military company, the first enrolled in Harford county, and was a member of the state legislature. After the war he practiced his profession and several important discoveries in therapeutics are credited to him. In 1801 he was a presidential elector and from 1801 to 1807 was a member of congress from Maryland. His death occurred in 1810. The Archer family is of Scotch-Irish descent and was represented among the earliest settlers of Harford county, where for generations they wielded wide influence. It is worthy of record that the portrait of Hon. Stevenson Archer appears among those distinguished men of Maryland placed in the new courthouse in Baltimore, that state, and also adorns the courthouse in his native county; while that of his father, Dr. John Archer, is on the walls of the state capitol at Annapolis.

George Earle Chamberlain devoted his boyhood days to the acquirement of an education in the schools of Natchez. He put aside his text-books in 1870 when a youth of sixteen years to enter upon a clerkship in a mercantile store. Two years were devoted to commercial pursuits, but preferring a professional career, he resumed his studies as a pupil in the Washington and Lee University at Lexington, Virginia, in which he pursued the regular course of study, winning the degrees of Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Law upon his graduation in June, 1876. Almost immediately afterward he returned to Natchez, where he continued until the 7th of November, but thinking that he might have better opportunities in the growing northwest, he came to Oregon and since the 6th of December, 1876, has been a resident of this state. From the obscure position as a teacher of a country school in 1878, he gradually worked his way upward until he became the chief executive of the commonwealth, and is today recognized as one of Oregon's eminent lawyers. In the latter part of the year 1877 he was appointed deputy clerk of Linn county, and thus served until the summer of ' 1879. In 1880 he was elected to represent Linn county in the lower house of the general assembly. In the meantime, he had entered upon the active practice of law, and in 1884 was elected district attorney for the third judicial district of Oregon. Fie was appointed by the governor to the office of attorney-general of Oregon on the creation of that position in May, 1891. At the succeeding general election, he was chosen by popular sufl^rage to the office as the democratic candidate, receiving a majority of about five hundred, a fact which indicated that he ran at least ten thousand, five hundred votes ahead of his ticket, for the normal republican majority in Oregon at that time was about ten thousand. In 1900, having previously taken up his residence at Portland, he was chosen district attorney of Multnomah county by a majority of eleven hundred and sixty-two, overcoming the usual republican majority of four thousand.