Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/597

 FLOHUS B. PLIMPTON. Flokus Beardsley Plimpton was born September fourth, 1830, in Palmyra, Portage county, Ohio. His fathei", Billings 0. Plimpton, removed from Connecticut in the early part of the century, and connected himself with the Pittsburg Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, retaining an itinerant relation to it until the Erie Conference was erected, when he was set off with that branch of the itinerant w^ork, and remains one of the few original members of that body. Shortly after entering upon his ministerial labors in northern Ohio, he mai-ried Miss Eliza Merwin, young- est daughter of one of the early settlers of the Reserve ; and the subject of this sketch was the third son of their union. Florus enjoyed the advantages of a common school and academic education, re- maining on his father's farm, in Hartford, Trumbull county, till seventeen years of age, when he entered on his collegiate course at Allegheny College, Meadville, Penn- sylvania, where he remained three years, when changes in the domestic affairs of his father's family rendered it necessary for him to return home. He did not resume his collegiate course, thus abruptly terminated, but in the spring of 1851 connected him- self with James Dumars in the publication of the Western Reserve Transcript, at Warren, Trumbull county. In the summer of 1852 he received an invita,tion to con- duct a Whig Campaign paper in Niles, Berrien county, Michigan, which he accepted. At the conclusion of the Campaign, disastrous alike to his political hopes and the party with which he was identified, he returned to Ohio, and connected himself with the Portage Whig, then conducted by John S. Herrick, at Ravenna, Portage county. During his residence there he married Miss Cordelia A. Bushnell of Hartford, Trum- bull county, on the second of June, 1853, and in the following spring removed to Elmira, Chemung county. New York, where he was engaged, till the spring of 1857, in the publication of the Elmira Daily Republican, and a weekly campaign paper in 1856. In 1857 he removed to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and associated himself with the Daily Dispatch, of which he is, at the present time, one of the editors. Mr. Plimpton has contributed to various newspapers and periodicals in the East and West : the Knickerhocker Magazine, Godeyh Lady's Booh, Genius of the West, New York Tribune, and Ohio State Journal ; but for three or four years has confined his labors to the newspapers with which he has been associated. He has, however, within that time, published but a few poems. Such leisure as he could command for visits from the Muse, has been devoted to the elaboration of a poem of considerable scope, which he designs for a volume when prudence commends a collection of his poems. The ballad, " Lewis Wetzel," which concludes the selections for this volume, now first appears in print. (581)