Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. III.djvu/199

 JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD. JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD, twentieth president of the United States, born in Orange, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, November 19, 1831 ; died in Elberon, N. J., September 19, 1881. His father, Abram Garfield, was a native of New York, but of Massa chusetts ancestry, descended from Edward Gar- field, an English Puritan, who in 1630 was one of the founders of Watertown. His mother, Eliza Ballou, was born in New Hampshire, of a Hugue not family that fled from France to New England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685. Garfield, therefore, was from lineage well represented in the struggles for civil and religious liberty, both in the Old and in the New World. Abram Garfield, his father, moved to Ohio in 1830, and settled in what was then known as &quot;The Wil derness,&quot; now as the &quot;Western Reserve,&quot; which was occupied by Connecticut people. Abram Garfield made a prosperous beginning in his new home, but died, after a sudden illness, at the age of thirty- three, leaving a widow with four small children, of whom James was the youngest. In bringing up her family, unaided in a lonely cabin, and impress- 168