The Ancestors of My GrandchildrenFURNAS, Robert Wilkinson (5 May 1824-1 June 1905), governor and agriculturist, was born near Troy, Ohio, the son of William Furnas and Martha Jenkins, farmers. Orphaned at the age of eight, Robert lived with his paternal grandfather until he was twelve and then went to work in a general store in Troy. At fourteen he began an apprenticeship with a Troy tinsmith, followed by four years as a printer's apprentice in Coyington, Kentucky. During his childhood, Robert attended school only irregularly, accumulating no more than twelve months of formal schooling.
After his apprenticeship as a printer, Furnas operated a book and job printing office in Cincinnati. In 1845, during his Cincinnati sojourn, he married Mary B. McComas. They were to become the parents of eight children. In 1847 Furnas returned to Troy, where he became editor of the Times, a local Whig newspaper. After five years in this position, he had a succession of jobs, including jewelry and notions merchant, railroad ticket agent, railroad conductor, and insurance agent.
Unable to establish himself successfully in any business, in 1856 Furnas abandoned Ohio and moved to the frontier territory of Nebraska. There he settled in the Missouri River community of Brownville and begun publishing the Nebraska Advertiser, one of the territory's earliest newspapers. From 1856 to 1860 he also published the Nebraska Farmer, the first agricultural periodical in the territory. Furnas quickly established himself as a leading citizen of the fledgling community, and in the fall of 1856 he was elected to the territorial legislature, serving in that body through 1859. As a legislator he wrote the first school law for Nebraska as well as legislation creating a territorial board of agriculture. Furnas was the first president of that board, thus beginning his career as Nebraska's greatest agricultural booster. Throughout the remainder of his life, he expressed a boundless faith in the agricultural bounty of his adopted home, and no one was more active in promoting the advantages of Nebraska for farming.
During the Civil War President Abraham Lincoln commissioned Furnas a colonel in the army, and he was charged with organizing regiments of Indians to fight on the side of the Union. After some skirmishes with Confederate soldiers in the Indian Territory, Furnas returned to Nebraska and led a troop of Nebraskans against the hostile Sioux tribe. Then from 1864 through 1866 he served as agent for the Omaha Indian Reservation, losing this position because of differences over Reconstruction policy with President Andrew Johnson.
Appointed to the newly revived Nebraska board of agriculture in 1867, Furnas remained a member until his death. From 1869 through 1873 he was president of the board, and from 1884 to 1905 he served as its secretary. As secretary he was responsible for overseeing the Nebraska State Fair. Moreover, he became known for his interest in scientific farming and horticulture, especially fruit growing. In recognition of his knowledge of apple raising, he was chosen vice president of the American Pomological Society. He also was dedicated to transforming the treeless Nebraska prairies through an ambitious tree-planting initiative and was one of the progenitors of Arbor Day.
In 1870 Furnas was a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor but was defeated at the party convention by incumbent governor David Butler. Two years later, however, Furnas was the party?s choice for chief executive, and on election day he handily defeated his Democratic foe: During the election campaign the Democratic Omaha Herald accused Furnas of having accepted a $3,000 bribe while serving in the territorial legislature. Furnas supposedly had been paid money after agreeing to change his vote pn the removal of the territorial capital from Omaha. Following his election as governor, the outraged Furnas brought a well-publicized libel suit against the newspaper. The jury split, with ten jury members supporting the newspaper and two siding with the governor. Dissatisfied with this outcome, Furnas published a lengthy newspaper article, which he distributed throughout the state in a fairly successful effort to exonerate himself. But the trial and surrounding publicity cast a shadow over his short tenure as governor and soured Furnas on the idea of further pursuing a political career. In 1874 he was not a candidate for reelection.
Furnas spent the remaining years of his life boosting Nebraska and promoting its institutions and industries. He was a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska and was a founder of the Nebraska Historical Society, serving as its first president from 1878 through 1890. His first wife died in lS97 and two years later he married Susannah Emswiler Jamison. At the time of his death in Lincoln, Nebraska, he remained active in the promotion of agriculture and was making arrangements for the upcoming state fair.
Though not a notable national leader, Furnas was a significant figure in the formative years of the state of Nebraska. He was representative of state builders across the nation, men and women who were among the first white settlers of their respective states and devoted their lives to transforming their new homes in accord with nineteenth-century notions of civilization. Furnas sought to make over Nebraska so that it would resemble his more civilized birthplace in Ohio, complete with trees, apple orchards, and bountiful croplands. Moreover, he sponsored legislation creating public schools, nurtured the state university, and founded a historical society for a state that had little history. Like pioneering leaders in other states, he sought to replicate the world he had known in the East while convincing all who would listen that his new homeland had greater potential than the world he had left behind.
Furnas's papers are in the Nebraska Historical Society. For information on Furnas's activities during the 1860s, see Robert C. Farb's articles in Nebraska History 32 (1951): "The Military Career of Robert W. Furnas," pp. 18-41, and "Robert W. Furnas as Omaha Indian Agent, l864-l866," pp. 186-203, 268-83. Short sketches of Furnas's life and political career appear in Thomas W. Tiptan, Forty Years of Nebraska at Home and in Congress (1902), and J. Sterling Morton and Albert Watkins, Illustrated History of Nebraska (1911). A memorial tribute appears in Proceedings and Collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society (1907). Jon C. Teaford.
From: Andreas, A.T. History of Nebraska. Chicago, IL: The Western Historical Company, 1882. Nemaha County, part 8 (Biographies). Online at http://www.kancoll.org/books/andreas_ne/nemaha/nemaha-p8.html#bios
EX-GOV. ROBERT W. FURNAS of Nebraska is of English ancestry, though his parents were both born in South Carolina, which State they left in 1804 because of slavery. They both died of cholera in 1832, when Robert W. was but eight years old. He was born May 5, 1824, on a farm in Miami County, Ohio, and at seventeen, went to Covington, Ky., where he served, to use his own expression, an old-fashioned apprenticeship at the printing business, of four years. Almost his entire education was obtained here, as he had never attended school not to exceed a year prior to this time.
When about twenty-three years of age, young Furnas became proprietor and publisher and editor of the Troy, Ohio, Times, a Whig newspaper of which he disposed five years later. He was then consecutively agent and conductor on a railroad and insurance agent until 1856. In March of that year, he came to Brownville, Neb. and commenced publishing the Nebraska Advertiser, which is still published at South Auburn, Neb., and is the oldest newspaper in the State that has never been discontinued or changed name.
Gov. Furnas served one year as clerk and four years as a member of the Territorial Council. At an early period in the civil war, he was commissioned Colonel in the United States Regular Army by President Lincoln, and organized the Indian Brigade of three regiments, which he commanded during its service in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and the Indian Territory. Resigning his command he returned, recruited the Second Nebraska Cavalry, and, as its Colonel, served in Gen. Sully's expedition against the Sioux Indians, pursuing them into British Columbia. He was appointed Agent for the Omaha and Winnebago Indians, and held the position for nearly four years.
In the fall of 1872, he was elected Governor of Nebraska as a Republican, and served during one term: 1873-74; was then elected Regent of the State University, serving for six years, two years as President of the board. He has served eight years as president of the State Board of Agriculture; also as President of the State Horticultural Society, President of the Nebraska State Soldiers' Union, Vice President of the National Pomological Association, Past Grand Master of the I. O. O. F., Past Grand Master, Past Grand High Priest and Past Grand Commander of the Masonic bodies of Nebraska. He, while a member of the State Legislature, drafted and secured passage of the first common school law and the law organizing the State Board of Agriculture. In addition, Gov. Furnas enjoys the distinction of having organized the first school board in the Territory of Nebraska, and of having presided over the first State Educational Convention.
It is entirely within the limits of truth and equity to say that Robert W. Furnas has planted and caused to be planted more trees on the great prairies of Nebraska than any other twenty men in it. His life long motto has been, leave this world something the better for having lived in it, and to this end the best years of his life have been most unselfishly devoted, self and self interests having been subserved to his one grand controlling idea. One of his chief delights has been to witness the results following his efforts to transform the so-called great American desert into a region covered with fruitful farms cultivated by an intelligent community of farmers. To use his own words again, "How successful I have been is for others to say; I have at least gone up head in all I undertook, and have had no time in which to accumulate wealth, believing perseverentia omnia vincit."
The Governor has been a member of the Presbyterian Church since he was eighteen years of age. He married in 1845, in Cincinnati, Miss Mary A. McComas, who is still sharing with him their pleasant Brownville home. They have reared five children to manhood and womanhood. The Governor is now actively engaged in farming and fruit-growing on the Furnas fruit farm on the outskirts of the picturesque little city in which he has lived twenty-six years.