History of Bucks
County, Pa Volume 3 by William H. Davis
|
SAMUEL R. KRAMER |
|
SAMUEL R. KRAMER, Post office (sic) Perkasie, was born March 29, 1860, on the Ridge road, about two miles northeast of Perkasie borough, in Rockhill township, and was the youngest of seven children born to Abraham and Elizabeth KRAMER. At the age of eight years his father died, and for five years he was in the employ of George L. BARINGER, a farmer in Richland Center, during which time and between the attendant duties of farm life he received a common-school education in the Quakertown public schools. In 1875 he was apprenticed to a jeweler in Delaware county, Pennsylvania, June 4, 1877, he was apprenticed to J. E. WITMER, of the Longsdale (Landsdale?)Reporter, at Langsdale, Montgomery county, this state, and served three years at the printing business. In June, 1881, Hon. M. S. SELLERS established the Central News in Perkasie, and employed him to take charge of the mechanical part, which position he held until the death of the founder, February 7, 1882, when he became a member of the firm of MOVER & KRAMER, and continued the printing and publication business. In 1885, at the age of twenty-four, he was elected to the office of justice of the peace by his fellow-citizens, for the term of five years, and was re-elected for three succeeding terms thereafter. He was married in 1881to Miss Mary SWARTLEY, of Gwynedd, Montgomery county, Pennsylvania. The union was blest with ten children, the following of whom are living: Samuel R., Jr., Russell, Lulu, Mamie, Stewart, Folwell and Randall. From a wooded hillside Mr. KRAMER created Menlo Park. He united Perkasie and Quakertown by trolley. He produced the Perkasie water works. He gave the “upper end” a model weekly newspaper. He was a charter member of many lodges, and belongs to the following: F. and A. M., K. of P., I. O. O. F., O. U. A. M. He brought to Perkasie its largest industries, persuading the proprietors to locate here, and financed the building of factories As a surveyor he laid out important and profitable annexes to the borough. He was a leading spirit in annexing Bridgetown to Perkasie, and in freeing the Bridgetown-Perkasie turnpike. He was successful in pleading for municipal ownership of the borough electric light plant. He was the pioneer along the North Penn for modern railroad stations, the first and finest of which is located at Perkasie. To a great extent Perkasie Bank is because of him. Verily a busy and honored career-a course uniformly run with integrity, and opportunity for his associates to go along with equal privileges. His political affiliations tend toward the Democracy of Jefferson, although his partisanship is not of the intense type. Man or measure appeals to him because of its worthiness-nothing else-although, all things being equal, he is a Democrat. He was one of the leaders of the PALMER and BUCKNER (Gold Democrats) campaign in 1900, and was a national delegate to the convention that year. By the loss of only one vote Mr. KRAMER failed to become the choice of his party for the assembly in 1890. The products of his pen are a source of great pleasure. He is versatile, facile, and Keen-convincing-and is equally at home with the weapons of sarcasm, ridicule, or the “statement direct”-the power of which has been felt in many a campaign, or other public question. And, remarkable as it may seen, he is equally forceful as a public speaker. Mr. KRAMER subscribes to the German Reformed faith, and has served the St. Stephen Sunday school as its superintendent, choir leader, and orchestra leader. Of late years, however, his religious tenets have undergone a liberalizing process, and his views upon the plan of salvation, and the mundane machinery connected therewith, are a fusion of most beliefs-a compromise for all. Socially, his home is headquarters, locally. His genial personality, through which magnetism runs as the band of red through the national colors, attracts all classes. His heart is large, and his purse open-although his charity is unostentatious. He does good by stealth and blushes to find it fame. Commercially, he is at present head of a corporation engaged in manufacturing and selling his patented attachments for platen printing presses-an ingenious mechanism which makes these presses print from a roll, in colors, perforating, numbering, collating and packing, or rewinding the same. He dissolved partnership with ex-Senator MOYER in the proprietorship of the Central News in 1903, they two disposing of the property to Charles M. MEREDITH.
Test taken from page 504-505 of: Davis, William W. H., A.M., History of Bucks County, Pennsylvania [New York-Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1905] Volume III Transcribed December 2004 by Joan Lollis of, IN. as part of the Bucks Co., Pa., Early Family Project, www.rootsweb.com/~pabucks/bucksindex.html Published January 2005 on the Bucks County, Pa., USGenWeb pages at www.rootsweb.com/~pabucks/
|
| ||||||||||||||||||
Page was last edited:
11/15/2008