Mount Union borough

One of Mount Union's Boys, a Kansas Judge

John Calvin Postlethwaite was born near Newton Hamilton, in Mifflin County, on August 22, 1848, the son of James Andrew Jackson Postlethwaite and Elizabeth Jane Gayton. The family moved to Mount Union in 1855, and he grew up there and went to its public schools. He was twelve when he began work as a water boy and timekeeper for the Pennsylvania Canal Company. He went on to the company's machine shops as an apprentice, and when the shops closed during the Battle of Gettysburg he found work in a general store.

He reached Manhattan, Kansas, in 1869 and kept books in the bank of W. P. Higinbotham, which the 1909 history of Mount Union calls the Blue Valley Bank. In 1870 he took a homestead in Jewell County, and in 1872 he settled on it. A county history printed in 1878 says the first public prayer ever made in Jewell County was his, at Fort Jewell on July 4, 1870, at the county's first celebration of the nation's birthday. He was admitted to the bar in 1873. The same 1878 history says Calvin Township, organized on December 7, 1875, was named in his honor and that he was mainly instrumental in organizing it.

A bank was organized at Jewell City in 1880. The 1883 History of the State of Kansas calls it the Jewell City Bank and says he became its cashier and one of its owners, while the 1909 history calls it the Jewell County Bank and says he organized it. Both the 1909 history and an 1899 biography have him selling out in 1884. A plaque placed at Jewell in 1993 calls it Jewell County's first bank, but the 1883 history records a private bank at Mankato that was organized in October 1877.

In 1899 Governor Stanley appointed him one of the three judges of the Kansas Court of Visitation, which was to take the place of the Board of Railroad Commissioners. On November 27, 1899, in granting Western Union a temporary injunction, a federal judge held that the court “cannot lawfully exercise judicial functions.” The state then asked the Kansas Supreme Court to make the judges act on a complaint over cattle rates, which Postlethwaite and his colleagues had refused to take up. On May 5, 1900, the justices turned the request down, agreed with the judges' refusal and held the law creating the court unconstitutional and void.

He was the first Master of the Jewell City Lodge, organized in 1873, and the list of grand masters of the Grand Lodge of Kansas gives his name for 1890. The 1909 history says he was an elder of a Presbyterian church at Jewell City, joined the Methodists there after it disbanded, and served 21 years as Sunday school superintendent. It also names him a trustee of Baker University and of Kansas Wesleyan University, president of the First National Bank of Formoso, vice president of the First National Bank of Jewell City and a director of the First National Bank of Beloit. The sketch calls him “one of Mount Union's boys, who has made good.” His Find a Grave memorial gives his death at Jewell on November 26, 1910, and burial in Wallace Cemetery there.

Checked against the record. We read the 1909 history of Mount Union and the 1878 history of Jewell County on their scanned pages. The 1899 Kansas Blue Book, the 1883 History of the State of Kansas, the 1912 list of grand masters and the two court decisions were read as transcribed text, and the plaque as transcribed on the Historical Marker Database, not in person. The age of twelve comes from the scan of the 1909 history, which prints 12. The sources differ in places, and the story says whose account is whose on the bank. The 1899 biography puts him in the machine shops at fifteen, while the 1909 history says fourteen. Still open: we found no death notice or obituary, so his death date and burial rest on the memorial alone. A Jewell County bank register would settle which bank came first.

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