GALUSHA AARON GROW
GROW, GALUSHA AARON, farmer boy, lumberman, land surveyor, lawyer, railroad president, orator, philanthropist, economist, Father of the Homestead Law, representative from Pennsylvania in the United States congress 1851-63, and 1894-1903, and speaker of the house, 1861-63, was born in Ashford, Windham county, Connecticut, August 31, 1823; the youngest son of Joseph and Elizabeth (Robbins) Grow and a lineal descendant of John Grow, the first of the name in America, who came from England to Ipswich, Province of Massachusetts Bay, in the seventeenth century. Joseph Grow was a farmer and died in Ashford, Connecticut, in 1826, leaving a widow and six children. The widow soon after the death of her husband made her home with her father. Captain Samuel Robbins, a Revolutionary officer, at Voluntown, Connecticut, until May, 1834, when she removed to a farm in Lenox township, Pennsylvania, which she had purchased and to which, after a few years, she gathered all her children. They made their home with her there until her death, in 1865. The first summer the stock on her farm consisted of a yoke of oxen and one cow. With the oxen Galusha and his brother plowed and planted several acres of corn and oats, Galusha driving the oxen and doing other light work. His education was limited to winters in the common schools of the district until he was fourteen. His mother established a store — the distance to the nearest one being eight miles. His brother Frederic engaged in mercantile business and lumbering. Galusha made his first trip on a raft down the Susquehanna river when he was fourteen years old, serving the crew as cook and occasionally taking a hand at an oar. He went as far as Port Deposit, head of Chesapeake Bay, in company with his brother Frederic. While there he was engaged by Phelps & Bailey, a large lumbering firm from Corning, New York, to go as supercargo, with a sailing vessel load of their lumber, with directions to find a market somewhere along the Chesapeake Bay, or failing in that, at Norfolk, or Richmond, Virginia, if necessary. He sold his cargo at Annapolis, and rejoined his brother at Baltimore. After rendering
