the thirty-fifth Congress, December, 1857, Mr. Grow was made the candidate of the Republican party for speaker; but as the party was in a hopeless minority, James Lawrence Orr of South Carolina was elected.
On the outbreak of the Civil war, Mr. Grow joined General Cassius M. Clay's brigade in Washington for the protection of the national capital, and he served until the brigade was disbanded. When drafted in 1863 he secured a substitute, although the board of examination had declared him physically exempt from military service. He was one of the victims of the National Hotel poisoning in 1857, and on retiring from congress, March 4, 1863, was in feeble health from this cause and from the nervous strain incident to his twelve years' service in congress during the exciting and eventful years preceding the Civil war. He engaged in lumbering at Newton, Luzerne county, 1864-65; was in business in the oil regions of Venango county, 1866-67, and traveled on the Pacific Coast during the summer of 1871, going as far north as Victoria in British Columbia. Mr. Grow served as a delegate from Pennsylvania to the Republican national conventions of 1864, 1884 and 1892, and as chairman of the Republican state central committee of Pennsylvania, 1868. He removed to Houston, Texas, in 1871, having been elected president of the Houston and Great Northern Railroad Company of Texas; and during his four years' residence in that state he superintended the building of five hundred miles of railroad. On his return to Pennsylvania in 1875 he was active in the campaign for John Frederic Hartranft for governor, and in 1876 he entered the presidential canvass for Hayes and Wheeler. He was a prominent candidate for the Republican nomination for governor in 1878, being the choice of the delegates from a majority of the Republican counties of the state. Upon the nomination of Henry Martyn Hoyt he refused to accept the second place on the state ticket, but opened the canvass for Governor Hoyt on August 10, 1878, at Oil City, where his subject was "Money and Its Uses," in which he announced the keynote of the campaign to be the financial question, and on this issue the election of Governor Hoyt was secured. In the presidential campaign of 1880 he spoke from August to November, in Maine, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, for Garfield and Arthur; and the same year President Hayes offered him the appointment of United States Minister to Russia, as successor to E. W. Stroughton, which he declined. At a special
