where he afterward made his home. Like his father, he was of the Latin type, dark complexion and of powerful physique, weighing two hundred and thirtyfive pounds when a young man. He was noted as a wrestler and all-round athlete. Fabulous stories are told in the family of his great feats of strength and wrestling bouts. His father lived to old age, and the mother to the age of one hundred and ten years, Perrin Cardwell himself being ninety-nine years of age at the time of his death. At the age of twenty he married a Miss Washam, a blond Saxon, aged nineteen, and they lived together for seventy-eight years. Thirteen children were born unto them, of whom nine reached middle life or old age.
Dr. Cardwell's grandmother on the maternal side was Polly Ann Capels, of Lynchburg, Virginia. The grandfather was Benjamin Biddle, the youngest son of a wealthy Welsh family, but primogeniture left him comparatively poor. Leaving home, he first went to Virginia about 1780. There he bought negroes which he took to the south, selling them to the sugar planters, and in 1830 he became a resident of Illinois. It was on Christmas day of 1829 that his daughter, Mary Ann Caples Biddle, who was then a resident of Tennessee^ became the wife of William Lee Cardwell, and in the spring of 1830 they removed to Springfield, Illinois, where on the nth of September of that year Dr. Cardwell was born, his mother being then in her eighteenth year, his father in his twentyfifth year.
William L. Cardwell had obtained a classical education, had taught school, had studied law for a short time and also was a licensed physician. He regarded farming, however, as the ideal life, and on coming to Illinois located and made his home on a sixteenth section—school land—in the vicinity of Springfield. Later he went security for a brother-in-law and in the financial panic of 1837 lost his property. He then removed to Carlinville, Illinois, and with another brother-inlaw turned his attention to building operations and furniture manufacture. He was a natural mechanic and readily took to the business, for he did not like the practice of medicine. In following that pursuit he was enabled to provide well for his family of five sons and three daughters. The three daughters died in infancy and he devoted his attention to the liberal education of his sons. Like his ancestors, he was a large, strong man, weighing about two hundred pounds, of dark complexion and of the French type. In July, 1862, he fell from a building and sustained injuries which caused his death.
Dr. Cardwell, who was the eldest of the family, spent his youth largely to the age of twelve years in caring for the babies of the household and assisting his mother in the house work. His parents instructed him in reading, writing and arithmetic, and his mother always told with some pride that he learned the alphabet in one afternoon when three years of age. As a boy his only amusement was in mechanics. In his father's shop he made kites, bows and arrows, cross bows, wagons, sled boxes, etc. He never played with other boys or has never had close association with men. He was always interested in music and fromthe age of fifteen years played the flute in band and concert work, and is well known throughout this section of the country as "the flutist." He was one of the organizers of the Philharmonic Club of Portland and during its existence, covering probably twenty years, played the flute and piccolo. He attributes the good habits formed in early life and to which he has since adhered to the fact that as a boy and young man he spent his leisure hours in music instead of going out with other boys. He attended a private school between the ages of twelve and fifteen years and was thus qualified to enter Professor Spaulding's preparatory school of Jacksonville, Illinois, and take the preparatory course qualifying him to enter Illinois College. He had had twelve lessons in the Spencerian system of penmanship, so that he was able to teach penmanship in the preparatory school. He also had a private evening class and thus more than made his expenses. During the vacation period he visited St. Louis and was employed by Dr. T. J. McNair, a druggist, acquiring some knowledge of the drug and pre-
