He was born on the farm in Eagle Township July 24, 1857. He received his preparatory education in the common schools. This was supplemented by a course of three years at the Zionsville Academy and one term at Purdue University. Following this, he became a teacher in Boone County at age seventeen. He began teaching in 1874 at the district schools of Worth Township and then the graded school at Zionsville for a total of four years. He then had charge of the graded school of Reelsville, Putnam County, for one year.
In the spring of 1879, while on a visit to Purdue, he went before the Board of Examiners of candidates for admission to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York and was selected from the thirty-one applicants from the 9th Congressional District. He commenced studies at the academy in June, 1879, having been admitted to the class of 1883. Two years later, because of impaired vision, he was obliged to tender his resignation.
Returning to Boone County in 1881, he was appointed to the principalship of the Whitestown graded schools for one year. He then entered a joint principalship of the Zionsville school for one year. He then came to Lebanon in 1883, and for four years was principal of the high school. In 1887 he was elected county superintendent of schools, a position he held for four years. He achieved the reputation of being an excellent disciplinarian both as a teacher and as a superintendent being "strict, but impartial in his examination of teachers and reduced the number of licenses nearly one half" during his tenure.
On May 2,1891, he bought the Lebanon Patriot, the oldest newspaper in Boone County. It was Republican in politics and published weekly in competition with the Lebanon Pioneer, a weekly Democrat newspaper published by Ben McKee with whom he waged friendly editorial war. He sold the Patriot in 1913 after twenty two years but continued to do some news and editorial work on journals throughout the state.
In 1916 he was commissioned a member of the State Tax Board by Governor Samuel Ralston for a period of four years. During this time he rewrote the ammended tax law for Indiana, a product which was later declared a model plan for taxation.
In addition to his work as educator, publisher, and tax. authority, he:
While not a subscriber to some of the dogmatic theologies of the church, he was a firm believer in God and of the teachings of Jesus Christ. He frequently quoted as an expression of his religious belief:
His honors included appointment to the military staff of Governor W.T. Durbin in May 1901 as Aide-de-camp with rank of Major.
On June 17, 1883, at the time he became principal of Lebanon High School, he was united in matrimony with Adelaide Maleva Booher, daughter of Benjamin F. and Margaret (Beeler) Booher, at Whitestown. To this felicitous union three children were born:
In their later years they traveled extensively attending the 1900 Paris Exposition while touring Europe. They lived for five months in Hawaii from November 1920 through March 1921 traveling through the U.S. West on their return during April 1921. They also wintered in Daytona Beach and Ft. Myers Florida and summered in Bay View, Michigan where they were members of the Bay View Society.
S. N. died May, 1926, and is buried in the family lot at Oak Hill Cemetery Lebanon. Adelaide survived him by six years passing away on December 22, 1932, at the home of her sister, Miss Emma Booher, on West Washington Street, where she had been stricken three weeks before with paralysis while visiting and was unable to be moved to her own home. She was seventy five years old when she died.
The genealogy
of Benjamin F. Booher has been preserved by his family. His Great-great-grandfather,
John Bucher, is believed to have immigrated from the Rhineland Pfalz of
Germany. It is an area lying West of the Rhine River sometimes referred
to as the Rhineland Palatinate. They came as a result of an active program
of recruitment of successful German farmers to work the land. The movement
has been known as "Palatines to America." H.G. Wells in his Outline
of History reports that "---by the middle of the 18th. Century
there was a considerable immigration of a good class of German cultivators
into Pennsylvania." A family history compiled in 1930 and revised
in 1955 by Lora N. Booher of Darlington, Indiana reports: "A certain
native German named (John ?) Bucher migrated to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
in 1747." There he married a German lady and to their union was born
two children: Martin, for whom no certain record exists and John. After
the children had grown to manhood they moved south through the Valley of
Virginia, now tracked by Interstate Highway 81 to Wythe County, Virginia.
From there their large families scattered over an extensive territory,
and their name, Bucher, confusing to court authorities and recorders was
changed to Booher.
John Booher's children are known to have located in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Texas.
Jacob Booher, eldest of John Booher's ten children was born in Pennsylvania on March 3, 1777. By 1789 the family had relocated from Virginia to Tennessee. There the youngest of John's family, Elizabeth, was born in Sullivan County in 1797.
Jacob learned to be a blacksmith and married Catherine Barnett born February 3, 1779, daughter of Nicolas and Barbara Barnett, natives of Pennsylvania, who later moved to West Virginia. To them were born five children. Following Catherine's death, Jacob married her younger sister Elizabeth and to this union were born seven children including Benjamin F.
Jacob's sister, Elizabeth Booher Parrigan, has provided more family detail. Her record was obtained during an interview taken by her nephew, Benjamin F., (ninth son of Jacob and father of Adelaide) in 1901 at the home of her grandson in Albany, Clinton County, Kentucky, when she was 104 years old. It was reported by Benjamin F. to the family reunion in 1902 at Darlington, Indiana. She reported that:
In 1831, Jacob's third son, Gurdianus (Curtis), came with his family to Indiana settling on the John Coleman farm on present state road #47 near Darlington in Montgomery County, about one mile north of the Lutheran Church. Two years later Jacob's younger brother, John, settled in the same neighborhood.
Then on December 8, 1834, Jacob departed the Bristol area with his family, came overland to Indiana and settled on 160 acres of entered land in Montgomery County, Indiana, east of Darlington. To this he added, by purchase, 240 acres. The record shows that he and his wife were faithful members of the Lutheran Church and in politics he was a Jacksonian democrat. He lived to be sixty eight years old, dying July 29,1845, on his Montgomery County farm. He is buried in a cemetery on Montgomery County road 925 E about one mile south of SR 47 just north of the site of the St. James Lutheran Church.
His son Benjamin F. Booher was born on the family farm in Sullivan County, Tennessee, on September 5, 1821. He was educated in the common schools but left at age thirteen when the family came to Indiana where he was "invigorated both in body and mind through the severe discipline of farm labor." The record does not show when or why he left Montgomery County but does reveal that he was married on October 20, 1842, in Boone County to Margaret, daughter of William and Margaret (Hughes) Beeler.
Her
father, William Beeler was a descendant of Valentine Beeler who immigrated
to this country from Switzerland in the 1700's. His family came to Boone
County by way of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The Boone County History
reports that in 1832 a school house was built on the farm of William Beeler
at Eagle Township at about the same time a log school house was built in
the new town of Thorntown.Three years after their marriage, Benjamin bought 90 acres in the dense wilderness of Worth Township south of Whitestown. "He cleared it of its heavy timber and by hard work and thrift increased his possessions to one thousand seven hundred acres, almost all of which was in one body, and of this large property he gave to his twelve children, donating to each of them a comfortable size farm." It was said that as each of his children was born, he acquired another one eighth section of land (80 acres) which eventually became their patrimony.
Following the death of Margaret on June 2, 1888, he remarried choosing as his bride Mrs. Mary (Ross) Smith. He then moved to Lebanon to a substantial brick residence on East Main Street, which later became the site at the Darnell Apartments, across from the Central Christian Church. In 1909, he became the subject of an article appearing in the Indianapolis Sunday Star featuring "Indiana's Three Most Remarkable Men.'' At age 87 he was said to be the oldest man in Boone County. The article was accompanied by a photograph showing Benjamin F. 35 feet up in a pear tree which he had climbed on his Lebanon property. His favorite amusement was reported to be "breaking colts to drive and the more fractious the animal, the greater his delight."
He passed away one year later on December 28, 1910, and is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery, Lebanon, beside his first wife Margaret and surrounded by nine of his twelve children. Adelaide is buried beside her husband and their twin daughters in the Cragun lot and Minnie, his youngest, is buried beside her husband and three children in the Thomlinson lot. Daniel may be buried at Mulberry, Indiana where he ultimately retired.
Information concerning the children of Benjamin F. and Margaret Booher comes from various sources, primarily obituaries which had been placed in the S. N. Cragun family Bible.