Copyright USGenNet Inc., 2024 All Rights Reserved USGenNet Data Repository Please read USGenNet Copyright Statement on this page: Transcribed and submitted by Linda Talbott for the USGenNet Data Repository http://www.us-data.org/ =========================================================================== Formatted by USGenNet Data Repository Chief Archivist, Linda Talbott All of the above information must remain when copied or downloaded. =========================================================================== Detroit Free Press Thusday, 26 January 1860 DIED - In the city of Ypsilanti, on the 19th inst., at the resisdence of his son, JOHN GILBERT, JR., MAJOR JOHN GILBERT, in the 86th year of his age. The deceased was born in Lennox, Mass., on the 16th of March, 1774, and in 1792 he accompanied his father, Mr. JOB GILBERT, to western New York, for the purpose of surveying a part of what is known as the Phelps & Gorham tract, near the present city of Rochester, Monroe county, in which purchase his father was associated with GEN. HYDE and others, residents of Lennox. He afterwards returned to his native place, and, re- maining there until 1799, again returned to western New York and settled in Onondaga county, where, in company with his father, he built the Onondaga furnace, which was the first in western New York. In May, 1803, he was married to MISS SUSAN HASKINS, daughter of CAPT. WILLIAM HASKINS, one of the oldest residents of the county. During the following year he in connection with his brother, THOMAS J. GILBERT, were quite extensively engaged in the salt works at Salina, then in their infancy. In the war of 1812, he served under GEN. WILKINSON as Quartermaster, with the rank of Major, in the regiment of U. S. dragoons commanded by COL. TUCKER. In this connection we would state that MAJOR GILBERT'S father was one of the small band of Provincials which, under the command of WASHINGTON, covered Braddock in his defeat and led his broken columns to a place of safety. At the close of the war, he settled at Oswego, where he resided until 1818, when he took large contracts upon the Erie Canal near Syracuse, Rochester and Lock- port, and finally, after the completion of the canal, settled in Rochester, where he remained until 1830, when he removed with his family to Michigan, having in 1824 visited the West, at which time he accompanied the Commissioners in laying out the present Chicago road, and made large purchases of wild lands. For nearly a third of a century MAJOR GILBERT has resided in Ypsilanti, and had marked its growth from an inconsiderable hamlet to a place now numbering its population by thousands; while the Great West, of which it was then the almost utmost verge, by the, by the surging tide of population has stretched onward until staid only by the great western sea. Endowed with a form cast by nature in her manliest mould, and a power of endurance rarely absent from physical perfection; a mind rapid in its conceptions, and swift in its executions; a will indomitable, and an energy born of the will; he was eminently fitted for what he emphatically was - one of that hardy band of pioneers whose footsteps, treading out the imprint of the moccasin in our western wastes, led the way to a wider civilization, and the march of an extending empire. Warm in heart, genial in feeling, and open-handed in charity, to the frank, free bearing of the man untram- meled by the too often shallow conventionalities of an older society, MAJOR GILBERT joined the lofty courtesy bred of the military training of his earlier manhood; and his extended intercourse with his fellow citizens, won the meed which is instinctively bestowed upon the nobler attributes of our nature. As husband and father, in all the relations which cluster around the domestic circle, and render home, with its clinging affections, one of the most endearing of earthly joys, he could claim, and received, the earnest love and filial reverence which only belong to a heart keenly imbued with a sense of its household obligations, and in which the tide of affection runs alike deep and strong. The closing years of MAJOR GILBERT'S life were clouded by protracted illness, only alleviated by the constant and tender cares of his wife, who still survives him at the age of 76, and those of his children who still linger around the paternal home. As one of the links which bind us to the memories of the past; as a man of high and stern integrity in all the relations of busy life; as a patriarch of nearly four-score years and ten, widely and extensively known in Michigan and Western New York, MAJOR GILBERT will be long remembered by the older denizens as one who, full of years and of honor, has gone down to the grave, leaving to his children the heritage of a stainless name. ===========================================================================