Dr. Ebenezer S. Lane

Ebenezer Shaw Lane was born in August, 1819, the oldest child of Judge Ebenezer Lane and his wife Frances Griswold Lane. He graduated from Kenyon College, and studied medicine at the Ohio Medical School and also in Paris. Ebenezer S. Lane married Pallas Anderson, the daughter of Sandusky’s fist physician, Dr. George Anderson. During Sandusky’s cholera epidemic in 1849, Dr. Ebenezer S. Lane helped care for the sick, but he too became ill. Luckily, Dr. Lane survived his illness.

Dr. Lane and his family moved to Chicago. He eventually left the medical field and worked in real estate and finance, and had some interests in the railroad. Dr. Lane continued in his father’s hobby of collecting books and autographs. His collection totaled 9,000 volumes, and contained books about history, art, and literature. Eventually, Dr. Lane’s children, a son also named Ebenezer Lane, and a daughter, Fannie G. Lane, donated the Lane Collection to the University of Chicago. The collection now has been dispersed throughout the Special Collections of the University of Chicago Library. In 1983 Dorothy C. Drucker’s Masters’ Thesis was entitled: The Ebenezer S. Lane Library: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Reading Taste.

Dr. Ebenezer S. Lane died in Chicago on January 3, 1893. He is buried in Block 11 of Sandusky’s Oakland Cemetery. Dr. Lane’s tombstone lists his name as Dr. Eben S. Lane. He probably was known as Eben to avoid confusion with his father, Judge Ebenezer Lane.

Several members of the Lane family are buried in Block 11 of Oakland Cemetery. The Lane family made significant contributions to Sandusky in its early years. Helen Hansen wrote in her book At Home in Early Sandusky that Dr. Ebenezer Shaw Lane was “a true pioneer of this locality.”