Alonzo W. and Jane Hendry

 

According to the book History of Erie County, Ohio, edited by Lewis Cass Aldrich (Mason & Co., 1889), Alonzo W. Hendry was born in Erie County, New York. He moved to Lorain County, Ohio in 1834, and he was admitted to the bar in 1842. Mr. Hendry moved to Sandusky in 1843. He married Jane Penfield in Lorain County on August 4, 1848. Jane Penfield had been born in Penfield Township of Lorain County. The township was named for her father’s family, who had been early settlers there. She was a graduate of the Ladies Course of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute in 1847. 

Alonzo Hendry was vehemently opposed to slavery. In an article in the abolitionist newspaper, the Michigan Liberty Press, on April 21, 1848, Alonzo W. Hendry was on a committee that prepared several proclamations relating to keeping “free soil.”  The second resolution read in part:

“As free sons of a free soil and a free Government, we make the cause our own, and in the majesty and strength of justice, of truth, and right, proclaim to the world our unalterable opposition to extending the blighting curse of slavery over one foot of soil now free.”

In 1878, Mr. Hendry published an article in the Firelands Pioneer about the settlement of "Africa," on the edge of Sandusky, where free African Americans resided in the 1830s and 1840s (before the advent of the Fugitive Slave Act). 

A.W. Hendry’s name appeared in the listings of attorneys in Sandusky in the Daily Sanduskian of October 27, 1849. His office was in the upper level of the West block in downtown Sandusky.

The first child born to Mr. and Mrs. Hendry was a daughter, Maria, who was born on July 11, 1849, while Sandusky was in the midst of a deadly cholera epidemic. They had a total of seven children, including a set of twins. 

Alonzo’s recollections of Sandusky during the cholera epidemic of 1849 appeared in Hewson Peeke’s History of Erie County, Ohio (Lewis, 1916), in the chapter, “The Three Cholera Years.”  His description of Sandusky at that time read:

 "The railroad connection between Sandusky and Cincinnati had just been completed and the large amount of travel and traffic over its line was unprecedented in the West.  Large shops, docks and warehouses at Sandusky became a necessity, laborers with their families were crowded into small buildings with insufficient accommodations and it often happened that several families would occupy a small building hardly sufficient in size for one.  Temporary cabins and boarding houses were hastily erected and soon crowded to overflowing.  When the visitation of cholera came the city was wholly unprepared.  There were no hospital accommodations and the force of local physicians was wholly insufficient for the emergency.  Hospitals had to be improvised and physicians like the good Samaritan of old came in from the neighboring cities.  The first death from the cholera was Mrs. Allen, July second.  Three prominent ministers of the gospel passed away - Rev. N. W. Fisher, pastor of the Congregational Church; Rev. H. P. Ward, of the Methodist Church and Rev. T. C. Cooper in charge of the Bethel Church.  They are buried side by side in Oakland Cemetery near the city.  A single marble shaft bearing the names of each was erected by kind friends as a monument to mark their last resting place.  The cholera again visited Sandusky in 1852 and 1854 but in a mild form compared with 1849."

From 1848 to 1852, Mr. Hendry served as the Erie County Prosecuting Attorney. He served as Erie County Probate Judge from 1863 to 1869. After the death of his wife in 1881, he moved to Shawnee, Oklahoma. 

Alonzo W. Hendry died in Oklahoma on April 15, 1901. His remains were returned to Sandusky, for burial in Sandusky’s Oakland Cemetery. An obituary for Mr. Hendry, which appeared in the April 19, 1901 issue of the Sandusky Star reported that he had been a “prominent and highly respected resident of Sandusky.”  To read more about former Judge Hendry and many other of Erie County’s elected officials, see the book, Elected to Serve, by Patty Pascoe.