Aiken, James

Born: 1799-06-24 Otsego County, New York

Died: 1879-12-30 Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

Flourished: 1820 to 1879 Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

James Aiken, teacher, poet, and orator, was born in Butternuts, New York, and was educated locally before boarding with a potter in his teens, with whom he apparently apprenticed. At about the age of eighteen he relocated to Pennsylvania, where he lived for most of the rest of his life. Aiken reportedly lived and taught first in Northumberland, then moved to Lewisburg, teaching there and in surrounding communities through the mid-1860s. He also worked as a tutor for local families. In 1857 Aiken was an organizer of a teachers’ institute in Lewisburg. He was an advocate of the temperance movement and frequent public speaker on behalf of the cause. Aiken helped to found a temperance society in Lewisburg in 1831 and acted as an agent in New Jersey for the state temperance society for eighteen months from 1837 to 1839. At the time of the 1850 census, he was living in a temperance hotel in Lewisburg. Politically, Aiken was first a Whig and later a Republican. His opposition to slavery led him to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and he supported the presidential candidacy of John C. Fremont in 1856, and of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Aiken confined his political activity to public speaking and writing verse and never held office, reportedly expressing disinterest when considered for the position of county school superintendent in 1854 and declining to serve as county auditor when elected in 1864. On the advent of the Civil War he was a supporter of union and recruited volunteers for the U.S. Army. Aiken never married.

Charles M. Snyder, Union County Pennsylvania: A Bicentennial History (Lewisburg, PA: Colonial Printing House, 1977), 214-23; Richard Sawyer Currier, comp., Genealogical History of the Dickey Family (Montpelier, VT: Capital City Press, 1935), 51; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Lewisburg, Union County, PA, 304; The Sentinel of Freedom (Newark, NJ), 8 August 1837, 1:6; Emporium & True American (Trenton, NJ), 1 February 1839, 1:6; Lewisburg Chronicle and West Branch General Advertiser (PA), 7 July 1848, 2:5; 22 September 1848, 2:3; Carlisle Herald (PA), 25 September 1850, 2:3; Lewistown Gazette (PA), 16 July 1852, 4:1; Lewisburg Chronicle (PA), 13 August 1851, 2:7; 24 February 1854, 2:1; 2 June 1854, 1:2; 9 June 1854, 1:2; 20 July 1855, 3:3; 13 June 1856, 1:1; 27 June 1856, 3:1; 28 November 1856, 2:1; 11 December 1857, 2:4; 1 January 1880, 3:3-4; 8 January 1880, 3:3-4; Bedford Inquirer (PA), 21 May 1858, 2:2; Union County Star and Lewisburg Chronicle (PA), 25 May 1860, 3:1; 1 November 1864, 1:1; The Millheim Journal (PA), 8 January 1880, 3:2; Gravestone, Lewisburg Cemetery, Lewisburg, PA.