Harding, Jacob

Born: 1802-XX-XX Virginia

Died: 1883-03-XX Paris, Illinois

Born in Shenandoah County, Virginia, Jacob Harding moved to Paris, Illinois, in 1836 after residing in both Knoxville, Tennessee, and Corydon, Indiana. Harding founded the Prairie Beacon, a Whig and then Republican newspaper, in Paris in 1848 and also served as its editor. He later edited the Shawneetown Herald for several years. Harding married Love Nelson on June 27, 1827, and, by 1850, the couple had ten children. In 1860, Harding was employed as a printer and owned $5,300 in real property, with a personal estate of $2,830. In his obituary, the Mattoon Gazette called Harding, "one of the ablest newspaper men in the state."

Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 188; Guy C. Fraker, Lincoln's Ladder to the Presidency: The Eighth Judicial Circuit (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 119-20; Tennessee, U.S. Marriages Records, 1780-2002, 27 June 1827, Knox County (Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2008); U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Edgar County, IL, 203; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Paris, Edgar County, IL, 11; Mount Carmel Register (IL), 29 March 1883, 1:3; Mattoon Gazette (IL), 20 April 1883, 4:2; Gravestone, Edgar Cemetery, Paris, Edgar County, IL.