Meharry, Thomas

Born: 1799-04-27 Ohio

Died: 1874-01-29 Montgomery County, Indiana

Flourished: Montgomery County, Indiana

Born in a log cabin in Adams County, Ohio, Thomas Meharry was a farmer, real estate investor, Methodist, Whig, and, later, a Republican. He was raised on the family farm in southern Ohio and had limited schooling. After his father’s death in 1813 he devoted himself to helping his mother keep the farm afloat. During the summers he and his brother James, sometimes traveling with other boys from their hometown, transported the family’s produce to New Orleans via flatboat to sell it for good prices. Thomas made his first real estate investment in Indiana in April 1827. In December of that year, he married Eunity Patton, with whom he eventually had at least seven children. In May 1828, they moved to Indiana, settling first in Fountain County, then in Montgomery County in the fall of 1829. He purchased more than 4,000 acres of land in Champaign, McLean, and Shelby counties in Illinois, in part as an investment but also as an inheritance for his sons. In 1850, he was farming in Montgomery County and owned $20,000 in real estate. He lived in Montgomery County through the Civil War and died there.

Ohio, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1774-1993, 4 December 1827, Brown County (Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2016); Alexander Meharry, III, History of the Meharry Family in America: Descendants of Alexander Meharry I (Lafayette, IN: Lafayette Printing, 1925), 59-64, 70, 73-74; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Montgomery County, IN, 468; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Montgomery County, IN, 10; U.S. Census Office, Ninth Census of the United States (1870), Montgomery County, IN, 18; Gravestone, Meharry Cemetery, Wingate, IN; The Weekly Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), 7 February 1913, 8:5.