Tremble, Hiram M. (Trimble)

Born: 1808-04-19 Ohio

Died: 1881-03-07 Missouri

Alternate name: Trimble

Born in Warren County, Ohio, Hiram M. Tremble was a farmer, carpenter, military officer and chaplain, Methodist minister, merchant, railroad and grain warehouse builder, inventor, Democrat turned Whig, and an abolitionist. While still a boy, he moved with his family to Wayne County, Indiana. At age eighteen, he married Polly Jackson, with whom he had four children. He relocated his family to Shelby County, Illinois, then later settled in Mattoon, Illinois. His wife died in 1832. That same year, he served in the Black Hawk War at the rank of second lieutenant. In March 1833, he married Sarah Sawyer. They eventually had eleven children together. He became one of Mattoon's first merchants, selling dry goods ranging from groceries and hardware to tools and clothing under the firm H. M. Tremble and Son. He also served as a local minister, and helped construct a grain warehouse as well as twenty miles of the Illinois Central Railroad near Mattoon and part of the Iowa and St. Louis Railroad from Mattoon to the Okaw River at Shelbyville. He never attained great prosperity, but owned $2,000 in real estate in 1850 and $800 in 1860. During the Civil War, he served as chaplain of the Sixty-Second Illinois Infantry Regiment from 1862 to 1865. He died while visiting one of his daughters near McDonald County, Missouri.

The History of Coles County, Illinois (Chicago: Wm. Le Baron, Jr., 1879), 327-28, 386, 668; Lavern M. Hamand, ed., “Coles County in the Civil War, 1861-1865,” Eastern Illinois University Bulletin (April 1961), 35; Isaac H. Elliott, Record of the Services of Illinois Soldiers in the Black Hawk War, 1831-32, and in the Mexican War, 1846-8 (Springfield, IL: H. W. Rokker, 1882), 110; Illinois Statewide Marriage Index, Coles County, 14 March 1833, Illinois State Archives, Springfield, IL; Sangamo Journal (Springfield, IL), 1 May 1840, 2:6; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Coles County, IL, 46; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Coles County, IL, 68; The Mattoon Gazette (IL), 25 March 1881, 1:4-5; Gravestone, Campground Cemetery, Coles County, IL.