A new article has been added at Newspaper Abstracts > United States > California > Los Angeles http://www.newspaperabstracts.com/index.php?action=displaycat&catid=573 Direct link to article: http://www.newspaperabstracts.com/link.php?id=37331 Submitted by: Eileen Gillette Article Title: Reno Gazette Article Date: November 4 1924 Article Description: And He Was Part Of It All (Cornelius Cole) Article Text: The first railroad in the United States was not completed until five years after the birth of Cornelius COLE, who died yesterday in Los Angeles, and then it was a little three mile one out of Quincy, Massachusetts. That was in 1827. He was sixteen years old when the first steamship crossed the Atlantic and twenty-one when the first telegraph line in the world was placed in operation between Washington and Baltimore. When his end came yesterday at the age of one hundred and two years and two months, horseless carriages, undreamed of at his birth, took the physicians to his door, the news of his death was sent over miles of wire by the telephone, which even in his college days would have thought a piece of wiziardry, and it went over tens of thousand telegraph lines to great cities built up in what were vast wildernesses when he was already a member of congress. It was cabeled to Europe through strands of wire, the first of which was not laid until he was a man of public aff! airs. London, the first city to be lighted by gas, had installed the system only nine years before he was born and it came very slowly into use in the United States, so that Cornelius COLE probably grew to manhood before he ever saw a house lighted by gas, and he was fifty-seven years old before EDISON invented the incandescent electric light with a curiosity, yet he lived to see it in universal use. He was a leader in California public life and soon to be elected to congress at the age of thirty-seven, when Col. DRAKE struck oil at Titusville, Pennsylvania, and he lived to see the vast developement of the oil resources, not only in the United States but of the whole world. All this time he was not vegetating, by any means for he lead an active life. He went to college, became a lawyer, crossed the plains in 1849 and was District Attorney of Sacramento, California in 1854. He was elected a delegate from the Republican party at its first convention in California in 1856, to the National convention that nominated FREMONT for President and was first Republican national committeeman from the state. He served in the National House of representatives during the Civil War, was a personal friend of Abraham LINCOLN, and served in the Senate of the United States from 1866 to 1873, during all the troubled times when Andrew JOHNSON was impeached and when reconstruction in the South kept the nation in an uproar. Then he returned to California and took up the practice of the las in earnest, apparently pre pared to live the rest of his life in San Francisco. Most men at the age of sixty-four would think it was time to settle their affairs, but Cornelius COLE packed up bag and baggage and joined in the first boom of Los Angeles. That was in 1886 when Los Angeles had probably thirty thousand population. He bought land, and if he died with a great fortune, he made it all by his fortunate investments at that time. He grew up from his renewed youth at sixty-four to be one hundred and two years old in a city that gained 700,000 inhabitants while he looked on. A wonderful life. And the secret to it all? He never grew rusty. He kept himself bright to the last. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ CA-Old-News ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ NewspaperAbstracts.com - Finding our ancestors in the news! TM http://www.NewspaperAbstracts.com