Biographical & Portrait Cyclopedia of Cambria County Pennsylvania, p.434

You are here: Cambria > Books > Biographical & Portrait Cyclopedia

434 BIOGRAPHICAL AND PORTRAIT CYCLOPEDIA

an office that attests the confidence and trust placed in him by his fellow-citizens, who estimate him by his good character as well as by his business success. He is a member of the Catholic church, and has always been active and useful in religious work.
    In 1882 Joseph Bengele was united in marriage to Mary A. Buck, a daughter of W. J. Buck, of Loretto. They have four children, one son and three daughters: William, Hilda, Edna and Marie.

HON. ABRAHAM A. BARKER, ex-congressman and a man of wide acquaintance and successful business experience, was born March 30, 1816, at Lovell, Oxford county, Maine. His ancestors were of puritan stock) and were among the early settlers on the rock-bound coast of New England. He is a son of Stephen and Betsy (Andrews) Barker.
    Stephen Barker was a sturdy New England farmer, and the boyhood days of young Abraham were such as are characteristic of the boyhood days of the typical New England farmer boy, and were such as to develop a hardy constitution--a physical element he has found of great value in life. The school advantages were very meagre, and he was able to gain only a knowledge of the elements; taking up life's battles on his own account, he became a tiller of the soil, to which later was added a lumbering business. These vocations he faithfully pursued in his native county until 1854. In November of the latter year he came to Pennsylvania, and located in Carrolltown, Cambria county, where he remained two years, when he removed to Ebensburg, where he has lived ever since. He still continued in the lumber industry, and in 1858 added to it a mercantile business, which avoca-
tions he followed extensively and successfully until 1880, since which time he has not been actively engaged in business pursuits, but has spent much time in reading and travel throughout the United States.
    Politically, Mr. Barker was an ardent abolitionist, and for almost a half century has wielded a powerful political influence in the community in which he lives. He was always opposed to the institution of slavery, believing it to be a moral and political wrong; hence, upon the disruption of old parties, upon that issue, and the organization of the Republican party, he became one of its first adherents. He was a delegate to the National convention that met in Chicago and nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency in 1860. He was an active Lincoln man, with whom he was on terms of the closest intimacy during the latter's incumbency. In 1864 Mr. Barker was the choice of the people of the then Seventeenth Congressional district, composed of the counties of Cambria, Huntingdon, Blair and Mifflin, for Congress. He was elected by a handsome majority, and served in the popular branch of the legislative department of our government in a way that reflected not only honor upon himself, but with credit to his district and State.
    Mr. Barker has always been of strict temperance principles, and was earnestly engaged with General Neal Dow in canvassing the State from 1840 to 1851 in the interests of the "Maine Law." In 1876, because of the repeal of the local option law, by him regarded as a great barrier to the cause of intemperance, he left the ranks of the Republican party, and became a radical prohibitionist. In fact, Mr. Barker has been a radical in the truest sense of the word in whatever he has undertaken in business, politics or religion. He

Last Updated: