MAJOR-GENERAL Q. A. GILLMORE. UINCY ADAMS GILLMORE, Major in the Corps of Engineers, Brevet Major-General in the regular army, Major-General of volunteers, and the great artillerist and engineer of the war, was born at Black River, Lorain County, Ohio, on the 28th of February, 1825. Q His parentage was of mingled Scotch-Irish and German extraction. His father, Quartus Gillmore, was born in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, in 1790, on the farm of two hundred acres which his father continued for many years to cultivate. This farm was finally exchanged with one of the Connecticut speculators in Western Reserve lands, for a tract of one thousand acres in Lorain County, and, at the age of twenty-one, Quartus Gillmore thus came to be one of the Reserve pioneers. He reached the township in which his father's tract of wild land lay, on the shore of Lake Erie, in 1811, and immediately began his "clearing." He remained on it during the war of 1812, though most of the other inhabitants fled to the interior, and, before Perry's victory, the danger to the residents along the coast from British cruisers was supposed to be imminent. In 1824 he was married to Mrs. Elizabeth Smith. This lady was a native of New Jersey, where she was born in 1797. Her father, Mr. Reide, was also a native of that State, but his parents came from Germany. In 1807 the family removed to Lorain County, and at the age of sixteen Elizabeth was married to Mr. Smith. He lived but four years after the marriage; and after seven years of widowhood she was married to Quartus Gillmore, he being at that time thirty-four years of age, and she twenty-six. Neither of them had any advantages of education, save such as could be obtained from the rude schools of the time and place. Both were hardy, vigorous pioneers, and the wife was accounted a beauty. Both have lived to see, in a hale old age, the fame and honors of their first-born. At the time of his birth the country was agitated with the prolonged excitement of the famous Presidential contest of 1824, between Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Crawford, and Henry Clay. Quartus Gillmore, true to his Massachusetts ancestry and teachings, belonged to the Adams party. His favorite was finally elected by the House of Representatives on the 9th of February, and the news of the election reached that remote portion of the frontier on the very day on which the son was born. In the fullness of his joy at the election and at the birth, the happy father declared that his boy should bear the name of a President, and forthwith named him Quincy Adams.* The lad grew up in the hearty life of the pioneers. Through the summers * These facts are derived from an unpubliched sketch of General Gillmore's youth, by L. A. Hine, Esq., of the Cincinnati Times. He gives a list of the other members of the family, as fol |