The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-01-14
LEADER OF MODERN INDUSTRY
BY ARTHUR GOODRICH.
By ARTHUR GOODRICH in Worlds Work.

BY ARTHUR GOODRICH.
 He was just an ordinary fifteen year-old boy of the Hanging Rock Iron district. Until he was ten he had gone to school the usual three months in a year, but by that time he was big and ward the big family's little income. His father did managers work In the iron works for sl.25 day. and the boy was the twelfth of fourteen children. So he graduated from school into the iron works at ten. But the boy was looked up to and liked by everyone respected because he had thrown every wrestler of that and adjoining counties and could lift six hundred pounds at test. and liked because he was always an good humor. energetic and well hammered. He had worked about the furnaces for two years, and at twelve was running an engine. Then he had tried charcoal aking and had cut cord-wood day after day for small compensation. And it was this work with pick and shovel and wood-axe that had made him the healthy. broad shouldered. -musclec boy that he was. He was a child sr the great out doors A-
 Already political talk was in the air talk which ended sn Lincoln's cleo tion and the Civil War. The family was of Scotch stock and had settled
 
 McMillin had become thorough South erner in his sympathfes. It was sad day. therefore. in the little Ohio cabin, when the boy announced that he was a Republican-a black Republican, as they called 1t then. Why he. next to the youngest boy of tine family. alone had read some the Lincoln Douglass debates and had caught a glimpse of the other side of the question. is hard to say. He has been doing that sort of thing all his life. The other children were cautioned to say nothing of 1t outside of the house. It was consider ed family disgrace. But as time went on and rumors grew into events, there was a change The rather did not be- 1ieve in civil war. and the side which began the conflict lost his allegiance. The day after the firing on Sumter there was no more enthusiastic union man in Ohio. He did duty in border service company while four of the boys enlisted immediately and two more lat CT. The boy himself was rejected as too young when the first company he joined was mustered in. He was but barely seventeen. But he was not to be denied Like many another he aged a year in a day and enlisted in the 18th Ohio. At the end of three months the regiment was reorEanized as Virginia cavalry-the Ohio Guosa being full and became later the 2d West Virginia. The family of fighters became known as the lighting McMillins; three were killed or died from wounds; the boy himself was wounded five times and served in thirty eight battles. Only few weeks after his enlistment he was nearly run over by a train near Clarks- l burg while on guard at a bridge. Once after a skirnish in Sinking Creek Val l ley, in which he was wounded. he was | overcome with weakness and fatigue and cold on the ride back over Bald | Mountain. delayed officer, attracted by the whinny of the boys horse. found him beside log where he had dropped, 1 and brought him out of certain death. l Toward the end of the war, when one 1 day, he was, as lieutenant, officer of | the day. he stopped a mutinous mob | of several thousand with twelve picked | men.
 When the regiment reorganized as | cavalry he was offered commission. | He did not hesitate a moment to say: |
 NO. There are older and better | men,
 Later he refused lieutenants com mission in Negro regiment. Again he was made a lieutenant, but a new colonel side-tracked the commission, ana finally in the last year of the war he became a commissioned officer
 One winter in camp in the Kanawha Vallyey the boy got possession of book called Language Taught Wltn- out a Teacher" The men about him, playing cards by the campfire, jeered at him as he ground out the elements of French, but that didn't bother the boy. He acquired some French books and found a Frenchman in the camp who helped him on pronunciation. The next Spring his company was caught in rebel territory. There seemed no way out of the encircling enemy, when young girl in the hearing of rebel sympathizers told the boy in Preach of A bridge which would be destroyed in few minutes and which was the last avenue of escape. The company mov- ed instantly, first as if directly into the rebel ambush. then, as soon as they were out of sight, at a run toward the bridge. Five minutes after they had crossed the bridge into safety 1t was blown up. It was the same boy who read the Lincoln Douglass debates at home and the French primer by the campfire.
 After the grand review at Washing ton. where the division to which he be- ionRed held the place of honor the boy went back to Ohio. He had some mon ey. saved from pay and bounties. He tried country storekeeping and failed. He tried to sell goods-carried a bag