Winfield Scott Thrasher (1847-1911)

     One of the prominent men of the legal profession in Cattaraugus County was Winfield Scott Thrasher of Dayton, shown here with his wife and some of their family around 1901. He was born May 8, 1847 in Cornish, New Hampshire and came to Dayton in 1868, where he studied law in the office of the Hon. Norman M. Allen. In 1869 he married Mary A. F. Allen, daughter of his law partner, and the couple had 10 children. Admitted to the bar in 1872, he began the practice of law in Dayton under the name of Allen & Thrasher. His son-in-law, James E. Bixby, joined the firm from 1886 to 1890, when Thrasher went into practice with Irving R. Leonard in Gowanda, an association that lasted the rest of his life.

     In 1899, Thrasher was appointed Cattaraugus County Judge by Governor Theodore Roosevelt to fill a vacancy and was elected to two six-year terms in 1900 and 1906. He served in this capacity until his death in Dayton on Feb. 1, 1911. Upon his death he received many tributes, including this from an editorial in the Salamanca Republican Press that gave a keen insight into his legal mind and character: “Judge Thrasher had won a reputation as a jurist who consistently upheld the dignity and the majesty of the law, and yet who was ever ready to temper justice with mercy if the ends of justice would permit. He always strove to find a way to give prisoners another chance, and to impose such sentence as would be deterrent rather than punitive. It was only in the case of the repeated and flagrant offenses that he appeared as the stern and severe judge, meting out justice of a nature calculated to carry conviction that the law was not a thing to be flouted.”

     His son, Louis L. Thrasher, became a prominent lawyer in Jamestown and served as assistant district attorney for Chautauqua County.

     This photo was taken on the porch of the Thrasher family home on Allen Street in Dayton. Mrs. Thrasher died in 1914 and was laid to rest beside her husband in the Cottage Cemetery. Today many of their descendents still reside in Western New York.

     Photo printed from a glass negative in the W. S. Thrasher Collection, courtesy of the Dayton Historical Society.     (Researched and written by Gowanda Historian Phil Palen.)