How Dayton’s

      Norman Allen

         nearly became president

     Norman Milton Allen was born in what is now the Town of Dayton on Christmas Eve in 1828, the son of Luther and Huldah Benedict Allen. His mother died when he was just 9 years old, and his father when he was 17. He worked at various jobs, teaching school in the winter and working on a farm in the summer, while employing his leisure time studying numerous subjects. At 19 he married Huldah Merrill of Dayton. Their family included three sons and two daughters. At 30 he began studying law and was admitted to the bar in Albany. He mastered both French and Latin and taught school for a decade.

     Entering local politics at 21, he was elected Dayton town clerk in 1849 and later became town superintendent of schools. He was elected county superintendent of the poor in 1855 on the first Republican ticket ever nominated in Cattaraugus County. Two years later he resigned to become Dayton’s first commissioner of schools. In 1860 he was elected supervisor of the Town of Dayton. He held that office for 36 consecutive years, 29 of those as chairman of the Board of Supervisors of Cattaraugus County.

     In the fall of 1861, Allen was appointed United States mail agent for the Erie Railroad line between Dunkirk and Hornell. In 1863, he served a few months as paymaster of the Army during the Civil War, resigning to accept the position of chief clerk and deputy provost marshal in the 31st Congressional District. His duties included administering the military draft in this area. At the end of the war in April 1865 when President Lincoln’s remains were brought by train to Albany on the way to his burial site in Illinois, Allen served as one of Lincoln’s pallbearers in the state capital. He later wrote, “I am thankful to have lived when he did and shall cherish as long as I live the thought that I saw and knew the great Emancipator.”

     In the fall of 1863, Allen was elected to the New York State Senate to represent Chautauqua and Cattaraugus counties. He served one term, then was appointed state assessor in 1866, and served on the state constitutional convention in 1867. The next year, he was nominated to run for Congress, but declined. In 1871, he was elected for a second time to the State Senate.

     Allen was a delegate to the national Republican convention in 1880, a rancorous affair at Chicago’s Exhibition Hall that was torn by strife between supporters of former President Ulysses S. Grant, called “Stalwarts,” and backers of Senator James G. Blaine of Maine, called “Half-Breeds.” The New York State delegation was divided, with Allen favoring Blaine for the presidential nomination. Roscoe Conkling, a powerful United States Senator from Utica, supported Grant. After two days of voting and 36 ballots, James A. Garfield of Ohio emerged as the presidential nominee. This compromise angered Senator Conkling.

     To restore party unity, Blaine suggested they nominate Chester Alan Arthur of New York, a Grant supporter, for vice president. Conkling, not satisfied, chose Norman Allen for the position. The New York delegation held a ballot in conference to agree upon a candidate. In the choice between Arthur and Allen, a one-vote majority gave the nod to Arthur.

     In the general election, the ticket of Garfield and Arthur defeated the Democratic ticket headed by the greatly admired Civil War general, Winfield Scott Hancock. President Garfield was inaugurated in March of 1881. Four months later, on July 2, he and his two sons left the White House for a trip to his alma mater, Williams College in Massachusetts. In the Washington train station a lawyer and disappointed office seeker named Charles Guiteau approached Garfield from behind and fired two pistol shots. One bullet grazed his arm while the other lodged in his back. Taken to the White House to recover, he lay for two months while doctors repeatedly made futile attempts to remove the bullet. Finally, on Sept. 19, 1881, James A. Garfield died at Elberon, New Jersey where he had been taken in the hope that the fresh ocean air would aid in his recovery.

     By the law of succession, Chester Alan Arthur became our nation’s 21st president. Norman M. Allen no doubt had to reflect upon that single vote at the Republican convention a year earlier, the ballot that perhaps cost him the most powerful office in the land.

     That fall Allen was elected a third time to the State Senate, again serving a single term. In 1884 President Grover Cleveland appointed him prison labor commissioner. He continued his law practice in a partnership with his son-in-law, Winfield Scott Thrasher, which had begun in 1872. From 1886 to 1890, Thrasher’s son-in-law, James E. Bixby of Dayton, also joined his firm.

     The imposing brick Victorian mansion on Allen Street in Dayton, which he had built in 1876, became home to Allen and his wife. In later years, he also engaged in banking, in a building next door. A few doors up the street stands another large brick house, which was the Thrasher family homestead, where Norman Allen died on Nov. 15, 1909. So many people attended his funeral that special trains were run up from Salamanca to accommodate the crowd.

     He was laid to rest in the family plot at Cottage Cemetery. Mrs. Allen passed away four years later.

     For over half a century he was a notable figure in political circles, and was affectionately known as the “Sage of Dayton.” Old newspapers record that he was “a quiet man of great force of character, amiable, and a kindly autocrat over the political destinies of his county.”

     Today many descendants of Norman Allen still reside in this area.