Colonel Augustus W Shearer, (USA)

the Gus Shearer referred to in Jesse W. Bean's letter(s): Whistful thinking at Ring's branch

' I well recollect Mrs. Eunice Shearer. she was about two or (Jesse seems to be responding to something his brother Edwin had brought up in correspondence) three years older than me and we were school mates. Col Gus was a courting her when she went to school at the Old Norriton school house on the Ridge pike above Jeffersonville . There were a splendid lot of young woman there in them days : Eunice schrack, Mary and Margarett Stinson, Jane Getty, Maggy Hamill, Maggy Davis, Mira Heebner, Elizabeth Getty, the Crawford Girls and the Matheys (incl. Jesse's future wife Elizabeth and her younger sister Hannah Mathey) and the Rittenhouse Girls; two families of Shannon, John and Samuel's, and some five or six of old John Miller's at Jeffersonville. Edwin, you may have more in quantity there now but not of the get-up-and-git quality that girls had in them days. '

The author, Jesse W. Bean, died in 1905...not realizing that his nephew, Theo. Lane Bean would buy Eunice Shearer (Schrack's) childhood home... Norris Hall. Jesse couldn't. He had died before that happened.

The Norris Hall property is now a condominium housing development. (2016)

Col. Shearer at findagrave He was a Col. in the Penna. State Militia

Looking in: U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861-1865:

• Name: Augustus Shearer < this is probably a son of the subject of this profile
• Rank at enlistment: Private
• State Served: Regular Army
• Service Record: Enlisted in the Regular Army 16th Infantry Regiment.

A Biographical Sketch oF Augustus W. Sheerer is on pages 1007 & 1008 of Theo. Weber Bean's History of Montgomery County (1884)

• director of the Indian Creek School
• on e of six who founded the Montgomery County Agricultural Society.
• In 1846 commissioned Col. of the 63rd Regiment of the PA. Militia
• as a Democrat, supporter of the 1860 candidacy of Stephen Douglas but supported Lincoln policies in "the Rebellion"