1825 - 1871

Some of our ancestors are so elusive, so hard to pin down. AC Daniels is one of those. Partly it’s a function of his very brief appearance on the family stage. He married Hollister’s grandmother, Hannah Pendleton, in 1855, fathered a son, Samuel Thurston Daniels, and was gone from Hannah’s life by 1857 or so.

The only public record we have linking Hannah and AC Daniels is their marriage license in the Oregon State Archives and the announcement in The Oregon Argus, a newspaper based on Oregon City, in the Oregon Territory. (The Rev. G. H. Atkinson was one of Oregon's early, well-known settlers.)

But we can piece together a fuller picture of his life based on scraps of public records. The first mention of AC Daniels is in the 1850 Census. He was living in Iowa with his wife and six-month old daughter. He was a teacher, born in Pennsylvania.

By 1851, though, he and his family joined in the great overland migration to Oregon. According to an obituary in the Corvallis Gazette-Times, AC Daniels’s daughter, Margaret, was born “while her parents were en route to Oregon by ox team” and that “her mother died a short time later.”

So, AC Daniels arrived in Oregon Territory a widower with at least one small child. His brief marriage to Hannah Pendleton produced Samuel, but there’s no evidence (census records) that Samuel lived anywhere but with Hannah.

AC Daniels was politically active. He ran for School Superintendent in 1862. (Margaret’s obituary says that “her father was state superintendent of public instruction in the early days.) *

He attended the Democratic state convention held at Eugene City, Oregon, in January 1862. He was one of the fundraisers for the California and Columbia River Railroad organized at Jacksonville in 1863.

And he remained a teacher, hired by the Salem School District to teach at the Central School in 1861. One of his students, T. T. Geer, went on to become Governor of Oregon and remembered his teacher as “an old fashioned pedagogue, whose chief characteristics, as I now remember him, were his uniform kindness, and uniform laziness, as manifested by the constancy with which he remained in the large swivel chair he occupied. He was also noted for his excellent penmanship.”

AC Daniels married at least once more. The 1870 census lists his profession as Gardener, and he was living in Marion County (near Salem) with his wife Olive. There were seven children in the household, but most were likely his wife’s children. His daughter Margaret's obituary said that "the Oregon state fair grounds are located on land which was formerly a part of her father's farm."

Surprisingly, AC, so well prepared in his professional life, died intestate. Probate records show that his wife, Olive F. Daniels, acted as representative of his estate and that his heirs were Maggie M. Taylor (she was born on the trip west), six-year-old Alva R. Daniels, Minnie Daniels (4 years old), and Clyde Daniels (21 months old).

AC Daniels is buried in the Salem Pioneer Cemetery, though he has no marker for his gravesite. He lies very near some of Oregon’s well-known pioneer families. And his unmarked grave is very close to the ostentatious marker for Samuel Royal Thurston. Most likely, that would make him very happy.

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*Thanks again to Joy Wulff for the information on Margaret Daniels Taylor and for the photo of AC Daniels.