Gardner Stow

Gardner Stow (born ca. 1790 in Orange, Franklin County, Massachusetts) was an American lawyer and politician.

Life

He was the son of Timothy Stow. The family removed first to Warrensburg,^[1] and in 1802 to Bolton, New York. In 1806, he went to Sandy Hill, New York to study law, and made the acquaintance of Esek Cowen who was a fellow student and became later a judge of the Fourth Circuit Court. When Cowen was admitted to the bar and commenced practice, Stow continued his studies in the office of Gansevoort and Cowen in Gansevoort's Mills, Saratoga County, New York, and was admitted to the bar in 1811. He commenced practice in Elizabethtown, New York, and in 1829, he was Postmaster there, and Essex County Treasurer.

In 1834, in an address delivered before a Temperance Society in Keeseville, he was "the first man to advocate legislation to prohibit all traffic in intoxicating liquor, as a beverage."^[2]

Later he lived at Keeseville, New York, and was District Attorney of Essex County from 1838 to 1844.

Later he moved to Troy, New York.

After the resignation of Levi S. Chatfield, Stow was appointed New York State Attorney General by Governor Horatio Seymour on December 8, 1853, to fill the vacancy until the end of the year.

His daughter Evelina Charlotte Stow (1812–1839) married Sewall Sylvester Cutting (1813–1882) in 1836, and their only son was Gardner Stow Cutting (1838–1883).

Notes

1. At the time the town was called Athol and lied in Washington County, New York. The part where the Stows lived was separated in 1813 as the Town of Warrensburg in Warren County, New York. The remaining Town of Athol is now named Thurman, New York in Washington County.
2. A History of Temperance in Saratoga County, N.Y. by William Hay (G. M. Davison, 1855, page 27)

Sources

• Political Graveyard
• Marriage notices from North Star, Danville, Vermont, at rootsweb
• Google Book The New York State Register for 1843 edited by O. L. Holley (page 373, J. Disturnell, Albany NY, 1843)
• Google Book The New York State Register for 1847 edited by Orville Luther Holley (page 83, J. Disturnell, New York NY, 1847)
• Google Book The New York Civil List compiled by Franklin Benjamin Hough (Weed, Parsons and Co., 1858)
• Obit of Sewall S. Cutting, in NYT on February 8, 1882 (giving wrong middle initial "H." for his older son)