age to the island of Cuba as supercargo and part owner, landing at Santiago de Cuba. During the same year he made a like venture to the island of Porto Rico, which proved successful. In the spring of 1812 he made his third and last voyage, during which he nearly lost his life. This time he sailed to La Guayra, the sea port of Caraccas, the capital of Venezuela, South America. On the 15th of March he proceeded to the city of Caraccas, crossing the eastern extremity of the Andes, and arrived in time to see the memorable earthquake in that city. He was an eye-witness of all the horrors of that terrible scene. He saw the earth open and shut before him, walls of houses tumbling down, and thousands of people buried in the ruins. The violent concussion threw him on his knees, and the deplorable catastrophe so shook the country as to leave its sensible marks on the surface two hundred miles from the sea coast. On his return home, finding the country engaged in war, he volunteered in a company which marched to Port Deposit under General Cadwallader. He returned to Philadelphia the next year. In 1815 he again embarked in mercantile pursuits, in connection with the iron business, in New Jersey. In 1820 he returned to his native county, and commenced farming, surveying and conveyancing. He acted many years as Justice of the Peace, and was much engaged in settling up estates. In 1833 he removed to Pottstown. He was much interested in politics, and in 1846 was elected to the State Senate. He married in 1820, and had five children-three sons and two daughters. He took an active part in all local improvements and enterprises. He with others established the Pottstown Academy, which continued to be a successful educational institution for many years. He was an active friend of the adoption of the common school system when it was submitted to a vote of the people. He was connected with the Lutheran church from the age of 17 years until his death, which occurred August 19th, 1873. He died at the ripe old age of 85 years. His son, Mark H. Richards, Esq., of Pottstown, who is one of the most public spirited citizens of that borough, was some years ago elected a Justice of the Peace, and is a very active, capable business man, doing a general scrivening business. He is besides a very warm and active Republican, often taking a leading part in the conventions of that side. BERNARD MCCREDY. Though not at any time a resident of Montgomery county, Bernard McCredy deserves a place among our eminent men, because for a period of nearly thirty years he was the head of one of the largest cotton manufactories within our bounds. He was born of a reputable family in county Derry, Ireland, in 1775; studied six years in the University of Dublin, where he graduated in his twenty-first year, and very soon afterwards came to the United States to seek his fortune. He opened a private school in Philadelphia, where he taught three years. About 1824, in connection with Samuel R. Wood, he bought the site and valuable water power at the foot of Swede street, and immediately below the great dam that crosses the river at Norristown. Here they erected what was known as the first and largest structure of the kind built near the borough previous to 1840. The concern and its manufactures were booked in Philadelphia and New York as "The Wyoming Mills," but only known here as "McCredy's cotton factory." Bernard McCredy died at the age of 71. In person he was below the average height, stoutly built, comely in features, and with light hair and complexion. He lived and died in connection with the Catholic church. SAMUEL GARTLEY, M. D. Was born in the city of Philadelphia in the year 1779. He was the. son of John and Elizabeth Gartley, the former of whom was born in Ireland and the latter a daughter of John S. Hutten, of Philadelphia. John Gartley was a classical scholar, having been a graduate of theUniversity of Edinburgh. For many years he taught school in. Philadelphia, and during the Revolutionary war was in the Commissary department of the army. While residing there his son Samuel, the subject of this biography, was born, who in due time. studied medicine and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1801. Soon after receiving his diploma Dr. Samuel Gartley was appointed Surgeon on the ship Ganges, an East Indiaman,. which at that time, in consequence of the constant war in Europe,. shipped what was called "a fighting crew." Dr. Gartley returned. from China in 1803, and located in Norristown. In 1807 he married Sarah Potts, who was the daughter of Thomas and Abigail* Potts, he holding at that time the office of Register and Recorderat Norristown under the appointment of Governor McKean. Dr. Samuel and Sarah Gartley had one son, William H. Gartley, who still lives in Norristown, intermarried with Harriet, daughter of Valentine and Elizabeth Saylor, of Upper Providence. In 1809, two years after her marriage, Sarah Gartley, the wife of Dr. Gartley, died, leaving her son William an infant. Some time. afterwards Dr. Gartley married Catharine M. Potts, a sister of his. first wife, and he continued to reside here, having a widely extended practice for many miles around Norristown, till 1824, when he died, in his 45th year. The children of this second union were John H., living in Philadelphia; Elizabeth H., deceased at Pottstown in 1848; Thomas P., who died in Clearfield county in 1876;. and Samuel, who lives in Coventry, Chester county. Having had two years experience on shipboard and abroad, Dr.. Gartley was esteemed a very skillful physician, and was often called into consultation by other practitioners in Montgomery, Bucks and Chester counties. He was besides, during the war of 1812, appointed a local examiner of soldiers as to their fitness for service in the army. Dr. Samuel Gartley was a member of the Episcopal church, and is buried at Swedes' Ford Cemetery. His. second wife, Catharine M. Gartley, still remains his widow, and. The daughter of Colonel Samuel Miles, of the Continental army.. lives in Pottstown, a sprightly old woman of 92, having survived him fifty-four years. The son of Dr. Gartley, William H., and Harriet his wife, were married in 1830. Their children who survived infancy were Ferdinand Potts, intermarried with Mary Ann Wilson. He died in 1874 at 43, leaving four children, to wit: Samuel F., William H., Clara, married to Edward Moore, and Adeline Gartley. William H. and Harriet Gartley's second son was Samuel Gartley, who died in 1852, in his 20th year. Their third child is Sarah Ann, the wife of Martin Molony, of Norristown. The children of the latter, being of the fourth generation from Dr. Samuel Gartley, are Joshua, Adele M., Anna B., Martin, and Sarah Molony. HON. N. B. BOILEAU.* This is the state of man.: To-day he puts forth The third day comes a frost, a killing rost,! And, when he thinks, good, easy man, full surely His greatness is aripening, nips his root, And then he falls.-Shakspeare. And now, behold, my witness is in heaven and my record on high.—Job xvi, 19. Nathaniel Brittan Boileau, who was eight sessions a member of the lower house of Assembly, elected Speaker of that body, and thence made Secretary of the Commonwealth for three terms by Governor Snyder, was in many respects the greatest man Montgomery county ever produced. His equal and compeer at the time. was Hon. Jonathan Roberts, who, with him, were the ruling spirits of young Montgomery during the first twenty years of the present century. He was the son of Isaac and Rachel Brittan Boileau. The father of Isaac Boileau was a Frenchman, driven from France among othe Huguenots, and exiled on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which gave toleration to Protestants. Along with a shipload or other refugees he landed on Staten Island about 1675. After remaining there some time, during which Isaac Boileau was born, many of them, he of the number, emigrated to Bucks county and *For the particulars of the private and personal history of N. B. Boileau we are indebted to Mr. William Sprogel and Mrs. Hannah D. Yerkes, of Hatboro. to the neighborhood of Philadelphia. The father of Nathaniel B. came to Mooreland township and purchased a farm of eighty acres land now owned by Mr. Lewis R. Willard, about two miles northeast of the present borough of Hatboro. Here Nathaniel B. Boileau was born in 1763, and also two sisters. When Nathaniel B. was 33 years old, in 1796, his father sold to him his farm just referred to, and at the same time a tract of twenty acres in Bucks county, for £550, the deed for both being certified "before Robert Loller, one of the Judges of the Court of Common Pleas." This property, or the first part of it, he exchanged some time after for a farm of two hundred acres on the southern limit of the borough, land now owned by Judge W. H. Yerkes and the Bates family. Isaac Boileau was a well to-do farmer, and gave his only son the best education possible, sending him to Princeton College, where he graduated. His mother must have been advanced in life at his birth, for persons still living remember her residing at Hatboro as late as 1812, when she was well nigh a hundred years old. We do not know when Mr. Boileau graduated at college, but it must have been previous to 1788, when he was 25 years of age; for he had married Hester Leech in 1795, who bore him one son, Thomas Leech Boileau, she dying in her 30th year, in 1797. Of the events of his life from the time he graduated till he began to figure as a politician in 1797, we have no record beyond the fact that he was interested in Fitch's efforts to perfect his boat to run by steam. Mr. Boileau himself was an ingenious man, accustomed to the use of tools, though but a farmer, and constructed one of Fitch's model steamboats. During college vacations, as he related in after life, he made the paddle-wheels of said boat, and assisted the inventor in testing its capacity on some of the ponds near his father's residence. In this period of eight or ten years it is presumed he was dividing his time between farm labor and studies, preparatory to the active public life he afterwards led. He was undoubtedly conversant with all the writings of the political fathers of our young Republic, and it is safe to say that few men of his time more heartily drank in the spirit of Seventy-six than Nathaniel B. Boileau. Public documents and political papers from his pen, found in the newspaper files of the first quarter of the present century, abundantly show this. Some time after he made the exchange of properties he divided (in 1801) the large farm on the York road, and built a very fine mansion on one part of it for his own use, which at that time was |