Over the course of generations, there have been many families whose names are synonymous with Hamilton — be they Becketts, Benninghofens, Rentschlers, Millikins, or Fittons — honored in history and on buildings and street signs, and whose ancestors continue to help make our city a great hometown.
Though their dynasty was but a brief three generations, Samuel Zearly Gard was the patriarch of one of those powerful pioneer families. A little more than a century ago, Samuel and his sons Homer and Warren were a power trio in local law, politics, and journalism.
Samuel Zearly Gard was the son of Butler County pioneers, born 1833 near Darrtown. He went off to Antioch College in Yellow Springs and studied under the famed congressman and educational reformer Horace Mann, who coined what became the college’s motto:
“Be Ashamed to Die Until You Have Won Some Victory for Humanity.” This, indeed, seems to be an apt epigram for the Gard family.
Samuel Gard returned from Antioch an educator himself in the local schools while he studied law under Judge Alexander F. Hume, passing the bar in 1859 and taking up a successful practice. That same year, he also launched a side career in journalism, helping to establish Hamilton’s first German paper, Schwildewache.
Back in those days, when newspapers were largely operated by special interest groups, usually political parties, and at the beginning of the Civil War, partisan tension was as palpable as it has ever been. In 1861, Hamilton’s Democratic Telegraph was purchased by and absorbed into the Republican Intelligencer, leaving the Butler County Democratic Party without a newspaper. The situation “became acute,” according to a later report, when at their August 1861 convention, the Butler County Democrats adopted resolutions denouncing President Lincoln and the Civil War, the editors of the Telegraph refused to print them.
Thus Samuel Gard, a devoted Democrat, organized a consortium of four other prominent men who chipped in $200 each to purchase a printing press from the recently defunct Oxford Union. Gard and another of the consortium took a two-horse wagon to Oxford to pick up their machine, and a large crowd of Democrats lined the street to welcome them on their return.
The Democratic party established the True Telegraph the following month, balance was restored, and at the following election, Samuel Gard won the seat of Butler County prosecutor, which he held for two elected and one interim term (when he prosecuted the infamous McGehean trials). In his book “Biographical and Historical Sketches,” Stephen D. Cone described Samuel Gard as “a man of unimpeachable honesty and integrity of character, of a keen, clear and very decisive mind, uncompromising in his dislikes and a firm and ever faithful friend.” Cone said that Gard was several times nominated to be mayor of Hamilton, but always declined to run.
His professional career on solid footing in two careers, Samuel Gard turned at least some of his attention to domestic life. He and his wife, the former Miss Mary “Mollie” Duke, had two children. Homer was born January 9, 1866, and Warren, July 2, 1873. Both were bright, capable young men and determinedly followed in their father’s various footsteps. That is, Homer became a journalist, Warren a lawyer and a politician.
After graduating from Hamilton High School in 1884, Homer entered Amherst College, ending his studies after three years to return home because of the illness of his father, who suffered from asthma. Samuel wanted his oldest son to go into law, but young Homer felt the call to journalism, and took his first job with the Daily News, Hamilton’s Republican paper, as its society reporter, a first step in a career that lasted 65 years. He was fired from this job in 1890 after getting stuck in the middle of a dispute between his editor and William Beckett, owner of the paper mill.
The following day, he took a job with the competition, the Daily Democrat.
His career took its first great leap forward as a result of a workplace tragedy, when editor John K. Aydelotte got his coat caught in the wheels of the printing press and was killed, February 1891. Homer Gard was chosen editor “on trial.” The trial apparently lasted until the newspaper encountered some financial trouble and sold to an investment group that fired Homer and replaced him with a school teacher, Lee Rose. Homer promptly bought controlling interest in the Canton (Ohio) News-Democrat and moved there for 18 months.
His first act as editor and publisher in Canton was to change the name of the newspaper to the Daily News, causing much consternation among the Democrats there. He continued to rile them by taking un-Democratic stances on certain issues. The final straw came when Gard endorsed a prominent hometown Republican, William McKinley, in the 1896 presidential election. The local Democrats withdrew their advertising, and so Homer Gard sold his interest at a loss when the offer came from Hamilton to return and become editor of the Republican Daily News.
The following year, the Daily Democrat once again changed ownership and Homer took over as president and general manager, and purchased one share of stock. By September 1897, with limited capital but the support of the Second National Bank, he had purchased all the stock in the Daily Democrat and installed his aging father on the board of directors. Samuel Gard, suffering from severe asthma, died in 1906. The Daily Democrat changed to the Evening Journal in 1908, and in 1933 absorbed the competing Republican Daily News to become the Journal-News, making Hamilton a one-newspaper town for the first time since the 1820s.
Though Homer Gard’s prominence as a newspaperman would be his defining role both locally and nationally (he was a charter member of the Associated Press and instrumental in founding several other press associations), he was busy in the community and somewhat active in politics. He served one term as clerk of the City Council (1903-1905), and in December 1913 was nominated by President Woodrow Wilson to be Postmaster of Hamilton, a role he held for over eight years.
His contributions to the social and cultural life, however, are beyond measure. His dearest involvement was with the YMCA, beginning shortly after the turn of his century when he began serving on committees. In 1923, he was elected to the board and in 1929 to the presidency, an office he held until his death. It was to the YMCA that he and his wife Lutie left the enduring legacy of Camp Campbell Gard north of the city along the Great Miami River in honor of their only son, a World War I veteran who died in 1921 while just beginning his career at his father’s newspaper.
Homer also helped found the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce in 1910, served many years as president of that board and in 1930 became a director of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States. He was a devoted member of the Rotary Club and its Crippled Children’s Committee; served as president of the Red Cross, on the boards of Mercy Hospital, Second National Bank, the Florida Bank and Trust Company, and Miami University; was active in the Boy Scouts; and a member of civic and fraternal organizations too numerous to list.
His younger brother Warren had an equally distinguished career in law and politics. Indeed, Warren was perhaps even more of a prodigy. After graduating from the Cincinnati Law School and one year at the bar, Warren was but 25 years old when he was first elected Butler County Prosecutor in 1898. His father was 28 when he took the office.
In that capacity, he prosecuted Butler County’s first case that would end in the electric chair when Alfred Knapp murdered his wife in 1902 and sent her body down the Great Miami River in a shoe box. He gained fame for his prosecution of a case charging a couple with manslaughter after denying their young child medical care after suffering severe burns, relying instead on prayer as a curative agent. He went toe-to-toe with high-powered Chicago lawyers when he prosecuted two men from that city in a diamond heist against a local jeweler.
By 1907, still under 40 years old, he was elected to the bench, and in 1912 was tapped by the Ohio Democratic Party to run for the congressional seat vacated by James M. Cox, who had become governor. So Mr. Gard went to Washington and held his seat until 1921. As the second ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, Gard prepared all the legislation that took the United States into World War I and introduced the bill that established the Boy Scouts of America. Although he would be on the losing end of the battle, he was an outspoken opponent of Prohibition.
In 1921, while still serving in Congress, Warren Gard contracted erysipelas, an acute skin infection. He came home and resumed his law practice, even defended some of the local gangsters in their own war against prohibition, but the effects of the erysipelas eventually overcame him, and he died of kidney failure, November 1, 1929. He was 52 years old.
Warren Gard and his wife Pearl are said to have loved children, but never had any of their own, and because of the untimely death of Campbell Gard eight years earlier, the lineage of Samuel Zearly Gard came to an end