1. Jonathan Norcross was elected in 1850 as the fourth Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, serving the customary term at the time of one year.
21 Facts About Jonathan Norcross
1. 2.
Jonathan Norcross had six siblings, including older brother Nicholas Gaubert Norcross.
3.
Jonathan Norcross attended common schools and was taught the trade of millwright.
4.
Jonathan Norcross left Pennsylvania in 1833 to teach school at an academy in North Carolina.
5.
Jonathan Norcross became a sawmill operator and dry goods merchant.
6.
Jonathan Norcross described the excitement attendant to the arrival of the first trains at the station in 1845:.
7.
In 1851 Jonathan Norcross was among two dozen founders of the Atlanta National Bank.
8.
Jonathan Norcross owned the 1894 landmark Jonathan Norcross Building at Five Points in what became Downtown Atlanta.
9.
Jonathan Norcross unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 1848, in the town's first election, when fewer than 225 white men voted.
10.
The mayoral term was only one year, and two more Rowdy candidates were elected before Norcross ran again in 1850, representing the Moral Party against Leonard C Simpson, an attorney and candidate for the Free and Rowdy Party.
11.
Jonathan Norcross won as a "temperance man who hated civic disturbances"; he presented a choice between civilian law and order and the bellicose Rowdies.
12.
Jonathan Norcross intended to use public shaming to persuade the Rowdies to move a mile south-west to "Snake Nation".
13.
In 1876, near the end of the Reconstruction era, Jonathan Norcross ran as the Republican nominee for Governor of Georgia.
14.
Jonathan Norcross was defeated by Democrat Alfred H Colquitt, at a time of intense efforts by Democrats to disrupt and suppress Republican voting, especially by freedmen, with a combination of fraud and violence.
15.
Jonathan Norcross made an impassioned speech, from which The New York Times printed an excerpt.
16.
Jonathan Norcross married Lydia F Howes on May 19,1875, in Bibb, Georgia.
17.
On September 4,1877, the widower Jonathan Norcross married again, to Mary Ann Hill, in Fulton, Georgia.
18.
The last surviving antebellum mayor of Atlanta, Jonathan Norcross died at his home in Atlanta on December 18,1898, at age 90.
19.
Jonathan Norcross is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, in a marked grave, Section 10, Block 140, Lot 3.
20.
Jonathan Norcross married Sophronia Pratt and moved to Bangor, where he established a career in the lumber industry.
21.
Jonathan Norcross finally settled in Lowell, Massachusetts, an area for lumber, as well as textile mills that became increasingly important to the economy.