Henry Cantine Connelly (1832 - 1912)

Born 25 Sep 1832 in Phoenicia, Shandaken, Ulster County, New York

Ancestors

Husband of Lucinda (Manning) Connelly — married 1858 in Ulster, New York, United States

Died 8 Oct 1912 at age 80 in Kingston, Ulster County, New York

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Biography

Life Sketch (1874)

The Fourteenth Senatorial district consists of the counties of Greene and Ulster. The Senator is HENRY C CONNELLY.

Senator CONNELLY was born at Shandaken Ulster county on the 25th of September 1832 consequently he is now in the full maturity of his powers. Shortly after his birth the family removed to Esopus in the same county which has remained the Senator's home ever since His father and his father's father were both born in the town of Olive Ulster county. His grandfather was a physician and Baptist minister and his father a farmer. The latter is still living at the age of 66.

The Senator's education was received for the most part at the common schools of his county. A portion of one year he attended the Charlotteville Seminary at Schoharie. At the early age of 15 he began to learn the great lesson of self-dependence, and we find him teaching the young ideas to shoot. He followed teaching for three months, and then went to clerking it at Rondout. Here he remained four years and then removed to Eddyville, Cattaraugus county, where he spent some time in mercantile pursuits. In 1856, he embarked in business on his own account and to day finds him in the same place in which he commenced a successful and respected merchant. The firm of CONNELLY & SHAEER is widely known as manufacturers of Rosendale cement.

In politics, the Senator, although brought up under Free Soil Democrat influences, has always been a Republican. For four successive years his friends and neighbors showed their regard for him as a man of capacity and integrity by electing him to represent his town in the Board of Supervisors of Ulster county. He cares very little for public life, and never asked for an office in his life. Whenever he has consented to represent the people the office has sought him not he the office.

Thoroughly known throughout the Fourteenth district and everywhere as a man fitted, by his sound business capacity and inflexible integrity, to make a useful legislator, it was not strange that his party friends placed him in nomination for Senator. The district had been counted unfailingly Democratic and yet, although Greene county went against Mr CONNELLY 543, his own county of Ulster gave him the handsome majority of 809, thus securing his election by 266 over JACOB H MEECH. In 1871 a Democratic Senator was elected by 828 majority.

Senator CONNELLY is Chairman of two Committees Erection and Division of Towns and Counties and Charitable and Religious Societies he is also a member of Roads and Bridges and Printing.

The Senator has been twice married. He was married to his present wife a daughter of LEVI MANNY of West Path(sic) Ulster county in 1858. He has been connected with the Methodist Episcopal Church since 1852^[1]

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes was his nephew.

Sources

• Life Sketches of Government Officers and Members of the Legislature of the State of New York in 1875 by W. H. McElroy and Alexander McBride (pg. 51f) [e-book]
• Ex-State Senator H. C. Connelly in NYT on October 10, 1912
• The History of Ulster County by Alphonso T. Clearwater (1907; Vol. 2; pg. 576; re-published 2007)

1. ↑ Life Sketches of Government Officers and Members of the Legislature: Of the State of New York for 1874, William Henry McElroy, Alexander McBride Weed, Parsons and Company, printers, 1874,