George Creed Taylor (1824 - 1908)

Born 6 Aug 1824 in Rockingham Saxon's River Village, Vermont, USA

Ancestors

Husband of Hetty Matilda (Cropp) Taylor — married 31 Aug 1845 in Barbour, Alabama, USA

Husband of Alice (Cross) Taylor — married 30 Sep 1862 in Summit, Pike, Mississippi, USA

Descendants

Died 9 May 1908 at age 83 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Oklahoma, USA

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Biography

George Creed Taylor was born in 1824. He led a very colorful life as described below in his obituary. ^[1] He passed away in 1908. ^[2]

GEORGE CREED TAYLOR, LL.D. This distinguished gentlemen and scientist died on May 9, at the home of his son, Mr. Wallace C. Taylor, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Dr. Taylor at the time of his death was nearly 84 years of age. He had been quite feeble during recent years and was confined to the house and, in fact, to his bed for two or three weeks before his death. Dr. Taylor became a reader of the Louisiana Planter from its beginning in 1888 and was a frequent contributor to its columns over the nom de plume of Greybeard. He was born near Bellows Falls, Vermont, August 6, 1824. Dr. Taylor was born a scientist and began to take an active interest in matters chemical and microscopic at the age of twelve years. His father, Sereno Taylor, was the president and owner of a female model school at Sparta, Georgia, in 1836. To show the liberal atmosphere in which Dr. Taylor was reared it was stated that this Sparta school was founded by his father on a basis of non-sectarianism in religion and was the first to give educational facilities to women equal to those of men. The basis of study was taken mainly from Yale and Princeton, and yet did not exclude from the women the highest training and culture of music, painting, domestic home culture, etc. From the age of ten until he was fourteen Mr. Taylor studied in this school. At the early age of twelve he had full access to the chemical laboratory in his father’s school and did much original work therein. When fourteen years old Mr. Taylor’s father removed to Ft. Gaines, Georgia, and at the age of seventeen Mr. Taylor went to Abbieville, Alabama, where he taught school for three months. Glenville, Alabama, then became the home of his family and his father removed his school to that locality.

Dr. Taylor was a universal genius and was talented along the lines of drawing, painting, music, chemistry and microscopy, besides being versatile writer and giving to the world a number of valuable treatises on these various subjects. During his travels about the country as a young man these talents served him many a good turn. The period of his life between the ages of 20 and 30 was principally devoted to music, drawing and painting. He was twice married, first in 1845 to Miss Hetty Matilda Cropp, of Glenville, Alabama, who died in 1858, and later to Miss Alice Cross, whom he married in 1862, and who died in 1880.

Before the civil war Mr. Taylor invented a revolving cannon of three barrels and had just completed a model when the federals took New Orleans. In 1866 Dr. Taylor opened a co-educational academy in Summit, Mississippi, and later moved to Louisiana and for fifteen years under the firm name of Taylor & Company, as half owner and manager, he conducted the Orange Grove sugar plantation of Lafourche parish, where he made fine open kettle sugar. Being drowned out by two crevasses, Dr. Taylor gave up active sugar culture and devoted himself to his microscope and chemical work along sugar lines, giving much time to original research and making many valuable discoveries.

In recognition of Dr. Taylor’s standing as a microscopist, he was appointed an optical expert by the Bureau of Awards of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 to examine and report on the great Yerkes Telescope. Dr. Taylor was vice-president of the National Microscopical Society and stood high in chemical circles and, to quote Dr. William C. Stubbs, then director of the Louisiana Experiment Station, Dr. Taylor was “perfectly at home with the polariscope and ‘au fait’ in all the chemical processes involved in sugar analyses. His experience has been more extensive in the scientific and practical sides of sugar perhaps than any other person in this state.”

For a number of years prior to Dr. Taylor’s removal to Oklahoma he conducted the chemical laboratory on the Poydras plantation in Saint Bernard Parish, where his wealth of general knowledge made him peculiarly fitted for the position. Dr. Taylor leaves living seven children: Mary Louisa Darden, Raphael Edgar Taylor, Wallace Creed Taylor, [Eugene Carl Taylor absent from obituary] Josephine Alice Merrill, Stella May Gillis and Robert Sydney Taylor. Of these two are living in Louisiana: Mrs. G.E. Gillis and Mr. Robert Sydney Taylor.

Dr. Taylor’s death at the ripe age of 84 is deeply deplored by all who knew him and his memory will long survive, both from his scientific and personal qualities. The Louisiana Planter extends its sincere sympathy to his surviving family. Obituary, 1908

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Sources

1. ↑ The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, A Weekly Newspaper Dedicated to the Sugar, Rice and Other Agricultural Industries of Louisiana, Volume XXXX, No. 25, June 20, 1908, New Orleans
2. ↑ Primary date/location information entered by Stan Ulrich, Saturday, August 16, 2014.