BIOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

THE LEADING CITIZENS OF MADISON COUNTY

CONTENTS
Preface
Names Index
Portrait Index

   W. HECTOR GALE. The following sketch was written especially for this work by Joseph Beal, Esq., of Oneida. Mr. Gale is a son of John and Sophia (Gilbert) Gale, and was born at Oneida, N.Y., January 15, 1847. He attended the common schools until he arrived at the age of twelve years, and then went to learn the printer's trade in the office of the Oneida Sachem, and on April 1, 1863, entered the office of the Democratic Union. In the following November, when he was sixteen years old, he enlisted as a private soldier in Company M, Second New York Artillery, inheriting his patriotism and military ardor from his paternal ancestry, his grandfather having been a soldier in the Revolutionary army and his father in the War of 1812-15, while his great-grandfather on his mother's side was a surgeon in the patriot army of the Revolution. Young Gale was continuously with his regiment, participating in many of the battles of the Civil War, among them the battles of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania Court House, North Anna, Deep Bottom, Ream's Station, Hatcher's Run, Patrick Station, Five Forks, Southside Railroad, Amelia Springs, Farmville, and the battle resulting in the surrender of Lee. Immediately after the surrender he took charge of a government printing-office in Washington, D.C., located on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Nineteenth Street, where were printed nearly all the general orders mustering out the Army of the Potomac. He was honorably discharged October 10, 1865.
   Returning home, he at once resumed work in the Union office at Oneida, but left this office the next spring to engage in lumbering and in the inspection of logs in the Saginaw Valley, Michigan. Until 1869 he travelled extensively in the far Western States and Territories, and joined a surveying party which operated in North British America in the vicinity of Hudson Bay. In 1874 he established the Streator Pioneer at Streator, Ill., which paper he published for three years, at the end of which time he removed his office to Oneida, where he ran a job printing-office for a time. In 1880 he established and has since continued to publish the Oneida Free Press, a weekly paper devoted to local news and to the interests of the survivors of his regiment, which venture proved a success, his office being now located on the lot upon which he was born, at Nos. 5 and 7 Gale Street.
   In 1879 Mr. Gale was married to Jennie E. Moore, and has since had a home at Oneida. He has also a handsome summer residence called "The Maples," which is situated at Sylvan Beach, N.Y. In politics Mr. Gale is an ardent Republican, but has never taken part in political matters except to vote and to fill the position of Village Clerk. He is a Mason, and prominent and active in Masonic affairs, and is at this writing (1893) the Worshipful Master of Oneida Lodge, No. 270, A. F. & A. M.