The Shotwell Collection, 1823-1836; 1842-1888; Cadiz, Ohio

Lawyer and financier Chauncey Dewey was born on 27 March 1796 in Norwich, Connecticut. He attended Union College in Schenectady, New York, and graduated in 1820. After college, Dewey moved to Cadiz, Ohio, and studied law under General W.B. Beebe. After his admission to the Ohio bar, Dewey formed a partnership with Steubenville lawyer and future Ohio Senator Benjamin Tappan, under the firm of Tappan & Dewey. In 1836, Dewey formed a new partnership in Cadiz with Edwin M. Stanton, future Secretary of War from 1862 to 1868 under presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. That partnership dissolved in 1842, and that year Dewey formed a new partnership with Stuart B. Shotwell, under the firm Dewey & Shotwell of Cadiz. Dewey retired from the law practice in 1849, and became a leader in Cadiz’s growing banking industry. In 1849, he was elected president of the Harrison Branch of the State Bank of Ohio, and remained its president when it converted to the Harrison National Bank of Cadiz in 1865. He was a director of the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, & St. Louis Railroad. In 1823 he married Nancy Pritchard, and the couple had ten children. Dewey died in Cadiz on February 15, 1880.

Stuart B. Shotwell was born in 1819 in Washington Township, Harrison County, Ohio. He attended Franklin College beginning in 1836, and after graduating he studied law in Cadiz in the law office of Dewey & Stanton. In 1842, he was admitted to the Ohio state bar, and the same year he joined Dewey in a new partnership of Dewey & Shotwell, after the departure of Edwin Stanton. Shotwell carried on the business under his own name after the retirement of Dewey in 1849. In 1851, Shotwell married Nancy Gaston. The couple had five children, including Walter Gaston Shotwell (b. 1856), a lawyer who trained in his father’s firm and later opened his own practice in Cadiz, where this collection was likely stored at one time. Stuart B. Shotwell died in Cadiz on December 3, 1890.

Further Reading:

Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio in Two Volumes: An Encyclopedia of the State, Volume 1 (1902)

Commemorative Biographical Record, Harrison, Ohio (1891)

H.J. Eckley and William T. Perry, eds., Carroll and Harrison Counties, Ohio, Volume 2 (1921)

Other Related Collections:

Shotwell Family Papers, Ohio Historical Society, MSS 225

Walter B. Shotwell Papers, Harrison County Historical Society