William B. Powers was born at Temple, New Hampshire, of Irish descent. He came to Quincy in 1838; was a brickmason and followed that trade for several years, then entered into partnership with Matthew B. Finlay in the clothing business, where he accumulated much wealth. After the death of Governor Wood, the beautiful Woodland Cemetery was neglected and commenced to run down. Mr. Powers organized the Woodland Cemetery Association, of which he was chosen president, and soon restored that sacred garden of the dead to its former position, the most beautiful cemetery in the West. He died in 1895 at the age of eighty-four years. Only one son, W. C. Powers, survived him, and he is now a retired merchant.
The Shannahan Brothers, John, William and Patrick, born in Waterford County, Ireland, came to Quincy before 1840. They were all successful railroad builders and constructed roads in all parts of the country. In 1852 they built sections of the Iron Mountain Railroad in Missouri. They constructed the Northern Cross Railroad between Quincy and Clayton. Had contracts on the Hannibal and St. Joseph road, and the Quincy, Alton and St. Louis road. John and William lived to a ripe age. Patrick survived them. He died in 1895 at the age of eighty-four years, leaving three sons, James P., Richard and William, and four daughters, all in Quincy except William, who is in California. John Shannahan had two sons, but William had none. A brother, Thomas, came from Ireland in 1851.
John Burns, Sr., was born in Maine of Irish parents and came to Quincy in 1834 with a family of several sons. He was a man of strong religious convictions and a hater of slavery. John Burns, Jr., went to California in 1849 and became a prominent man of that state. George W. Burns went with his brother, but returned after one year and engaged in the mercantile business in the town of Payson, eighteen miles south of Quincy, where his father was then residing. In 1854 he returned to Quincy, and in company with John Wood, Jr., engaged in the flour milling business. In 1862 he was appointed paymaster in the army with the rank of Major, and was captured on the Red River and held for three months. He was elected a state senator in 1874. In 1880, he went again to California, where in a gallant effort to catch a team of runaway horses attached to a carriage containing ladies, he was killed on the streets of Sacramento. Major Burns inherited a brave and generous disposition to risk his own life to save that of others, as shown by the brave conduct of his father in saving and protecting the noted Doctor Nelson, the most brilliant man among the early pioneers. Dr. David Nelson was born in Tennessee. He was a friend of Andrew Jackson and served under him as surgeon during the war of 1812. He had been an infidel, but was converted and became an ardent advocate of Christianity. He was an extensive slave holder and moved with them to Missouri, near Palmyra, eighteen miles west of Quincy. He was a kind and humane master and soon caused a bitter feeling against himself among his slave holding neighbors by persisting in teaching his negroes to read and write and giving them religious instruction in defiance of a law then existing forbidding the teaching of negroes. He attempted to found a college at Palmyra, and had books shipped to him from the East. Upon opening one of the boxes, it was found that not being quite full of books, it had been filled with anti-slavery pamphlets, by some eastern man who knew his desires to educate and uplift the blacks. The knowledge of the receipt of the pamphlets spread like wild-fire among the slave holders, who determined to take his life. The Doctor was spirited away by his friends and hid in a cave, where he wrote the first chapter of his great work on “Infidelity,” while his enemies were scouring the country for him, with all of the roads guarded and every supposable means of escape cut off. His friends implored him to come to Quincy. Making his way through a heavy forest, he arrived at midnight on the west bank of the Mississippi River opposite Quincy, where John Burns and other friends were to meet him and row him across. While waiting at the edge of the forest for his friends to appear, with the wide sweeping river before him and the lights of Quincy on the opposite shore, he composed that beautiful hymn, “The Shining Shore”:
My days are gliding swiftly by
And I, a pilgrim stranger,
Would not detain them as they fly,
Those hours of toil and danger.
Chorus.
For Oh, we stand on Jordan’s strand,
Our friends are passing over,