Boston Public Library - Electric Scotland

284 WILLIAM O. ALLISON, OF ENGLEWOOD, N. J.
The student of heredity and the defender of the law of
entail will each find something of interest in tracing the history
of the ancestry of the subject of this sketch. From the
earliest records of Lawrence Allison, or, more directly, from
those of his son John, we find the evidences of foresight and
thrift which, developing in the third in descent from the
resident of the New Haven colony, led to the foundation of
a great fortune in land on the west banks of the Hudson.
With succeeding generations ownership of this vast estate
became divided and subdivided, but no generation of the
family down to the present has been wholly without an
inheritance from the estate acquired more than a century
and a half ago.
This possession proved enough to afford the
means of a livelihood, growing more meagre, however, with
successive generations, but yet enough to dispel want, and so,
perhaps, to curb ambitions ; for circumstances more affluent
or less comfortable might have developed in a larger number
of the descendants of John Allison the traits which the records
of his operations as a i^ioneer showed him to possess.
But the assurance of enough land from which to earn a
livelihood by working, or to acquire a living by sale, is not
a favorable culture-medium for those qualities which make
pioneers, or develop conspicuous successes in any
walk of
life ; and for several generations many of the strongest qualities
of the Allison family lay dormant in this branch of its
descent, for the need of the actual necessities for their development,
or for some other incitement to their employment.
From his early boyhood the subject of this sketch lived
much of the time in the family of William B, Dana, a prominent
resident of the Palisades, a man of forceful and exem-
plary character, and a journalist of culture. The intelligent
observer of his own life cannot deny the important part
which the accident of his environment has had in his successes
quite as much as in his failures, and it has been alike
creditable to his intelligence and his loyalty to so good a
friend as she was, that William O. Allison has never failed
to give full measure of acknowledgment, no less by deed
than by word, of the benign influence which Mrs. (Katharine
Floyd) Dana exerted upon his life. This good woman, herself
childless, took a deep interest in the boy, and his intel-
lectual development was guided by her in a manner born of
the superior intelligence and the inbred refinement, and
wielded by the great strength of character which she possessed.
That she found in him the inherent traits for devel-
opment, was as satisfactory to her as was her training grate-