Jeptha Homer Wade was born in Romulus, Seneca County, New York, the son of Jeptha and Sarah (Allen) Wade and a descendant of Benjamin Wade, a clothier, who was living in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1675. The elder Jeptha Wade, a surveyor and civil engineer, died in 1813, and about this time or later the family moved to Seneca Falls.
The boy learned the carpenter's trade, and as a young man operated a small sash and blind factory. Interest in art, however, led him to study painting with Randall Palmer, a local portrait painter, and for five or six years after 1837 he traveled through New York, Louisiana, and Michigan as an itinerant painter of portraits. While at Adrian, Michgan, he learned of the invention of the daguerreotype and purchased a camera to widen his field of portraiture. The news of the success of the telegraph in 1844 led him to study the possibilities of the invention of Morse and in 1847 he contracted to build a telegraph line from Detroit to Jackson - "a frail, one-wire affair. " Other lines, which came to be known as the Wade Lines, followed in rapid succession - from Detroit to Milwaukee, from Detroit to Buffalo by way of Cleveland, from Cleveland to Cincinnati and St. Louis. Meanwhile Royal E. House, Henry O'Reilly, Ezra Cornell, and other men were building up individual systems and in the early fifties competition became furious.
In 1854 the lines of Wade and House were consolidated, with Wade as the general agent, controlling a network over the Old Northwest. Similar consolidations of other systems were taking place at the same time, and in 1856 most of the western lines were combined in the Western Union Telegraph Company, with Anson Stager, formerly of the O'Reilly lines, as general superintendent and Wade as general agent. Within a few years Wade pushed on into the Far West, organizing the California State Telegraph Company and the Pacific Telegraph Company to connect St. Louis with San Francisco. A line to Salt Lake City from the West was completed in October 1861, putting out of business the firm operating the pony express and preparing the way for the transcontinental railroad and the daily mail. Wade was promoted from the position of general agent to that of managing director, and in 1866 became president of the enlarged Western Union, but illness in 1867 caused him to give up the responsibilities of that office.
About 1856 he had established his residence in Cleveland, and thenceforth was closely identified with Cleveland business. In 1867 he took a leading part in the organization of the Citizens' Savings & Loan Association and became its president, and later he held the same office with the National Bank of Commerce. He was also actively interested in railroad building and management and served on the boards of directors of most of the lines entering Cleveland.
He was a member of the public park commission, and a director of the Cleveland workhouse board, and also a member of the National Garfield Monument Association.
In physique Wade was slightly over six feet tall and powerfully built. In his personal characteristics he was modest and easily approached, genial and an interesting conversationalist. He never lost his interest in painting and music.
Wade married Rebecca Louiza Facer in 1832, who bore his first son, Randall Palmer Wade, later that year. Rebecca Wade died November 30, 1836 at the age of 24. He remarried in 1837 to Susan Maranda Fleming, with whom he adopted 4 more children.
