James Samuel Thomas Stranahan was a United States Representative from New York, and a municipal official of the City of Brooklyn.
Background
James was born on April 25, 1808 at Peterboro, Madison County, New York, United States. He was a son of Samuel and Lynda (Josselyn) Stranahan, and a descendant of James Stranahan who emigrated to Scituate, Rhod Island, probably in 1725.
His parents (both of Scotch-Irish stock) had come from Connecticut to the Mohawk Valley as pioneers. When James was eight years old his father died; his mother remarried, and he spent the remainder of his boyhood on the farm of his step-father, John Downer.
Education
He studied at the country schools in the neighborhood. A year at Cazenovia Seminary completed his formal education, but he had mastered enough of the elements of land surveying to enable him to set up in that calling, then fairly remunerative in a new country.
Career
During the thirties, while Stranahan was a wool merchant at Albany, Gerrit Smith, the wealthy abolitionist, who had known him at Peterboro, interested him in the development of some of his Oneida County properties, and particularly in the promotion of the village of Florence as a manufacturing center. A term as assemblyman at Albany in 1838 gave Stranahan an insight into legislative methods that was to serve him well forty years later.
In 1840 he went to Newark, New Jersey, and became a successful railroad contractor. He was one of the earliest operators on a large scale to take railroad stock in payment for construction work. After four years he transferred his activities to Brooklyn, New York, then a city of less than 100, 000, where harbor improvements known as the Atlantic Basin and Docks had been projected.
He entered into this enterprise with great energy and enthusiasm, bringing it to ultimate success, although it was twenty-six years before a dividend could be paid on the corporation stock. Meanwhile he invested in East River ferries and came to be known as one of Brooklyn's public-spirited and substantial citizens.
Yet his lasting reputation was to be won as a servant of the city rather than of the nation. As president of the Brooklyn park board (1860 - 82) he was largely responsible for the creation of Prospect Park at a time when few American public men saw the importance of public parks in municipal development. Much of the time he worked almost single-handed.
His services were recognized in an unusual way during his lifetime by the dedication on June 6, 1891, of a statue of him by Frederick William MacMonnies, erected through public subscription. Hardly less significant was his early and persistent espousal of the plans for the original East River Bridge.
In 1883, the year in which he presided at the formal opening of the bridge, he pledged support of the Greater New York consolidation plan, which involved the loss of Brooklyn's identity as a city and ran counter to the cherished ideas of some of his co-workers and friends. He was seventy-five when he set out to win over Brooklyn for consolidation; he was ninety when the goal was finally reached, and he was hailed as one of the fathers of the greater city.
He died at Saratoga, New York.
Achievements
James Samuel Thomas Stranahan was postmaster of Florence and was a member of the New York State Assembly in 1838. Stranahan was a trustee of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge Company, serving as its President. In the 1890s, Mr. Stranahan promoted the consolidation of City of Brooklyn into a Greater New York and was an active member in the Commission that framed the first charter for the City of Greater New York.
Politics
His election to Congress as a Whig in 1854 came after a defeat as candidate for mayor.
Connections
He was twice married: first, on May 4, 1837, to Mariamne Fitch of Oneida County, New York, and second to Clara Cornelia Harrison, author of A History of French Painting (1888).
