Background
He was born on January 8, 1808 in East Andover (now Andover), Maine, United States, the second son of Dr. Silvanus and Mary (Merrill) Poor.
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He was born on January 8, 1808 in East Andover (now Andover), Maine, United States, the second son of Dr. Silvanus and Mary (Merrill) Poor.
He varied farm work with occasional terms of school and regular study with his brother-in-law, Rev. Thomas T. Stone in Andover.
When he was nineteen he entered the law office of his uncle, Jacob McGaw, in Bangor, and at twenty-four was admitted to the bar. After a few months of practice in Oldtown, he returned to Bangor and became his uncle's partner. He practised law fourteen years in Bangor, earning a reputation as a sound, even brilliant, lawyer and public-spirited citizen. He took part in the town government, was a member of the Whig state committee, and was active in forming the Bangor Lyceum and the Bangor Social Library.
Years later, in Portland, he endeavored to establish a free public library with no success, because the idea was far in advance of the time. He himself collected rare books. He was keenly interested in local history, and in 1839 when the dispute over the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick was raging, he prepared three letters for the Portland Advertiser discussing the history of attempts at boundary settlements and pressing the claims of Maine.
Railroads gradually became both his avocation and his vocation. On April 16, 1834, he was among those who saw the first train of the Boston & Worcester Railroad pull out of Boston, and after the first railway in Maine was built, from Bangor to Oldtown, in 1836, he devoted much time to the study of the possibilities of railways in the economic and social development of the state. In 1844 he made public a plan for two lines, one with a terminus at Halifax, the other with a terminus at Montreal, converging upon Portland. This project aroused powerful and determined opposition in Massachusetts from promoters of the Boston, Concord & Montreal Railroad. In the face of a blizzard, in February 1845, utilizing what horses he could engage as he proceeded, Poor journeyed to Montreal, where on February 10 he met the Montreal Board of Trade and prevented the adoption of a resolution in favor of building their line to Boston instead of to Portland.
He then moved to Portland, in 1846, to devote himself to railway interests. The Atlantic & Saint Lawrence Railroad Company was organized to build the railway from Portland to the Canadian border, with Preble as president and Poor as one of the directors (1845 - 49). On July 4, 1846, work was begun at Fish Point, at the entrance to Portland Harbor. The Canadian company, the St. Lawrence & Atlantic, began work at the same time, and the entire road between Portland and Montreal was opened on July 18, 1853, having been leased on July 1 to the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada.
In 1849, Poor went to New York City and purchased the American Railroad Journal, of which his brother, Henry Varnum Poor, assumed the editorship. Returning to Portland, John A. Poor became president of the Gas-Light Company, but resigned in 1852, having extricated it from its financial troubles. In 1851 he had been elected president of the York & Cumberland (later the Portland & Rochester) Railroad, had won a lawsuit for the company, reorganized it, and provided for the construction of its line from Gorham to the Saco River. From this office also he resigned in 1852, to devote his whole attention to international railway expansion.
In 1850 he had been the moving spirit behind a convention at Portland which launched a project for connecting the railroads of Maine with those of the lower Canadian provinces in the direction of St. John, N. B. The convention appointed Poor chairman of the executive committee which it created, and on August 20, 1850, he secured the charter of the European & North American Railway Company. The road had a lively history, whether viewed as a construction feat or as the subject of international negotiations; the last rail was laid September 20, 1871, fifteen days after Poor's death; and in 1882 the line in Maine was leased in perpetuity to the Maine Central Railroad.
Poor established the newspaper, State of Maine, in Portland in 1853, and edited it from 1853 to 1859, when it merged with the Portland Daily Advertiser, in which he had purchased an interest.
He also brought to public attention the fertility of the lands of Aroostook County, Maine, now world-famous for potatoes; and in 1857 suggested to the Maine legislature the construction of a railroad to open the county to settlement. In 1858 he urged a geological and water-power survey and the compilation of general statistics of the state, an enterprise toward which he had made a beginning in 1855 with the publication of his Commercial, Railway, and Shipbuilding Statistics of the City of Portland and the State of Maine.
Transcontinental railroad projects occupied his attention from about 1869, although he had corresponded with Asa Whitney on the subject as early as 1845. He became president of the Portland, Rutland, Oswego, & Chicago Railway in 1871. In September of that year he died suddenly of heart-failure.
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
He had become a member of the Maine Historical Society in 1846.
On July 8, 1833, he married Elizabeth Adams Hill, eldest daughter of Thomas Adams Hill. She died January 14, 1837. Of their three children only the eldest, a daughter, survived her parents. Poor later married Elizabeth, daughter of Benjamin Orr of Brunswick. She died in 1844. Her only child, a son, died before his mother. Poor's third wife, Mrs. Margaret Robinson (Barr) Gwynne of Cincinnati, whom he married July 19, 1860, survived him.