820 SETTLE, EVAN E. SETTLE, EVAN E. (b. December 1, 1848, Frankfort, Ky.; d. November 16, 1899, Owenton, Ky.) Evan Evans Settle, an Owen Co. lawyer and politician, was the son of William H. and Harriet Evans Settle. Evan’s early education was at the prestigious B. B. Sayre Academy in Frankfort. The family moved to Louisville, where Settle attended Louisville Male High School, graduating in 1864. He worked for a year in Louisville in the U.S. Provost Marshall’s office during the Civil War and then moved to Frankfort and worked for the state auditor. Settle studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1870. He set up his first legal practice at Owenton. He married Lizzie Herndon on October 20, 1875, and they had six children. Settle served as Owen Co. attorney from 1878 until 1887 and was then elected to the Kentucky legislature. In 1897 he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served until his death at age 50. Settle was buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery at Owenton. Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. “Settle, Evan Evans.” http://bioguide.congress.gov (accessed November 22, 2005). Houchens, Mariam Sidebottom. History of Owen County: “Sweet Owen.” Louisville, Ky.: Standard, 1976.
SHALER, NATHANIEL BURGER (b. July 21, 1805, Massachusetts; d. January 17, 1882, Newport, Ky.). Dr. Nathaniel Burger Shaler, a physician, attended schools in the city of Lancaster, Mass., before graduating from medical school at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. He had a somewhat combative personality, which occasionally got him into trouble. Shaler went to Havana, Cuba, to practice medicine because he had a connection with the U.S. consul there. After that did not work out, he moved to the frontier town of Newport, Ky., in 1832, at the height of the worst cholera epidemic the state of Kentucky had ever experienced. As Shaler cared for those victims, he quickly gained the respect of the community. He was one of the first physicians to abandon the medical practice of bloodletting. In October 1835 Shaler married Ann Southgate, the daughter of Richard Southgate and Nancy Hinde Southgate. The newlyweds built a home in what is now Evergreen Cemetery in Southgate. Shaler was known for treating difficult cases with some degree of success. In 1847 he became the surgeon at the local Newport Barracks and later served as a Union Army medical officer during the Civil War. His hospital at the barracks had a higher rate of success in achieving cures than other military hospitals. Shaler was a member of the Covington and Newport Medical and Surgical Society and the Newport city school board. Often his name would appear in the newspapers of the day in the lists of individuals owing back taxes. He was the father of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, a noted geologist, teacher, and historian who went on to become one of the great teachers of the 19th century at Harvard University. Late in life, Dr. Nathaniel B. Shaler moved into a mansion on Taylor St. in Newport (E. Third St. today), where he died in 1882. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Southgate, near his former home.
Poweleit, Alvin C., and James A. Schroer, eds. A Medical History of Campbell and Kenton Counties. Cincinnati: Campbell-Kenton Medical Society, 1970.
SHALER, NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE (b. February 20, 1841, Newport, Ky.; d. April 10, 1906, Cambridge, Mass.). Nathaniel Southgate Shaler was an educator, a geologist, and one of Northern Kentucky’s most prolific authors. He was the eldest surviving son of Nathaniel Burger Shaler, an eminent physician and surgeon, and Ann Hinde Southgate, the daughter of a prosperous attorney and landowner, Richard Southgate. Because he was born soon after his parents had lost their firstborn son in an accident, and because of his own frail health, his early boyhood was exceedingly sheltered. His lifelong love of nature, domestic and wild animals, and earth sciences was no doubt fostered during these early years, when he often accompanied his father on horseback rides down to the Ohio River and throughout the rustic Northern Kentucky countryside. As a youngster, Nathaniel also spent a great deal of time with his maternal grandfather, Richard Southgate, at his grandfather’s residence in Newport. During the first decade of Nathaniel’s life, the significant early influences of his father and his maternal grandfather, open access to their wellstocked home libraries, and free rein to explore the natural world around him supplied ample fodder for his insatiable curiosity and precocious mind. Between the ages of 11 and 12, Nathaniel attended the school at the nearby Newport Barracks. There he studied Latin, Greek, and mathematics, although ill health (in the form of “sick headaches,” which continued to plague him throughout his life), as well as his dislike of the school, often interfered with his attendance. When he reached age 15, his father hired a private tutor to supplement Nathaniel’s somewhat unorthodox education. Johannes Escher, a clergyman of Swiss and German heritage, not only furthered Nathaniel’s education but also provided him with a sterling example of scholarly discipline. Under Escher’s expert tutelage, Nathaniel built a sound, classically based foundation that included German, Greek, and Latin literature, as well as the philosophy of Hegel, Kant, and Schelling. When Nathaniel reached age 17, his parents determined that their eldest son should enroll in an institution of higher learning. Dr. Shaler, a Harvard graduate from the class of 1827, deemed his son to be a fitting candidate for his prestigious alma mater. Despite Nathaniel’s somewhat jumbled early education, he was enrolled as a sophomore at Harvard in 1859. While there, he studied earth sciences under the noted naturalist Louis Agassiz. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler’s years of undergraduate study were also spent preparing for whatever role he might be called upon to play for his native Kentucky in the escalating conflict between the Northern and Southern states. The militaristic influence of his boyhood experiences at the Newport Barracks, where his father served as army sur-
geon, along with his father’s resolve that Nathaniel, from a very early age, should become proficient in the use of the rifle and the sword, certainly prepared him for soldierly duty, but they did little to blunt his sensibilities to the harsh realities of war. As the specter of war loomed, Shaler supplemented his Harvard curriculum with martial activities: he participated in a drill club, studied various works on military tactics, and performed soldierly duties and clerked at the nearby military base Fort Independence in Boston Harbor. The outbreak of the Civil War occurred during Shaler’s last year as a student at Harvard. Wrestling with his conflicting desires—to take his final examinations or to delay his degree conferment to enlist in the army—Shaler returned to Kentucky and sought the counsel of trusted friends and family members. Following the advice of his grandfather, Richard Southgate, placed him on the Union side. But family and friends urged him to postpone his enlistment in the Union Army until after he had obtained his degree, so Shaler went back to Cambridge and prepared for his final examinations. On July 8, 1862, he graduated summa cum laude with a BS in geology from Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School. Almost immediately, he traveled to Frankfort, Ky., where he received a commission as captain of the Union Army’s 5th Kentucky Battery. He and his unit fortified one of the hillside battlements that had been hastily constructed earlier in 1862 when Confederate troops threatened Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. Because his father owned the land upon which the structure was built and graciously opened his vineyards to allow for the battlement’s construction, it was later named Shaler Battery in his honor. (Now a part of the Evergreen Cemetery grounds, Shaler Battery’s earthen ramparts remain visible atop the highest hill of the cemetery’s rolling acreage.) Although severe bronchitis forced Captain Shaler to resign his post, he was deeply affected by his wartime experiences and later wrote of his poignant military reminiscences in a posthumously published book, From Old Fields: Poems of the Civil War. In that same year, 1862, he married Sophia Penn Page. The couple had two daughters, Gabriella and Ann Penn. In 1864, prompted by pressing reasons of health and employment, he returned to the cooler climate of Cambridge and the welcoming environs of Harvard Yard. His beloved teacher and mentor, Agassiz, appointed him assistant lecturer in paleontology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. One year later, Agassiz’s declining health prompted increased teaching responsibilities for Shaler, as he took over instruction in both zoology and geology. From 1866 to 1868, he traveled extensively throughout Europe, collecting fossils and other specimens for the museum and conducting fieldwork in the Alps, France, and Italy. His travels also included a trip to Kentucky in 1868, when he participated in a paleontological dig at Big Bone Lick in Boone Co. Upon his return to Harvard in 1869, the 28-yearold Shaler was granted a full professorship in paleontology (his title was changed to professor of geology in 1888).