This intriguingly named man is Ammi Ruhamah Robbins Butler, who was born September 4, 1821, in Fairfield, Vermont, the son of Dr. Ammi Butler. Both father and son were presumably named in honor of noted New England clergyman Ammi Ruhamah Robbins (1740-1813), who maintained a ministry for over fifty years and later served as a trustee of Williams College. The Butler family removed from Vermont when their son was still in his infancy and resettled in New York. Young Ammi would later attend schools in the village of Alexander and married here in 1843 to Orvilla Tanner (1819-1895). The couple were wed for over fifty years and are believed to have been childless.
Ammi R.R. Butler studied law in Buffalo, New York, and was admitted to the state bar in 1846. Soon afterward he relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he permanently settled. Establishing his law practice in that city, Butler quickly advanced to the forefront of his profession and by the early 1850s was serving as District Attorney of Milwaukee County.
He was twice re-elected to that post and in 1866 he won election to the Wisconsin State Assembly, representing the county of Milwaukee until leaving the legislature in 1868.
In 1869 Ammi R.R. Butler was urged by members of the state Democratic party to run for the office of Chief Justice of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court against the incumbent Luther S. Dixon but refused to become a candidate. In 1876 Butler was nominated for Mayor of Milwaukee (despite his protests) and was subsequently elected without opposition. He was the first Milwaukee mayor to serve two terms, with his tenure concluding in 1878.
Having retired from the practice of law in 1874, Ammi R.R. Butler continued with civic activities in his native city and for a number of years served as president of the Milwaukee County Bar Association. He continued to reside in Milwaukee until his death at age 79 on April 4, 1901. Butler had been preceded in death by his wife Orvilla in 1895 and both were interred at the Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee. He was subsequently memorialized by his contemporaries as a "marked man in his profession", as well as having been a
"A man of commanding presence, of dignified bearing, rather reserved though courteous in manner, and of exceptionally personal character."
Portrait from "the Minutes of the Maine Conference", April 1903.
A distinguished Methodist minister in Maine for over forty years, Ammi Storer Ladd entered politics in the early 1890s when he became the Prohibition Party nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives from Maine's 2nd congressional district. In addition to his run for Congress Ladd was later a two-time candidate for Maine Governor, again being the Prohibition Party standard bearer.
The son of Jesse and Sophronia Ladd, Ammi Storer Ladd was born on June 17, 1835, in Phillips, Maine. He attended school in the town of his birth and was later a graduate of Kent's Hill Seminary. Ladd joined the Methodist Episcopal Church as a young man and joined the Maine Methodist Conference in 1860. He was licensed to preach that same year and in July 1861 married to Lydia Golder (died 1880), with whom he had one daughter, Lizzie (1862-1867).
Through the succeeding years, Ammi S. Ladd's ministry took him to a number of Methodist churches throughout Maine, holding pastorships in Kent's Hill, Waterford, Biddeford, Bath, Portland, Lewiston, Bangor, and Auburn. In 1869 he received an honorary degree from Colby University and several years later served as a member of the Maine delegation to the Methodist General Conference held in Baltimore.
Following Lydia Ladd's death in 1880 Ammi Ladd remarried to Marion Meriwether, with whom he had two further children, Lydia (born 1882) and John (died in infancy in 1885). Marion Ladd died in 1885 and one year later Ladd remarried for a third time, taking as his wife Helen Osgood (1854-1917). The couple would have one child, Marion, who died in infancy in 1887.
Active in the temperance movement in Maine, Ladd was a staunch prohibitionist and in 1892 entered politics when he received the nomination for Congress as the Prohibition Party candidate. As one of five candidates vying for the seat, Ladd placed a distant fourth on election day, polling 803 votes to six-term incumbent Nelson Dingley's winning total of 17, 194. Four years later Ladd was again the Prohibition Party nominee, this time vying for the Maine Governorship. On election day 1896, he placed fourth in a field of five candidates, losing out to Republican candidate Llewellyn Powers. Ladd was dealt another gubernatorial loss in 1898, garnering just 2326 votes to Powers' winning total of 53, 900.
Ammi S. Ladd spent the final years of his life in Yarmouth, Maine, where he died at age 74 on February 6, 1910. He was survived by his wife Helen, who, following her death in 1917, was interred alongside her husband at the Riverside Cemetery in Yarmouth.
Portrait from the Maine legislative composite of 1865.
In a March 31, 2017 update to a nearly six-year-old article, another politically affiliated "Ammi" has been located...Ammi Lord Boynton of Cornish, Maine. A two-term member of the Maine House of Representatives from York County, little information could be located on Boynton, and the discovery of the above portrait (part of a larger photo composite featuring members of the 1865 Maine legislature) came as a welcome surprise!
Ammi Lord Boynton was the son of Joseph Deering and Hannah (Chick) Boynton, his birth occurring in Hiram, Maine on April 18, 1822. He married in May 1859 to Elizabeth Cooper, with whom he had at least three children, Charlie (died in infancy in 1864), Nellie (1868-1875) and Amy (1872-1876).
A resident of Cornish for a good majority of his life, Boynton was a farmer and gained distinction in local politics, serving as a town selectman for Cornish from 1863-67. Boynton represented Cornish in the Maine state legislature for two terms (1865 and 1868) and during the former session sat on the committees on the Division of Towns and County Estimates.
Following his time in the legislature, Boynton became a founding member of the Cornish Savings Bank in 1869. He died four years later at age 51 on June 19, 1873, and was interred at the Riverside Cemetery in Cornish.
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