Anyone who has delved below the surface of my postings will have run across the name of David A. Conner more than once. The overwhelming majority of the Milton News pages on this blog were written by him, and the insights into Milton townspeople have been invaluable in my own research.

In the weeks to come, thanks to one of Conner’s direct descendants who contacted me recently, I will be revealing more about Conner’s personal life than I would have been able to glean from his journalism alone. I will let the descendant determine if and when he (or she) wants to be identified in the blog; I hope that the answers are yes and very soon.

The first piece of new information is the location of David Conner’s home, where he wrote his Milton News letter every week and where he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1919. On the corner of Federal and Manship, it has been altered in the last century but would still be recognizable to him if he could see it today.

The second item of news concerns the small outbuilding at the rear of this house. Although it looks like a garden shed, it was actually a tiny drug store, where Leroi H. Johnson – Conner’s grandson – dispensed various medicines to customers. The structure was moved from its original location on Federal Street to its current place decades ago. Leroi Johnson was not a trained pharmacist, but he learned the business as a clerk in William T. Starkey’s drug store a few blocks down the hill on Federal Street.