People

The urge to know something of the lives of the “People of the Windows” – the people named on the Lydia B. Cannon Museum’s stained glass windows when the Milton M. P. Church was rebuilt in 1906 – is what began the research into the general population of Milton at that time. The research expanded beyond the members of the M. P. Church congregation as other Milton personalities linked to the M. P. congregation of the early twentieth century appeared in the Milton News letter in the Milford Chronicle.

The short biographies at the link destinations below were assembled from public source, including the Milford Chronicle, the Denton Journal, and other newspapers of the day; birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, church records, and a few personal documents. The biographies are continuously being modified as more information comes to light.

People of the Windows

These are members of the Milton M. P. Church congregation in 1906, or their family members, whose names appear on the stained glass windows in the present-day Lydia B. Cannon museum building. and particularly those who presented the windows.  The list is still being added to.

D. A. C.

These initials, as well as “Crusader,” are the byline of David A. Conner, the resident correspondent of the Milford Chronicle who wrote a weekly letter from Milton about the goings-on in town from the late 1880’s to his death in 1919.

Other Contemporary Miltonians

An album that once belonged to Fredonia Lofland, nee Fredonia Clowes Wilson, contains cabinet card photos, cartes de visite and tintypes of a score of her Milton friends, relatives, and acquaintances. Highlights of that album can be found in Fredonia Wilson and Her Circle.

John Baynum Welch, druggist and the town’s literary lion, has a history all his own and a substantial oeuvre that shed light on popular taste and sentiment of the time. Information on him can be found at J. B. Welch – Milton’s Poet Laureate.

Lydia B. Cannon, nee Lydia Ann Black, is the benefactor who purchased the former Milton M. P. Church building in 1971 and presented it to the Milton Historical Society. It became the Lydia B. Cannon Museum in 1973, as it is known today.