Bio: Curtis, Alfred T. (Commemorative Bio - 1895)

Poster: Crystal Wendt

Alfred T. Curtis

Alfred T. Curtis, editor and publisher of The Merrill News, Merrill, Lincoln County, is a native of Wisconsin, born September 7, 1872, near Mauston, Juneau County.

Henry Hale Curtis, his father, was born in Ohio, near Cleveland, and when about six years of age came to Wisconsin with his parents, who settled in the country, near Mauston, Juneau County. The father was a farmer until after the birth of two of his children (of whom our subject is the eldest), and then attended Wisconsin University law school, where he graduated. At Portage, Wis., he practiced law, and was district attorney of Columbia County some time. In the spring of 1885 he moved to Merrill, Lincoln County, and associated in the practice of law with his brother, George Curtis, Jr., the firm being known as Curtis & Curtis until 1890, when A. H. Reid entered the firm, which became Curtis, Curtis & Reid. H. H. Curtis died May 30, 1893, of typhoid fever, which he contracted in Pensacola, Fla. For about two years before his he did little law work, spending his winters in the South on business and pleasure, in the summers engaging in various lines of work in the North. He was a successful lawyer, and excellent judge of good literature, of which he was very fond, and was well known by most prominent lawyers in the State. His widow and three of her sons, two of whom are Freshmen in the University of Wisconsin are at present residing at Madison, Wis. George Curtis, Jr., came to Merrill in 1881, and has remained there ever since. The law firm is now Curtis & Reid.

Alfred T. Curtis, the subject proper of these lines, came, in 1885, from Portage (where he had resided some eight years) to Merrill, at the high school of which city he graduated in 1891. For two years he was a student at the University of Wisconsin, at Madison, in the Civic-Historical course, and during vacations and other times worked at the printer’s trade, becoming a journeyman printer in June, 1893. On December 8, 1894, he bought the Merrill News of Dunn & Christenson, and has since been its editor and proprietor, doing a successful business, conducting one of the brightest, newsiest and most readable papers in the county. He has not yet taken a “header” into the fathomless Sea of Matrimony, whatever his intentions may be.

---Source: Commemorative Biographical Record of the Upper Wisconsin Counties of Waupaca, Portage, Wood, Marathon, Lincoln, Oneida, Vilas, Langlade and Shawano. publ. 1895 by J. H. Beers & Co., Chicago 1110 pages, illustrated; Page 823