Abram H. Nixon
Abram H. Nixon, manufacturer of spraying apparatus, was born within seven miles of Cincinnati, Ohio, December 3, 1813. He is a son of John Nixon, who was born in New Jersey, from which state he emigrated to Fayette County, Pa., where he was married and whence a few years later he removed to Ohio, coming down the Ohio River on a flatboat, and settling at the place where Abram was afterward born. Coming to Ohio at that time John Nixon was one of the earliest pioneers of the state, which was then only ten years old. Some years later he moved about fifteen miles north of his first location, into Butler county. Here Abram was reared on a farm, his education being received in the district schools, which were then of a very inferior kind, as much inferior to those of the present day as were the log cabin school-houses, with their puncheon floors and greased-paper windows, to the finely adapted modern school structures.
When nineteen years of age he went to Franklin, Ohio, and established himself in business in the manufacture of cooper ware. Remaining in Franklin for two years, he then removed to Centerville, Montgomery county, where he carried on the same business for three years. At that time there was more pork packed in Centerville than in Dayton. In the spring of 1838, Mr. Nixon removed to Carrollton, Montgomery county, where he continued his business on a larger scale than ever before, using machinery in the manufacture of his wares, and being the first to introduce it for that purpose into the county. At that time it was the custom to go to the woods, cut the timber and hand it to the cooper shops in wagons, but Mr. Nixon soon found that to be too tedious and laborious a method, and conceived the idea of going into the forest, there cutting the trees into staves, and hauling them to the cooper shop in canal boats. He was, in fact, the first to bring a canal boat load of cooper stuff to Carrollton.
Mr. Nixon was married in Carrrollton to Miss Mary Ann Cotterill, who was born in Brown county, Ohio. He continued to reside in Carrollton for nineteen years, and in 1857 removed to Dayton, where he has resided ever since. In 1852 he disposed of his cooper business and engaged in buying and selling leaf tobacco, which was then just beginning to be raised in Ohio. After locating in Dayton he continued in the tobacco business and has retired from active business only within the last three years. Mr. Nixon shipped the first car load of tobacco out of Dayton, over the Dayton Sandusky railroad. This was in 1853, when that was the only railroad in the city. Mr. Nixon, becoming interested in the manufacture of spraying apparatus, was the first in the United States to make a specialty thereof.
In 1860 A. C. Nixon became engaged in the tobacco business with his father, since whose retirement from active business he has carried it on alone. Abram H. Nixon is the oldest dealer in cigar leaf tobacco west of the Allegheny mountains and is well known all over the country, as a man of probity and integrity. A long career of honorable business activity has rendered Mr. Nixon's life a worthy example for the emulation of the young men of the present day.
From Centennial Portrait and Biographical Record of the City of Dayton and of Montgomery County, Ohio, A. W. Bowen & Co., 1897