Joseph Wilkins Eylar
was born in Carlisle, Brown County, Ohio, March 11, 1847. Before he was a year old, his parents removed to Winchester, Ohio, where they resided until 1856, when they removed to Youngsville, where they resided until 1860, when they removed to West Union. Our subject attended public schools at Winchester, at Grace's Run near Youngsville, and at West Union. While in West Union, between terms of school, he went into the employment of Billings and Patterson, who were publishing the Democratic Union. In 1862, he went to Georgetown where he worked at the printer's trade under John G. Doran, publisher of the Southern Ohio Argus. In 1862, he went with his father in the army, acting as teamster and forage master. He was with Burnside's Army in East Tennessee in 1863. Just before the siege of Knoxville, Eylar was one of a party sent with dispatches from General Burnside to the commandant at Cumberland Gap, directing the forwarding of commissary supplies. The party carrying the dispatches went from Knoxville to the gap by a circuitous route and narrowly escaped capture by the rebels. They, however, delivered the dispatches safely, and from there young Eylar went home. That winter he spent in school and from there went into the office of the Democratic Union, at West Union. He remained there until the summer of 1865 when he went to Fayette County and worked in a hub and spoke factory until September when he returned to West Union and undertook to establish a Democratic newspaper in Adams County. He walked over the county canvassing for subscribers and on the nineteenth of January, 1866, he launched the Peoples' Defender on the troubled sea of journalism. As a newspaper, it was a success from the start. Mr. Eylar seemed to have a talent for newspaper work and was able to make the paper as good as it could be with the support he had in Adams County. The paper and its editor, Mr. Eylar, prospered right along.
In March, 1889, he was married to Mary Ellen Oldson, daughter of James R. Oldson, of West Union. He has had four children, Margaret Ann, William Allen, James Norton and Lotta Sinclare.
In 1876, Mr. Eylar was elected to the Legislature from Adams County as the representative of his party and re-elected in 1878. During his two terms, he secured the passage of more bills than any one who had ever preceded him in the representation of Adams County. made a record as a most efficient legislator.
He In 1890, after having published the Peoples' Defender successfully for twenty-four years, he sold it to Edward A. Crawford and removed to Georgetown, Ohio, where he purchased an interest in the Georgetown News Democrat and has been its editor and publisher ever since.
Mr. Eylar is a Democrat in the intensest sense of the word. While there may be, and doubtless are, Democrats whose faith in the tenets of their party is only sentimental, that is not the case with Mr. Eylar. His democracy is eighteen carats fine. He not only believes it, but he thinks, acts and lives it. The Defender under his management was an able newspaper. Many thought at times he was too pungent and sarcastic and sometimes too abusive, but his friends stood by him and he succeeded.
Mr. Eylar is a good friend, a good neighbor, a bad enemy, and a good citizen. He believes in the broad religion of humanity and practices it every day of his life. With the foundations he was able to lay in his boyhood and youth, he has made a superstructure with which he and his personal political friends can be well satisfied and of which they can be proud.
From History of Adams County, Ohio from its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time - by Nelson W. Evans and Emmons B. Stivers - West Union, Ohio - Published by E. B. Stivers - 1900