David Shields

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Husband David Shields ^{1 2}

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           Died: Aft 1915
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         Father: Thomas L. Shields (1809-1879) 2 3
         Mother: Amelia Neville Chaplin (1812-      ) 3 4 5

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Wife

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Children

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General Notes: Husband - David Shields

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Civil War: he enlisted in Co. F, 63d P. V. I. He participated in many battles, and was promoted to captain. The last two years of service he was a personal aid-de-camp of Gen. Alexander Hays; was honorably discharged before he was twenty years old for wounds received in action.

After attending the public and private schools near his Pennsylvania home, he became a student in Jefferson College. His academic course was little more than under way when war between the north and the south advanced beyond the stage of threatening danger and became a terrible reality. He entered the ranks of Company F, Sixty-third Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, as a private, and advanced through the grades of corporal, sergeant and second lieutenant to the rank of captain, receiving his commission in November, 1862, through Special Order No. 9, serving in that capacity until his disablement and subsequent honorable discharge, dated June 9, 1864. Returning to his home, Captain Shields was for ten years engaged in the manufacture of woolen goods in New Brighton, Pennsylvania, the company with which he was identified being the Keystone Woolen Manufacturing Company. After withdrawing from this line of endeavor he engaged in the cultivation of the homestead, and there for more than twenty-eight years he conducted experiments in the perfection of an ideal fertilizer. For twenty-seven years he endeavored to procure from coal a fertilizer that could be obtained cheaply enough for commercial purposes, reasoning that, coal being a vegetable production, it should in some form be valuable in plant fertilization. During all this time he did not attain success, the solution, if one lies along that line, eluding him persistently. At the end of this twenty-seven years of experiment he transferred his operations to fire clay, with which all coal is underlain, and from that substance he produced a fertilizer of desirable qualities at a price moderate enough to permit of its general use. This he protected with patent rights and recently arranged a series of tests with fertilizers manufactured in England, his product being awarded the victory in each case, its action upon plant life inducing a steady, vigorous growth and increasing the productive power thereof. The composition of this fertilizer is in the following proportion, seventy per cent. fireclay, twenty per cent. powdered coal, and ten per cent. salts of water. This last ingredient is procured twelve hundred feet below the surface of the earth, the properties that make it of value in the fertilizer having been taken from the soil as the water sank from the surface. The fertilizer was placed on the market, and upon the authority of persons competent to judge should prove an immediate success, its use being universal and its value to agriculturists almost beyond comprehension. Its perfection represents many hours and days of seemingly hopeless search on the part of Captain Shields, and in finally reaching the goal for which he strove, he placed his name among those honored for their accomplishments in the arts of peace, as he gave it position among those loyal and valiant in the business of war. Captain Shields was a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union Veteran Legion, and wore the decoration of the Loyal Legion.

1 Editor, The History of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Part II (Chicago, IL: A. W. Warner & Co., 1889), Pg 508.

2 John W. Jordan, LL.D., Genealogical and Personal History of Western Pennsylvania (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1915), Pg 954.

3 Editor, The History of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Part II (Chicago, IL: A. W. Warner & Co., 1889), Pg 431, 508.

4 Editor, Memoirs of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Vol. I (Madison, WI: Northwestern Historical Assosciation, 1904), Pg 360.

5 John W. Jordan, LL.D., Genealogical and Personal History of Western Pennsylvania (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1915), Pg 26, 954.