Fayette County PA Archives Biographies.....Crossland, Greenbury June 16, 1813 - ????
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Marta Burns marta43@juno.com September 1, 2024, 10:17 am

Source: Gresham and Wiley, 1889: Biographical & Portrait Cyclopedia, Fayette Co, PA, pg 581
Author: John H. Gresham & Samuel T. Wiley

    Greenbury Crossland of Uniontown must be ranked markedly 
among those worthy men generally known as "self-made, strong 
and individuate in their characteristics, and who build 
their own monuments of fortune and reputation.  Mr 
Crossland, the son of Elijah Crossland and Catherine Smith 
Crossland, was born at Connellsville, June 16, 1813, and 
moved with his parents to Uniontown in 1822, where he has 
ever since resided, having occupied his present domicile 
thirty four years.  At twelve years of age he went to work 
at twelve and a half cents per day with George W Miller on a 
farm where he remained a while.  His literary education was 
obtained from three or four short terms of schooling under 
the tuition of William Thompson and others long before the 
common schools of Pennsylvania were instituted; but his 
father being a butcher and horse dealer, young Crossland got 
his principal training in the meat shop and by driving 
horses to the eastern cities.
    On the first day of January, 1833, he married Sarah 
Stearns with whom he has lived happily for nearly half a 
century.  In April, 1833, he commenced business as a butcher 
on a capital of twenty three dollars, ten of which were 
furnished by his wife, and has never received a dollar by 
bequest, or in any way save through his labor or business 
transactions.  At the time of his early operations as a 
butcher, it was his custom to take a wheelbarrow at one 
o'clock in the morning , a wheel, his wife helping him by 
pulling with a rope tied to the barrow, a side of beef from 
the slaughter house to the market house, where all meat was 
sold in those days.  The first year he made three hundred 
dollars, and bought a log house and the lot on which it 
stood, the latter being the one on which now stands the 
house occupied by T J King.
    He continued butchering, gradually increasing in 
prosperity until about 1841, when he commenced buying cattle 
to sell in the eastern market, a business he has followed 
mainly ever since.  For about fourteen years he was a 
partner in business with Charles McLaughlin, late of Dunbar, 
but did not make the business remunerative until he engaged 
in it alone about 1856, since which time his march has been 
steadily onward in the line of fortune.
    In 1847 he bought of Charles Brown a farm of 104 acres 
whereon he has since lived, the first purchase of real 
estate which now constitutes him an extensive land 
proprietor; his domains covering over seven hundred acres in 
the vicinity of Uniontown, all valuable alike for 
agriculture and containing vast stores of mineral wealth.
    Mr Crossland's excellent judgment of weights and 
measures is a matter of popular notoriety, and it is said 
that he can guess at any time within five pounds of the 
weight of a fat steer, which probably accounts for much of 
his success in the cattle business.  His strength of purpose 
and moral firmness are remarkable, and he has never been led 
into the visionary and impracticable.  His knowledge of 
human nature is good, he seldom erring in his judgments of 
men, and it is said never making mistakes in his investments 
in property.
    Mr Crossland is in religion an ardent Methodist, and it 
is due to him to add that his neighbors accord to him the 
virtue of believing the faith he professes.  He and his wife 
joined the Methodist church in Uniontown, January 1, 1845, 
and have both continued to this time active members thereof. 
 He has been for twenty five years past a liberal 
contributor to the support of the ministry and the 
benevolent enterprises of the church.

Additional Comments:
Originally submitted 2000.

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