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John E. Haggart
Born on a farm in St. Lawrence county. New York, April 19th, 1846, a son of John and Mable (Northrup) Haggart, the early boyhood of John E. Haggart was spent in a manner similar to that of most boys raised on a farm in those days. Living at home and attending the country schools until about seventeen years of age, in 1863 he entered the employ of the government in coast construction work, and spent a year and a half with the army of the Potomac, after which he returned to the home of his parents where he stayed until 1867, when he came west, starting on his trip across the plains from Leavenworth, Kansas. The following winter he spent in Colorado and New Mexico, going from there to what is now Wyoming, where he conducted a lumber yard for the Union Pacific railroad until 1870. In 1871 he landed in the territory of Dakota and took up a claim on the Sheyenne river about six miles west of the present city of Fargo, which claim he owned until his death, having added to it until for many years he had been operating a farm of two thousand acres. In 1875 he was married to Miss Betsy J. Hertsgaard and to them were born nine children�Gilbert W., Mable E., Maggie I., John C., Estella M., Alexander M., George E., William H. R., and Daniel. Mr. Haggart was the first man to be made a Mason in what is now the state of North Dakota, being initiated into the order in 1873, since which time he has been made a Royal Arch Mason, a Knight Templar, a thirty-second degree Scottish Rite Mason, and a member of the A. A. O. of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. A life-long republican, Mr. Haggart held many offices of honor and trust. He was elected the first sheriff of Cass county in 1874, which office he held with conspicuous ability for twelve years. In 1889 he was elected to the state senate, of which body he was a prominent and influential member until 1898 when he resigned to accept an appointment as United States marshal for the state of North Dakota, which office he held to the time of his death. During his long residence in the state John E. Haggart was called upon to fill many other public positions, particularly during the formative period in the history of the state just after its admission into the union, to all of which he brought the same sterling qualities of honest ability that characterized his private life and made him a man honored and trusted by his friends and business associates. No sketch of the life of John E. Haggart would be complete without mention of the Agricultural College. Himself a farmer, he early saw the benefits of such an institution to the state, and of all the men in the senate who took a deep interest in the Agricultural College there was not one who felt more closely associated with the institution than he did. As senator from the third judicial district he wielded an influence that secured its location at Fargo, and from that time on, during his long service in the senate, he bent every energy to the up-building of an institution which he himself had fathered and which he lived to see become the benefit to the agricultural interests of the state that he had prophesied it would. A man of the strictest integrity and honesty, and of unusual ability, John E. Haggart was, withal, a man of so kindly and generous a disposition that to meet him was to know him and to know him was to love him. Dying suddenly in the early morning of Sept. 22, 1905, John E. Haggart passed from a busy life of care to that rest so long and so well earned, leaving behind a multitude of friends heart broken and sorrowing at what seemed, in that first hot grief, his untimely taking. From "Collections of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, Vol I"
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