William Aiken    

William Aiken was born in Mount Pleasant township, this county, a son of Joseph and Rose Ann (McGouch) Aiken, the former of whom was the progenitor of this line of Aikens in America. This Joseph Aiken was born in the seaport town of Coleraine, in the county of Londonderry, in the province of Ulster, Ireland, and was there trained to the trade of weaver, a fabricator of fine linen. He became an ardent and active member of Wolfe Tone’s historic Society of United Irishmen, organized in 1791 for the purpose of procuring parliamentary reforms in behalf of Ireland, and which was one of the influential factors in bringing about the bloody Irish rebellion of 1798. For his activities in that movement Joseph Aiken came under the ban of proscription and his small property was confiscated by the British. With his three brothers he fled to America and was for a time located in Adams county, this state, later coming to Washington county and settling in Canton township, where he took up weaving and was thus engaged until presently he bought a farm and retired. He died in 1843 and is buried in the North Buffalo churchyard.… This pioneer’s son, William Aiken, was trained to the vocation of weaving and tailoring and in due time became a merchant tailor. He was an expert in his line and when the McKee factory was established in McKee’s Rocks he was employed as the designer of the first clothing turned out there. Upon his retirement he bought a farm in the Coolville neighborhood over in Athens county, Ohio, and there spent his last days. He was a stanch democrat and was a steward in the Methodist Episcopal church.

Though he was but seventeen years of age when the Civil war broke out, John Aiken was four years in the service of the Union army and rendered service until the close of the war, being mustered out in 1865, a first lieutenant, Twenty-ninth United States Infantry. With the money saved from his soldier’s pay he paid his initial tuition in Washington and Jefferson College and entered upon his studies there with a view to preparation for the law, but his limited finances did not see him through and he was compelled to leave college before he had finished the course. Under the capable local preceptorship of Alexander Wilson, in Washington, he finished his reading in law and on December 13, 1869, was admitted to the bar and entered upon the practice of his profession in Washington, a profession he followed the remainder of his life and in which he became quite successful, long having been regarded as one of the leaders of the bar and one of the most influential citizens of the county. For years Mr. Aiken was a member of the board of trustees of Washington and Jefferson College, a member of the directorate of the Washington Refining Company, Washington County Fire Insurance Company, First National Bank of Washington, a director of the Citizens Water Company and one of the organizers of and a director of the Electric Light Company. He was an influential figure in the councils of the republican party in this district and was an elder of the congregation of the First Presbyterian church and for years the teacher of the students’ Bible class in the Sunday school of that church. John Aiken died on March 17, 1894. His widow survived him for a little more than thirty years, her death occurring on August 21, 1924, she then being almost seventy-nine years of age.

History of Washington County, Pennsylvania, 1926; Forrest, Earle Robert, Chicago: S.J. Clarke Pub. Co., page 218-220.  Search Hundreds of 1880s-1890s Pennsylvania County History Books for biographies and historical information on your ancestors.  View the book page images on line and print them out for your genealogy file!  Free Access to the old history books - plus birth & death records, census images and ALL other records at ancestry.com.