| Will Cumback Will Cumback was born in Franklin County, Indiana, March 24, 1829 and grew up on a farm. He was educated at Miami University and obtained his law degree from Cincinnati Law School. Cumback held various elective offices, including Congress (when he was 25), State Senator, Lieutenant-Governor. He also served as Collector of Internal Revenues. "During all these years of public service Mr. Cumback kept his literary tastes and capabilities alive and active, delivering lectures and writing for the press. He has not written largely in poetry, but his few poems are of such a hopeful nature that they leave the reader happier for having read them." [Benjamin Strattan Parker & Enos Boyd Heiney, Poets and Poetry of Indiana: A Representative Collection of the Poetry of Indiana During the First Hundred Years of Its History as Territory and State, 1800 to 1900 425 (New York: Silver, Burdett and Co., 1900)] Cumback's poem, "Memory's Banquet," appears in Edward Joseph, Indiana Writers of Poems and Prose (Chicago: Western Press Association, 1902), as well as in Poets and Poetry of Indiana. [Memory's Banquet] Cumback made his home at Greensburg, Indiana. [Thomas William Herringshaw, Herringshaw's Encyclopedia of American Biography of the Nineteenth Century 268 (Chicago: American Publishers' Assoc., 1898)("He taught school for ore or two years; attended the law school at Cincinnati, and adopted the legal profession . . .")] |
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