Lake County Ohio GenWeb

Edgar W. Viall

This sketch was printed in the Willoughby Independent 21 October 1898 page 3.

It was transcribed and submitted by Cynthia Turk in 2010.

A Former Lake County Citizen.

The Oshkosh (Wis.) Times of October 9 [1898] issued a souvenir edition, which contains an account of the business interests of the city, sketches of prominent citizens with likenesses, etc. A good portrait of Edgar W. Viall, son of Mr. Jacob V. Viall of Willoughtby, accompanies the following sketch:

Edgar W. Viall, or "Ed.," as most everybody calls him, is one of the pioneer residents of the city of Oshkosh, and has been a prominent factor in its business life and prosperity almost during the city's entire history. From the wholesale grocery business he went into the newspaper business, purchasing the Oshkosh Times and making an Associated Press paper of it. Last spring Mr. Viall sold the paper to the Oshkosh Times Publishing Co., in which, however, he is a large stockholder.

Ed. Viall is noted throughout Oshkosh and northern Wisconsin, where he is well known, for his generosity and kindly disposition. When people want favors and their own intimate friends turn them down, they go go [sic] Ed. Viall and are aided. When actively engaged in business, he built up a wide-spread reputation for sagacity and liberal business intelligence not surpassed in this section. His skill and ability as an accountant have been as "household words" in Oshkosh.

Mr. Viall is a native of Ohio, and was 64 years old Friday last. He comes of a long-lived family. His father, who is 91, is hale and hearty and as bright and strong intellectually as a man of 35. The Vialls moved from New York to Ohio in 1815, and there being a lack of roads, made part of the journey from Buffalo to Cleveland on the shores of Lake Erie. Mr. Viall, the subject of this sketch, in turn migrated from Ohio to Wisconsin in 1857, where he and his estimable wife have always been popular and respected.