Cleveland Millionaire, Jeptha Wade

A Cleveland Millionaire Who Saw

California.

The people in Ohio know Jeptha H. Wade much better that he is known elsewhere. He lives in one of the finest houses in Cleveland, and occasionally runs over to New York. He was there recently at the Fifth-avenue Hotel. Worth $8,0000,000 or $10,000,000, he enjoys the good things of this life with all the zest of a luxury-loving expert. He can remember very well, for it is not so many years ago, when he had not money enough to pay his board bills. A poverty-stricken portrait painter, with no particular special talent to recommend his work, Jeptha H. Wade wandered about the West in a precarious livelihood here and there, until he was well on toward forty years of age. He painted a picture one day for a telegraph operator in the early period of the system, and for his pay was taught the use of the instruments. The he was hired by the company, and began to earn $50 a month. He held some stock in two or three short lines of telegraph when the Western Union was formed out of all the united lines, and he had gathered in some money out of his speculations in land. He was a valuable man and he was soon in the directory of the great company, and finally became its President. While President of the Western Union he was the chief promoter of the Overland line of telegraph to the California Coast. He made his fortune in that venture. He visited California in the summer of 1860, made arrangements to absorb the California State telegraph lines and used the latter organization to construct the Overland line as far east as Salt Lake, where the lines were joined in the latter part of 1861. The first news dispatch received over the completed line announced the killing of General E. D. Baker, at the Ball's Bluff disaster. Soon after the Overland line was completed, President Wade undertook for his company the gigantic task of building a telegraph from California northward through Oregon, Washington Territory, British Columbia, Alaska, and across Behring Straits to Siberia, in Russia, and so on across the Continent of Asia to a junction with the telegraph systems of Europe. Great progress had been made in carrying out this project, when the successful laying of the Atlantic cable put an end to it as an enterprise promising any profit.