M.A. Raney

By 1900, Manley A. Raney was the editor of the Marengo Republican newspaper and was a prominent member in the town. It comes as no surprise that Raney was elected to serve on the library board and went on to serve as the library board president when the library was built.  He had been instrumental in the acquisition of the library grant of $10,000 from Andrew Carnegie.  He had met Carnegie in New York, when Raney was attending a parade as the Commander-in-Chief of Patriarchs Militant in I.O.O.F.[1]  He then wrote to him on February 14, 1903, and again on March 2, 1903.[2]  Raney published in his newspaper that the town was the smallest in the country to receive that much money to build a library.[3]

Manley A. Raney was born May 1857 in Indiana[4]. He was married to Francisca Raney in 1877. Together they had five children: Clyde, Catherine, Rosco, Earl and Millie. Raney passed away in 1914 and is interred in the IOOF Cemetery in Marengo[5].

-Ellen Mays

[1] Pauline Lillie, Marengo the County Seat Marengo the Town: A History, (Marceline: Walsworth Publishing, 1984).

[2] Carnegie Corporation of New York Records, reel 18.

[3] I was unable to find which issue of Raney’s newspaper stated this. Sources consulted were: Marengo the County Seat Marengo the Town: A History as well as newspapers from 1902.

[4] Ancestry.com, U.S., Find A Grave Index, 1600-Current: Manley A. Raney, [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2018. <www.ancestry.com> . Accessed 4 Nov 2018.

[5] Ancestry.com, 1900 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2018. <www.ancestry.com> . Accessed 4 Nov 2018.

[6] Ancestry.com, 1910 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2018. <www.ancestry.com> . Accessed 4 Nov 2018.

[7] James C. Dinwiddie, History of Iowa County, Iowa, and Its People, vol. 1, (Chicago: S.J. Clarke Publishing, 1915), p. 230.