Casey, Thomas Willet

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Larry Turner, “CASEY, THOMAS WILLET,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/casey_thomas_willet_13E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Farmer, temperance advocate, journalist, publisher, and historian; b. 25 Oct. 1834 in Adolphustown Township, Upper Canada, only child of Willet W. Casey and Sarah Melissa Farley; m. 4 March 1857 Anne Empey, and they had five daughters and a son; d. 10 April 1903 in Napanee, Ont.
    • Thomas Willet Casey was born on the family farm at Casey Point, now Shermans Point, at the entrance to Hay Bay. From his early days he was imbued with his family’s loyalist heritage on the Bay of Quinte. His grandfather William Casey had fled Rhode Island during the American revolution and settled with a brother and sister at Adolphustown in 1786. Although there were Quakers in the family, William became a trustee of the Methodist Hay Bay chapel.
    •  In 1867 he carried the Liberal banner in Lennox in the first general election for the Ontario legislature. Described in the Napanee Standard as “a successful lecturer in temperance matters, hard of hearing, of no regular business habits, a good and well-meaning man, but ill suited to be your representative,” he was soundly defeated by John Stevenson. He lost again in 1875.
    • Casey was best known for his compulsive, lifelong crusade for temperance. In 1874 Casey had sold the family farm and become publisher and editor of the Napanee Express, a Reform newspaper which he sold two years later, perhaps as a result of financial difficulties. In 1889 and perhaps later he was publisher in Halifax of the Canadian Voice, founded by John Thomas Bulmer and the organ of the prohibition movement in the Maritimes.
    • When he was not writing about temperance, he travelled widely from Nova Scotia to the American Midwest, lecturing as a “Great Secretary” of the Templars. He found practical application for his ideals as an inspector under federal liquor-licensing legislation. Even his devotion to the cause could not, however, stem the decline of temperance lodges after 1890.
    • Casey made a lasting contribution to the study of local history in Ontario by collecting early records and documenting details of pioneer life. His interest had been stimulated by William Canniff’s History of the settlement of Upper Canada . . . (Toronto, 1869) and the Adolphustown centennial celebrations of 1884, to which he contributed. He was contemporary with several other antiquarians and historians who were looking into pioneering on the Bay of Quinte, among them Canniff Haight, Charles Canniff James, and James Henry Coyne.
    • Dedicated to his homeland and devoted to both his church and temperance, Casey was a farmer with a proud family tradition, a little education, a skilled pen and tongue, an interest in politics, and a zeal for ideals. When Walter Stevens Herrington was editing Casey’s voluminous scrapbooks for the Lennox and Addington Historical Society in 1911, he remembered Casey’s latter years and his hobby: “He loved to linger about the old grave-yards and ruminate on the experiences, the joys and sorrows of his ancestors whose ashes lay mouldering there.”
  • Grandson of Proven United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=1346
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/135901216/thomas-w-casey