"Portrait and Biographical Record of Hunterdon and Warren counties, New Jersey"
Chapman Publishing Company, New York and Chicago, 1898
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JOHN FRANKS has made his home in Phillipsburg for about thirty years, and is now
agent and train dispatcher for the Delaware,
Lackawanna & Western Railroad, for this town
and also for Easton, across the river. He is actively interested in several local enterprises, being
a man who believes in fostering home industries,
both in a narrow and in the wider or national
signification of the term, for he is a Republican,
and an eloquent exponent of the party principles.
He is president of the Warren County Gas Light
Company; is treasurer of the No. 4 Building and
Loan Association of Phillipsburg; is a director of
the People's Water Company of this place, and is
the owner of a paying coal business. During the
campaign preceding the election of President Garfield he organized a Garfield Republican Club,
paying all of the expenses incident to the maintenance of the same for three months, and in many
ways was of great assistance to the party. In the
fraternities he is a Mason, belonging to Independent Lodge No. 42, F. & A. M.; Eagle Chapter No. 12, R. A. M., and DeMolay Commandery
No. 6, the two last mentioned being of Washington, this county.
The birth of John Franks took place in the
town of Changewater, Hunterdon County, N. J.,
June 4, 1840. His father, George Franks, was a
native of England, and came to the United States
in 1 82 1, landing in the city of Baltimore, and lived
in that neighborhood a few years. He built the
Changewater mill and operated it in 1852.
Later he removed to Newark, where he engaged
in the manufacture of portable gas machines, and
still later he ran a mill in Stanhope, Sussex
County, N. J. In 1864, when superintendent of
the Sussex Railroad, he was killed in a collision.
His good wife, the mother of our subject, had died
twenty years before, in 1844, leaving six children.
Of these, Henry and Anna, wife of Lawrence McKinney, are residents of Newark, N. J.; Mary,
who is unmarried, and Jennie, wife of John Clark,
reside in Washington, D. C. A brother of George
Franks is a retired officer of the British army, and
was a participant in every battle of the Crimean
war.
Leaving school when but ten years of age, John
Franks had meager opportunities of obtaining an
education, but by reading and study, as well as by
keen observation of men and events that have
come beneath his notice, he is to-day a well-informed man. He was forced to begin earning
his own livelihood at a time when he should have
been in school, and up to 1852 he worked in his
father's mill. Afterwards he learned the trade
of a locksmith at Newark, N. J., and remained
there until 1856. From that date until the outbreak of the war he was his father's right hand
man in the Stanhope mill. In 1861 he enlisted
in Serrill's First New York Company of Engineers, and served all through the long and trying
war period. He was one of the first of the white
troops to enter Richmond April 3, 1865, on the
day of the evacuation of the city by the Confederates. He was honorably discharged with the
rank of captain in July, 1865.
On returning from years of struggle and hardship on southern battlefields, most men found it
difficult in the extreme to collect their scattered
business energies and to settle down to the humdrum ways of peace, and so it was in the case of
Mr. Franks. He was not long idle, however,
but accepted the first employment that presented
itself by which he might honestly earn his living.
He became a laborer on the tracks of the Morris
& Essex Division of the Delaware, Lackawanna
& Western Railroad. In 1866 he was promoted
to be foreman of a gang of workmen, and a little
later he was made clerk in the freight office of the
company at Hackettstown. Then he was given
a position as an extra agent, and thus, from one
place to another, he was gradually promoted, until in February, 1868, he was sent to take charge
of the coal department at this point, which
handled about two thousand cars of coal a day.
In 1872 he was given the additional work of
freight master, and in these two capacities he
served for twenty years. In 1892 he was made
agent and train dispatcher, and still occupies this
responsible post. He was married April 9, 1864,
to Isabel, daughter of Francis D. Lawrence, of
Sussex County, N. J.
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