From "Standard History of Adams and Wells Counties, Indiana," Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1918, pp. 474-5.
SAMUEL MCCLEERY. For over sixty-five years the name McCleery has been identified with Wells County, where its associations are most honorable and where it is spoken with the respect due to success in business, public service and duty well performed.
The present Mr. Samuel McCleery is now a retired merchant and carpenter, and is a native of Bluffton, having been born on Wabash Street May 8, 1852. Many of his most active years were spent away from Bluffton, but he has always regarded it as his permanent home. His parents were Samuel and Mary (Forbes) McCleery. His father was born in County Antrim, Ireland, and his birthplace was a stone house known as Iva House. At the age of nineteen he came to the United States, first locating in Philadelphia, where he married a Miss Daugherty, who died in that city. Not long afterwards he came to Wooster in Wayne County, Ohio, and there married Mary Forbes. They were the parents of five children. The daughter Elizabeth was born in Wooster, Ohio, and is the widow of Lafayette Shinn, living at Montpelier, Indiana. The second child, William A. McCleery, was born at Edinburg, Ohio, and is now deceased. In 1849 the McCleery family came to Bluffton, and the first child born here was Charles McCleery in 1850, whose death occurred in 1916. Samuel McCleery, Sr., died at Bluffton in 1893. His second wife passed away in August, 1863.
Samuel McCleery, Sr., on coming to Bluffton was employed by the firm of Studabaker & Winters, and then started a shop of his own as a boot and shoe maker. He built up quite a business and had several men working under him. In 1856 he moved to the old town of Murray in Wells County, and lived in a log house there. He also conducted a tavern at Murray and built a shoe store there in 1859. In 1860, returning to Bluffton, he resumed his trade as shoemaker and in 1861 he erected the store room now occupied by W. H. Merriman on North Main Street, at the corner of Wabash Street. At one time he served as town marshal of Bluffton.
Samuel McCleery, Jr., grew up at Bluffton and remained at home until he was twenty-two years of age. In the meantime he had benefited by the instruction of the public schools. Concerning his early education it is interesting to recall the fact that he attended a school in the house where he now lives and which then stood at the northwest corner of West Market and Johnson streets. He was also a student in the first high school established at Bluffton.
Mr. McCleery learned the shoemakers' trade and followed it for eight years, but then took up work as a carpenter. He was employed in the bridge department of The Clover Leaf Railway in 1879, 1880 and 1881 and was then engaged in building bridges with the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railway for a year. In 1882 he went with the Wabash Railroad, and on May 26, 1886, he joined the Santa Fe Railway Company at Wichita, Kansas, and was in the bridge building department of that western railroad until 1900. From 1900 to 1903 he was connected with the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway Company and was superintendent of bridges and building over the entire road, a distance of over 500 miles. In October, 1903, Mr. McCleery returned to Bluffton and for several years concerned himself chiefly with looking after and repairing his property. In January, 1910, he engaged in the grocery business, but soon sold out and is now retired. Mr. McCleery has never married. He owns sixty acres of land at the old town of Murray, and has several properties in Bluffton, including a business room at the corner of Main and Wabash streets.
He is an active member of the Presbyterian Church, is affiliated with Bluffton Lodge No. 145, Free and Accepted Masons, and also with the Royal Arch Chapter and Council and is a past sachem of the Improved Order of Red Men. Politically he has always cast his vote as a stanch democrat.
[poster is not related to this family and has no further information]