Dr. Charles Merriman, 1304 Prairie Avenue, a realtor with offices in the Goodwin Block, has spent nearly all of his 78 years in Beloit. He was born in 1850. The home of his parents, Dr. and Mrs. Lewis Merriman, was on Fourth Street in the 900 block, which was torn down later to make way for an addition to the Yates-American Machine Company plant. Dr. Lewis Merriman came to Beloit in 1847, shortly after he had attended the ceremony of the laying of the corner stone at Beloit College.

He had been practicing medicine at Bloomington, Illinois, then a railroad town, but was so impressed by Beloit that he shortly afterwards came to this city to live. Mrs. Merriman’s parents were Yankees who had settled on the Isle of St. Francis in the St. Lawrence River and he was a graduate of Dartmouth. Charles Merriman grew up in Beloit attending Union School No. 2, “Old Stone Pile,” which was on the site of the present Parker School. He entered Beloit College, played baseball and was a member of the Beta Theta Pi Fraternity.

In 1878 he graduated from the College. For the first year after graduation, Dr. Merriman taught in an academy at Danville, Quebec. A year later he came back to Evansville, Wisconsin, as principal remaining there six years and then removing to Beloit where he was principal at Beloit High School for two years. On a Sunday evening after graduation exercises in 1896, he came home to find burglars ransacking his room. He fought and was shot. The bullet entered his neck, cut a nerve near the jugular vein so that his life was despaired of by the community.

From 1885 to 1887 Dr. Merriman studied medicine at Hannaman Medical College in Chicago. He went to Wabash, Indiana, for one year after his graduation, then returned to Beloit during 1890 to establish a practice and continued at the profession until 1897. Supplementing his association with schools and in medicine, Dr. Merriman served in public office He was superintendent of schools from 1891 to 1897, a member of the city council, health officer and in 1896 elected as representative to the state legislature.

In this period Dr. Merriman was appointed U.S. Consul at Brockville, Ontario, an important office in the beautiful Isles country. Following his duty as consul at Brockville, Dr. Merriman returned to Beloit to manage the real estate interests of Porter B. Yates. In this capacity more titles to houses, about 150, passed through his hands than through those of any other Beloit realtors except John Hackett and Horace White. Besides his duties as manager for Mr. Yates, Dr. Merriman served as a member of the school board, secretary of a building and loan association and as a member of the county board of supervisors.

He has retained this latter office since that time and has been secretary of the Citizen’s Alliance for 26 years. Mrs. Merriman was Mary H. Royce, who as a student of Beloit High School, had one of the best scholastic records ever established and was an honor student at Rockford College while a student there in 1889.

They have six children: 3 daughters, Kathryn (Mrs. Lee F. Clark), Elizabeth (Mrs. Fay Hulbert, Dorothy Merriman who is a teacher of history at Roosevelt Junior High School, 2 sons, Royce of the Richardson Roofing Company, Cincinnati, Ohio and Fayette L. Merriman with the F.W. Dodge Corporation, as office manager at Milwaukee. They are all graduates of Beloit College. Royce took a post graduate course in chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin and Fayette in Commerce there.