John Horace Kent (1828 - 1888)
Born at Barnstead (NH); died at Concord (NH).
Businessman, newspaper reporter and editor, active in California & NH politics.
Portrait by (attr.) U.D. Tenney, probably 1874.
Presented to the State c.1874.

Kent (1828 - 1888) was born at Barnstead (NH) and died at Concord (NH). Orphaned when he was sixteen, Kent went to live with his aunt (mother's sister) and her husband, Rev. Moses Howe, at New Bedford (MA). When he completed his schooling Kent went to New York City for two years, where he worked in an "wholesale establishment." Then he headed to western Pennsylvania, to work with his uncle (mother's brother) Daniel C. Dearborn at a "steam tannery."

Word of the California "gold strike" reached Kent in 1849, and he headed for the next steamer to San Francisco. Waiting at Panama for a place on another steamer, Kent met a young Boston printer. The two young men started a newspaper, the Panama Star, which lasted for many years; but Kent sold out and arrived at San Francisco in October 1849. A month later he cast his first vote in an election, in favor of the new state constitution and against slavery in the new state.

California was a violent place in its early years as a state. Kent worked as secretary to David C. Broderick, head of the anti-slavery faction, when Broderick was killed in a duel with David C. Terry, head of the pro-slavery forces and a California Suprme Court Justice. Kent served on the first Committee of Vigilance in San Francisco; the "vigilantes" conducted summary trials and hanged several convicted men while Kent was a member of the Committee.

Kent made several trips back to New Bedford (MA) from California. In 1852 he returned to San Francisco with Adele Penniman of New Bedford as his wife. The young couple had two children, one of whom had died, when the Civil War began in 1860. Kent sent his wife and child home by steamer; then he signed on as a newspaper reporter to several California newspapers and headed north to a new "gold strike" at the Fraser River, in British Columbia. The telegraph was new in British Columbia; Kent would get news from stagecoaches coming off the Great Plains and send it to San Francisco by wire.

Kent headed home on the Overland Stage. He stayed home for a year, then volunteered for the 43rd Massachusetts Infantry. Fighting with the Grand Army of the Potomac, Kent was "mustered out" as a sergeant in 1863. Then he was appointed a special agent for the Provost Marshall, Department for the District of New Hampshire. At the age of thirty-nine, Kent returned to the Granite State he had left in 1843.

As a veteran and a Lincoln supporter, Kent was rewarded with a clerkship at Portsmouth (NH) Navy Yard. He was elected Portsmouth City Marshall for two five-year terms (1867, 1871); then (Fall 1872) Kent was made a Special Officer and Claims Agent for the Eastern Railroad. In 1873 Kent was made Special Inspector of Customs in the District of New Hampshire, and in 1874 he became Chief of Customs for all of New England. Headquarterd at Boston (MA), Kent kept a Portsmouth address, and was elected a State Representative (1873, 1874). Governor Cheney (1875 - 1877) made Kent a colonel on his staff, and in July 1876 Cheney appointed Kent Sheriff of Rockingham County, a powerful patronage job. Kent was elected to a second term by popular vote in 1881.

Following completion of his second term as Sheriff of Rockingham, Kent was made Warden of the new State Prison. He died a year later, after an eventful sixty years.

References: D. Hamilton Hurd, History of Rockingham and Strafford Counties...(1882), pp. 110-113.