Algernon S. Paddock

(1830-1897) lived at Omaha and Beatrice. Lawyer, politician, was two-term U.S. Senator who in 1891 introduced pure food legislation and was later vindicated by passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 with enforcement by a federal organization that became known in 1931 as the Food and Drug Administration; considered a valuable member of the Utah Commission which was formed to allay the practice of polygamy through governmental process; appointed by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln as secretary of Nebraska territory from 1861 to 1867, but declined appointment by U.S. President Andrew Johnson in 1868 as governor of Wyoming. Consult Beatrice Daily Express obituary, October 18, 1897, p. 1 and Thomas W. Tipton, Forty Years of Nebraska at Home and in Congress (Nebraska State Historical Society, 1902) 287-304 and Dictionary of American Biography, Vol 14 (1934) 133 and Allen L. Shepherd, "Algernon Sidney Paddock: A Biography," Master's thesis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1967.

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