John Lowrie Mateer

Notes:

Zechariah G. Stewart was born and reared at New Alexandria, Pennsylvania. He
studied medicine and settled to practice at Murrayville, where he was living in
1830 when he married Jane Laird. Dr. Stewart lived in Murraysville until 1857,
when he removed with his family to Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania, to educate his
children. He died there in 1863 from typhoid fever contracted while acting as
a volunteer surgeon on the Gettysburg battlefield in the Civil War.

At the urging of his brother Calvin, John Lowrie Mateer studied printing,
lithographing and other publication processes in order to take charge of the
Presbyterian Press at Shanghai, China. He served in China from 1872 until his
health broke down in 1876. Then he returned to the States and bought a farm in
northwest Missouri.

After his marriage in 1879 John continued farming for about two years. From
1883 until 1885 he was in Front Royal, Virginia, where he engaged in the
manufacture of molasses "from sorghum by means of sulfurous acid." Then he
spent two years in Onargo, Illinois, in the hardware business with his brother
Will, and six years selling sewing machines in Burlington, Iowa. When his wife
died in 1893 after a long bout with consumption, John L. was himself just
recovering from typhoid fever. Weak, exhausted and miserably discouraged by a
succession of commercial misadventures, he was neverless firmly convinced "that
God had for me yet some special work to do for Him."

After a year spent in visiting family and friends across the country, John with
his second wife returned to China to take over the management of the American
Board Press in Peking, where he died just a few weeks before the Boxer
Rebellion.

During the sojourn in America between his two trips to China, John L. Mateer
had begun the collection of material for a Mateer genealogy. In a letter from
Peking, written 16 March 1900 to Major Will A. McTeer he says, "The
arrangements which I made before leaving home for printing the family history
were not carried out. We shall be going home in two years or less and then I
hope to do it." But he died less than six weeks after the date of this
writing.

No children.
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Reference:
McTeer - Mateer Families of Cumberland County Pennsylvania, Frances Davis
McTeer, 1975, p 112.

John married Jane Eliza Stewart 23 Dec 1879, Murraysville, Pennsylvania. Jane (daughter of Zechariah G. Stewart and Jane Laird) was born 25 Oct 1848; died 1 Apr 1893, Burlington, Iowa. [Group Sheet]

John married Mary La Rhue Sellers 14 Aug 1894, Beulah, Pueblo, Colorado. [Group Sheet]