Walter Ellsworth Roberts
"All are architects of fate
Working in these walls of time;
Some with massive deeds and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme;
For the structure that we raise,
Time is with material filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build."
It was upon the twenty-fourth day of February, 1870, that Walter Ellsworth Roberts received the first block from Time with which to build the structure of his life. He has not yet built with "massive deeds and great," nor with "ornaments of rhyme." Though fully as well has he built with the high prize of life, that crowning fortune of a man, which is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which ever finds him in employment and happiness.
He was the youngest son of a family of eleven children, born to Isaac and Lucinda E. Roberts. His ancestry will be found in the sketch of Lincoln J. Roberts, his brother. His parents, with two children, came from Virginia to Adams County, Ohio, in 1851. They purchased land in the northern part of Winchester Township, where the subject of this sketch was born and where he still resides. His childhood days were spent much the same as those of most boys upon a farm, where many people think that what boys do on a farm is of no consequence. A careful observer would see, as Charles Dudley Warner has so well expressed in his book, "Being a Boy," that "a farm without a boy would very soon come to grief."
His education was received in the District school which he attended until seventeen years of age. He then attended the North Liberty Academy and the Garret Biblical Institute of Evanston, Illinois, where his standing in his classes was always good, having never received a grade under ninety per cent, in any study.
He united with the Seaman Methodist Episcopal Church on February 23, 1893, and was licensed a local preacher by the Quarterly Conference of Winchester charge in January, 1894. He has twice been chosen to represent his local church in the Lay Electoral Conferences, the first in 1895, at Hamilton, Ohio, and the next in 1899, at Dayton, Ohio. He has taken an active part in the Farmers' Institutes of the county, having been elected President of one session of the Institute at North Liberty, Ohio. Since 1895, he has been prominently identified with the Sabbath School work of the county, having charge of the Normal Department, and was the first Normal Secretary elected in the county. In November, 1898, at Russellville. Ohio, he assisted in organizing a Normal Department in the Sabbath School work in Brown county, and enrolled the first student in that county, Mrs. Sallie Webster, a missionary to Santiago, Chili, S. A.
Mr. Roberts is actively engaged in farming, having an attractive and delightful home on a farm of two hundred and twenty-six acres. He is a constant reader and a great lover of books. His library is one of the largest and best in the county, and all who call at Greenway Farm will be most hospitably received and entertained and find in Mr. Roberts a gentleman of delightful social qualities.
From History of Adams County, Ohio from its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time - by Nelson W. Evans and Emmons B. Stivers - West Union, Ohio - Published by E. B. Stivers - 1900