Martin Russell Thayer

Martin Russell Thayer.

Martin Russell Thayer (January 27, 1819 – October 14, 1906) was a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania.

Early life

Martin Russell Thayer was born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, near the city limits of Petersburg, Virginia. He attended the Mount Pleasant Classical Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Amherst College. He moved with his father to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1837. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia in 1840. He studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1842 and commenced practice in Philadelphia.

Public service

Thayer was a commissioner to revise the revenue laws of Pennsylvania in 1862. He was elected as a Republican to the Thirty-eighth and Thirty-ninth Congresses, during which he served on the committee on the bankrupt law and was the chairman of the United States House Committee on Private Land Claims. He declined to be a candidate for re-election in 1866, and resumed the practice of law.

Thayer was judge of the district court of Philadelphia from 1867 to 1874, and served as president judge of the court of common pleas of Philadelphia from 1874 until his resignation in 1896. In 1873 he was appointed on the board of visitors to West Point, and wrote the report. (Some 40 years earlier, his cousin Sylvanus Thayer had been superintendent of West Point.) He was elected by the judges of the common pleas court prothonotary of Philadelphia in 1896. He also engaged in literary pursuits. He died in Philadelphia in 1906 and is interned in St. James the Less Church Cemetery.

Works

• The Duties of Citizenship (Philadelphia, 1862)
• The Great Victory: its Cost and Value (1865)
• The Law considered as a Progressive Science (1870)
• On Libraries (1871)
• The Life and Works of Francis Lieber (1873)
• The Battle of Germantown (1878)

References

• Martin Russell Thayer at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• The Political Graveyard
•  "Thayer, Sylvanus". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1889. 

External links

• Martin Russell Thayer at Find a Grave

United States House of Representatives
Preceded by William M. Davis	Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania's 5th congressional district 1863-1867	Succeeded by Caleb N. Taylor

Persondata
Name	Thayer, Martin Russell
Alternative names
Short description	American politician
Date of birth	January 27, 1819
Place of birth
Date of death	October 14, 1906
Place of death