Degree Recipient

Life Experience

Isaac Anderson Rice was born in Kentucky, moved to Waveland, Indiana, and attended Indiana College (now IU) where he earned his law degree at age twenty-eight. He was at various times a printer, a postmaster, an attorney, and a politician. He served in the Indiana State Senate for one a half two-year terms.

While serving his second term in the state legislature, he died suddenly of congestive chill. His fellow legislators drafted a resolution in his honor, in which they said, "in all his past private, professional and political life, he ever mainfested that high, honorable and gentlemanly bearing which endeared him to the hearts of all who knew him." A eulogist unconnected to his professional life wrote, "he was a pure-minded, honorable man, and his loss will be deeply felt."

Marriage and Family

Isaac Anderson Rice was the seventh of eight children. His father died when he was two years old. The year after he graduated from IU, he married Elizabeth Jane Rice, his first cousin. Her famous father had the same name (Isaac Anderson Rice). Rice and his wife Elizabeth had four children. Elizabeth died in 1857, with Rice left to care for four children from ages newborn to nine. When Rice himself died three years later, they were orphaned.

Rice's daughter Felicia grew to adulthood and married; she and her husband moved to the country of Persia as Christian missionaries, and all five of their children were born in what would later become Iran. They have several living descendants.

Rice's identically named father-in-law was born four months after the death of his father, Daniel Rice (the grandfather of the younger Rice and also of his wife), who was a war hero and about whom tales were written of his teenage exploits in the American Revolutionary War. The elder Isaac Rice was born at Fort Rice, a wilderness settlement his father helped to build. By the time he was eight years old, Rice had nine siblings ranging in age from one month to twenty-five years. In 1806, their extended family moved west. Some family members stopped in Kentucky, while the others continued onward to the Indiana Territory. The elder Rice was first a carpenter by trade, and, as one biographer wrote, he “became very proficient, so much so indeed that he could upon demand turn out with equal facility a house or mill, a bridge or boat, a cradle or a coffin.” In 1827, Rice moved to what is now Waveland, Indiana, at least five years before it was incorporated as a town. He became a farmer for a time. In the 1840s, after his sister, Margaret, died along with her husband and all six of their children in Kentucky of “the fever,” he co-founded the Waveland Academy for “religious training to the pious youth for the Gospel ministry.” The school became prosperous and well attended until many of its students enlisted in the Civil War, after which, the school declined until its closing in 1879. The elder Rice died in 1852, just three years after the beginning of the Academy.

Interesting Anecdote

Rice was the Republican candidate for Congress for his district when he died, three months before the election. A new candidate was chosen in his place, in time for the vote (Alfred Smith White, who would go on to win the election but then died in 1864 after serving only one term).

References

1. Ancestry.com
2. ancientfaces.com/photo/isaac-anderson-rice/ (photo credit) 
3. Bromwell, Henrietta A. (1910) The Bromwell Genealogy (Denver, CO: self-published)
4. Chapman Brothers (1893) Portrait and Biographical Record of Montgomery, Parke and Fountain Counties Indiana Containing Biographical Sketches of Prominent and Representative Citizens, Together with Biographies and Portraits of All the Presidents of the United States (Chicago, IL: self-published)
5. Crawfordsville Weekly Journal 08/23/1860 and other issues during election
6. The Evansville Daily Journal 08/04/1860 and other issues during election
7. Findagrave.com
8. ingenweb.org/intippecanoe/bio_Albert_White.html
9. Otis, James (1898) Corporal ‘Lige’s Recruit: A Story of Crown Point and Ticonderoga (New York: A. L. Burt)
10. Thomas, John Hardin (1914) “The Academies of Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History December (Vol. 10 #4) pp. 331 – 358
11. Waveland Independent 05/02/1902
12. Wikipedia
13. wikitree.com/wiki/
14. Wylie