Elias W. Leavenworth
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Elias Warner Leavenworth (December 20, 1803 - November 25, 1887) was a United States Representative from New York. Born in Canaan, New York, he moved with his parents to Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1806. He attended the Hudson Academy and was graduated from Yale College in 1824; he studied law in Great Barrington and in the Litchfield Law School from 1825 to 1827. He was was admitted to the bar in 1827 and practiced in Syracuse, New York until 1850, when he abandoned the practice of law because of ill health. He passed through the various grades and was appointed brigadier general of militia in 1836. He was president of Syracuse village from 1839 to 1841 and in 1846 and 1847, and was mayor of the town in 1849, 1850, 1859, and 1860.
Leavenworth was a member of the New York State Assembly in 1850 and 1857, and was Secretary of State of New York in 1854 and 1855. He was president of the Republican State convention in 1860 and was commissioner for the United States under the convention with New Granada in Washington, D.C., in 1861 and 1862. He was appointed president of the board of commissioners to locate the State asylum for the blind and a trustee of the State asylum for the insane in 1865, and was a member of the New York and New Jersey Boundary Line Commission in 1875. Leavenworth was elected as a Republican to the Forty-fourth Congress, holding office from March 4, 1875 to March 3, 1877. He declined to be a candidate for renomination in 1876 and resumed business activities in Syracuse; he died there in 1887. Interment was in Oakwood Cemetery.
