Homer Pratt Brown, treasurer of the county of Oxford, and a native of Cattaraugus county, New York, was born February 13, 1822. His parents were Henry and Sarah (Pratt) Brown. His father was in the second war with England, fighting on the American side and subsequently becoming a British subject. In the infancy of Homer, the family moved to the Genesee valley, and spent several years at Avon, Livingston county, and Mendon, Monroe county, removing to Paris, Upper Canada, in 1835. There his mother died in 1837; his father at Woodstock, in 1866. Young Homer received an ordinary public school education, limited to the rudimentary branches; farmed till eighteen years old; then learned the trade of a molder at Paris, and after working two years as a journeyman, came to Woodstock in 1844. Here he started a foundry for himself, and followed that business, with fair success, until the spring of 1867, when he sold out. While thus employed he was in the town council several terms, a reeve equally as long, and mayor in 1861 was also connected with the volunteer militia; and a Lieutenant of the “Oxford rifles.” He has been a magistrate during the last sixteen or eighteen years, and treasurer of the county since June, 1869. He is a careful and eminently trustworthy official, in whom the public have unlimited confidence. A county cannot be favored with too many such stable men as fill the offices in Oxford.
Mr. Brown is a reformer in politics, and a royal arch in the masonic fraternity, and has held most of the offices below the chapter and one or two in it. He attends the Canada Methodist church, and maintains a high character for correctness of habits and integrity.
Mr. Brown is director of the Oxford Loan and Savings Society, having held that office from the formation of the association, and has long been identified intimately with the progressive elements and important enterprises of the town.
On the 26th of January, 1846, he married Miss Jennet McDonald, of Ingersoll, and they have had twelve children, ten of them, six sons and two daughters, still living. Two of the sons, John H. and Homer A. are married. The former is engrossing clerk in the Registry office, and the latter is a mechanic, both residing in Woodstock.