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Born 25 September 1864, near Granger · chairman of Miles, 1925–1936
The tie, exactly: born here — the only birth-on-this-ground entry in the fame band, and stated in the record's own words. Nesbit's Who's Hoosier, read first-hand, carries him in one breath: "BEARDSLEY, ANDREW HUBBELL — His friends call him 'Hub.' Born September 25, 1864, on a farm near Granger, Ind. … Went to Elkhart twenty-five years ago to manufacture things, and has been unwilling to quit." The date needs its frame: in 1864 there was no village of Granger — the post office came in 1875 and the town was founded in 1883 — so the tie is to the ground, the Harris Prairie country the sketch's readers would have named by its nearest landmark, and it is printed that way.
The course: the manufacture he went to Elkhart for was medicine, at its most industrial. Albert R. Beardsley — his uncle, a founder-investor of the Dr. Miles Medical Company — persuaded the young man, in the words of the company's centennial history, "to tag along as a bottle washer." Beardsley rose through the firm rung by documented rung: by 1912 he was its secretary, certifying the dissolution of the original corporation to the State of Indiana; by 1925 he was chairman, holding the chair to 1936, and the centennial history regards him as the company's "second founder." With his younger brother Charles — later Miles's president (1944) and chairman (1947) — he took the firm's advertising and promotion "to new levels," and it was Hub, the history records, who pressed to modernize the formula and dress of Miles's Nervine, the product line that led to Alka-Seltzer. Miles Laboratories — Alka-Seltzer, One-A-Day, Flintstones Vitamins — was an Elkhart company, and its fame belongs to Elkhart's build; what belongs here is the chairman's first fact: he was born on a farm near Granger.
The distinction held: he is not kin, on any source read, to the Beardsleys of the Griffith sketch in the band above (Rebecca McMichael Beardsley; Milton Beardsley Griffith), and not to Dr. Havilah Beardsley, Elkhart's founder — the surname is common in two counties' records, and the file keeps the lines separate rather than merging them into a dynasty the record does not show.
Sources:
- Dwight D. Nesbit, Who's Hoosier (c. 1909), read first-hand — the Beardsley entry, birth date and place as quoted.
- "Milestones in Elkhart," the Miles centennial history account (Indiana Historical Society's Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History), for the bottle-washer beginning, the chairmanship of 1925–36, the "second founder" judgment, and the Nervine modernization.
- Indiana Historical Bureau marker text, Dr. Franklin L. Miles (20.2007.2), for Secretary Andrew Beardsley's 1912 dissolution certificate.