Dr. Franklin Benjamin Hough was born on July 20, 1822, in Martinsburg, Lewis County, New York.

He was a physician, scientist, historian, statistician, and a "father of American forestry." He studied medicine at Western Reserve College (M.D., 1848) and practiced in Somerville, N.Y. from 1848 to 1852. He was a pioneer historian of counties in New York State and an advocate of forest conservation. In 1855 and 1865, he was Superintendent of the State Census for New York and was also involved in the 1875 census. He was one of seven Commissioners of Parks in New York in 1872 and in 1876, he became a Forestry Agent in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Hough was extremely active in making known the depletion of American forests and in 1885, he drafted the law that led to the preservation of the Adirondack Forest. He published several reports on forest management. He is the author of "A History of St. Lawrence and Franklin Counties, New York" (1853) and "A History of Jefferson County in the State of New York" (1854).

In 1845, he married Sarah Maria Eggleston (1816–1848) and in 1849, he remarried Mariah Ellen Kilham (1829–1910). He died on June 11, 1885, in Lowville, Lewis, New York.

Rev. Oscar Allen Houghton was born on May 15, 1843, in Trenton, Oneida County, New York.

He was a clergyman. He was educated at Genesee College (M.A., 1872) and at Syracuse University, N.Y. (PhD., 1874). He was a minister in many churches, among them the Central New York Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church and Wolcott Methodist Episcopal Church, Vermont (1869-1871).

In 1869, he married Susan H. Ayres (1843–1900) and in 1902, he married Ida Arabella Delamater Gilbert (1855–1916). He died on September 22, 1908, in Towanda, Bradford County, Pennsylvania.

Edward Mandell House was born on July 26, 1858, in Houston, Texas.

He was an American diplomat and political advisor. He attended Houston Academy, a school in Bath, England, a prep school in Virginia, and Hopkins Grammar School, New Haven, Connecticut. In 1877, he entered Cornell University, but after his father fell ill, he returned to Texas to take care of him and help manage the estate. He eventually sold the cotton and sugar plantations and invested in banking. He was a founder of the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railway. He became active in Texas politics, but in 1902, he moved to New York City and served as an advisor to New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson in 1911. He helped him win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1912 and advised him in foreign affairs. House spent much of 1915 and 1916 in Europe, trying to negotiate peace through diplomacy. As one of America's greatest diplomats, he served as Wilson's chief negotiator in Europe between 1917 and 1919 and as Wilson’s chief deputy at the Paris Peace Conference (1919). His major achievements were participating in the drafting of Wilson's Fourteen Points (1918), the Treaty of Versailles, the Covenant of the League of Nations (1919) and securing an armistice with the Allies based on American ideals. In the 1920s, House strongly supported membership of both the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice. In 1912, House anonymously published a novel, "Philip Dru: Administrator."

In 1881, he married Elizabeth Louisa "Loulie" Hunter (1859–1941). He died on March 28, 1938, in New York City, New York.