Harvey Marion LaFollette

When he was seven years old, his father was killed in an industrial accident while working on a piece of machinery in the flour mill he owned.

Young Harvey was always an avid reader, and after studying at the nearby Friends School and a short stint at Wabash College, he left for France, the land of his Huguenot ancestors, to continue his education.

[5] He left Paris, travelling on foot and staying with peasant families to better understand the local dialects.

[7] Along with his youngest brother, Grant LaFollette, Harvey then moved some 400 miles (640 km) to the south and purchased more than 37,000 acres (150 km2) of land in the Tennessee mountains.

He established and served as president and general manager of a company that eventually employed 1,500 people and became the largest blast furnace in the Southern United States.

[8] Harvey built and lived in Glen Oaks, a 27–room mansion in the center of LaFollette designed by Knoxville architect George Franklin Barber.

During the glare of the Wisconsin governor's race of 1900, his mother and older brother and sister returned to Primrose with cousin Robert and other family members to visit the old log cabin where Harvey was born and to relive memories of the pioneering days of a half century earlier.

[10] During the next decade, Harvey and his wife were often in Washington, DC, visiting family members and meeting political allies.