All he wanted was a pair of glasses.
When Jacob Snider Jr. boarded a Great Western Railway passenger train called Oxford that was travelling from Toronto to Hamilton on the evening of Thursday, Mar. 12, 1857, he was returning from a visit to the oculist – he was having trouble with his eyes.
The proprietor of multiple mills in St. Jacobs, the generous-hearted industrialist had been honoured as the namesake of the growing town, along with his father. He was 35 years old, and had five children with his wife Anna “Nancy” Bricker – all of them descended from Swiss-German Mennonites who had migrated from Pennsylvania to Waterloo County.
