Jonathan Norcross (April 18, 1808 – December 18, 1898) was elected in 1850 as the fourth Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, serving the customary term at the time of one year. Dubbed the "Father of Atlanta" and "hard fighter of everything" by publisher Henry W. Grady, he followed three mayors elected from the Free and Rowdy Party. Early life, family and education Born on April 18, 1808, in Orono, Maine, Jonathan Norcross was the second son of clergyman Jesse Norcross, a Baptist minister from Penobscot, and his wife Nancy (née Gaubert) from Dresden, Maine. He had six siblings, including older brother Nicholas Gaubert Norcross (see last section below). His younger siblings include: Livonia (b. January 1810), brother Jesse (b. June 3, 1812), Nancy Gaubert (b. March 2, 1816), who married Moses M. Swan of Augusta, Maine; Maria (b. February 1818), and Louisa Norcross (b. October 1823). After the death of Nancy, his second wife was Mary Ann Hill. Their paternal immigrant ancestor was Jeremiah Norcross from England, who settled in Watertown, Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638. The immigrant owned land in Cambridge before 1642, and was a freeman of that town in 1652. The branches of the family became established early in New England. Norcross attended common schools and was taught the trade of millwright. As a young man he went to Cuba, where he helped construct a mill for processing sugar. While attending lectures in mechanics at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Norcross principally studied arts and sciences. 1833 move to the South Norcross left Pennsylvania in 1833 to teach school at an academy in North Carolina. (There were essentially no public schools in the South in the antebellum years.) He moved to Georgia in 1835, in the period of new development after Indian Removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from the Southeast by United States military forces to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. Norcross lived first in Augusta, then settled in the area that developed as Atlanta. In 1836, he took charge of lumber interests in southern Georgia for Northern capitalists. While in Putnam County, Georgia, he filed a patent, US 3210 for a Reciprocating Mill-Saw Guide in August 1843. From these efforts, he developed a vertical saw with a circular wheel 40 feet in diameter. It could be adjusted in an almost horizontal position, with a capacity to saw approximately 1,000 feet of lumber per day.