John K. Laing was born on July 2, 1836, in Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada, to Joseph and Mary Laing. His father was a shoemaker who owned $1,000 of real estate and $300 of personal property by 1860. The family immigrated to America in 1849 and settled in Passadumkeag, Maine. Laing attended school there until he was 16 years old, when he began working as a cooper. His father was a Democrat, and Laing initially supported the Democratic Party, as well. During the election of 1860, his father supported Stephen Douglas, while he cast his first presidential vote for Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge. During the Civil War, however, Laing became a Republican.

 

He enlisted in the Union army on December 11, 1861, and he mustered in as a sergeant in Company F of the 14^th Maine Infantry later that day. The regiment was stationed in Louisiana until July 1864, when the army moved it to Virginia. The men took part in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1864, and they spent the final months of the war stationed in Georgia. Laing was promoted to 1^st lieutenant sometime in 1862, then to captain on November 1, 1863, and finally to lieutenant colonel on April 10, 1865. According to one writer, he earned one of these promotions by “rescuing a wounded comrade in the face of the enemy’s fire, at the risk of his own life.” He mustered out on August 28, 1865.

 

Laing returned to Passadumkeag after the war and became an active member of the Republican Party. He opposed President Andrew Johnson’s lenient plan for Reconstruction. In August 1866, he served as secretary of the “Union Republican County Convention,” which declared that the seceded states should be “reinstated only upon such conditions as will give them an equal and just representation in Congress, secure their fidelity to the Government and guarantee an enduring peace to the country.”

 

The delegates were “determined to stand by an maintain the authority of the Congress of the United States as at present organized, at all hazards, and under all circumstances…and will, at all times, assert, against all executive encroachments, the validity and binding force of its legislation.” He was elected to the state legislature as a Republican in September 1866.

 

He married Mary Francis Hayward in 1864, and they had at least five children: Elizabeth, born around 1867; Josie, born around 1869; John, born around 1876; Florence, born around 1879; and Everett, born around 1886. They moved to Worchester, Massachusetts, in the late 1860s, and Laing worked as a grocer there. By 1870, he owned $1,500 of personal property.

 

They moved to East Portland, Oregon, in the mid-1870s, and he earned a living as a freight clerk for a railroad. He served on the Portland city council and the local school board. His wife died in the late 1800s, and he never remarried. By 1900, he was working as the deputy revenue collector in Portland. His health had reportedly “been greatly undermined by the Louisiana campaign [during the war],” and he remained in poor health for the final years of his life. He died in Portland on April 8, 1906.

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