Edwin W. Coggeshall

Edwin Walter Coggeshall began active life as a lawyer; for a number of years he was counsel to the Bowery Savings Bank; later he founded and organized by his own personal efforts the Lawyers’ Title Insurance Company, of which highly successful company he became president, and remained either as president or Chairman of the Board up to the day of his death. Coggeshall was a man of varied talents; he wrote exceedingly well. Most of his writings were essays read before the Hermean Society and the Washington Society of Morristown. But he never published anything except a small book which contained the history of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, from the inception of the plot to the end of the trial and the execution of the conspirators. He took great pains to get accurate information about this episode, even following exactly in the footsteps of Wilkes Booth during his flight from Washington after the murder; interviewed and corresponded with hundreds of people more or less connected with this crime, and the little book is perhaps the most complete account of that chapter of history that has ever been prepared.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1930 Century Association Yearbook