USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Leicester > Brief history of Leicester, Massachusetts > Part 13
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Captain Knight was engaged in the manufacture of card-clothing in the period of the rapid develop- ment of that industry, when inventive genius was perfecting the wonderful machine for card-setting, of which a gentleman once said, after admiringly watching its almost human movements : "Why ! it
1 By Rev. A. 11. Coolidge.
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thinks!" Ile had not been trained to the business, but was a natural mechanie, inventive and ingen- ions ; and though not forward in asserting his claims, made many valuable improvements in the machinery for card-making. According to the testimony of his partner, Mr. John Woodcock, he made the first card clothing set by machinery in Leicester.
Captain Knight was a man of sound judgment, self-reliant, and of strict business integrity. He gave elose attention to his business and was successful. IIe was wise and cautious in his investments, and became one of the wealthy men of the town. For his success he was largely indebted to his wife. She was a woman of domestic tastes, and devoted herself untiringly and efficiently to the varied duties of the household, acting her part with true womanly fidelity and fortitude in all the varied experiences of the family, in prosperity and in trial and sorrow. She was married at the age of seventeen years.
They had eleven children, seven of whom died young ; the three older at the ages of nine, ten and twelve years respectively. Their daughter Susan died in 1856, at the age of twenty-five. She is re- membered as an excellent scholar, retiring in man- ners, and loved by all her associates. Three sons survive-Dexter, James J. and George M.
Captain Knight died May 6, 1875, at the age of eighty-one years and eight months. His wife sur- vived him about four years, and died April 19, 1879, at the age of seventy-eight years.
REV. SAMUEL MAY.
Rev. Samuel May, the first minister of the Second Congregational (Unitarian) Church and Society, and who continued such for twelve years, was born in Boston, April 11, 1810, oldest son of Samuel and Mary (Goddard) May. Four years a pupil of Deacon Samuel Greele, afterwards for three years at the Pub- lic Latin School of Boston, and one year at the Round Hill School, Northampton, he was graduated at Mar- vard College in 1829.
After spending nearly a year in study with his cousin, Rev. Samuel J. May, at Brooklyn, Ct., he entered the Cambridge Divinity School in the fall of 1830, and was graduated there in 1833. The society at Leicester was then young, having been incorpor- ated in April, 1833, and holding its meetings in the old Town Hall. Mr. May spent six or seven weeks in their service that autumn, then left to fulfill some other engagements, and returned in March, 1834, to begin a second engagement. That spring he received and accepted the society's call to be their minister, and was ordained as such August 13th, the services being held in the society's new church, which had been dedicated the evening previous, when the late Rev. Dr. James Walker, then of Charlestown, preached the very impressive discourse, afterwards so widely circulated by the American Unitarian Association,
entitled, "Faith, Regeneration, Atonement," showing these to be successive periods and steps of the reli- gious life.
Mr. May's ministry was one of fair success. Rela- tions of good will and friendship were formed, which continued far beyond the term of his ministerial con- ncetion, and to the close of life of his parishioners in nearly every instance. Entire harmony of feeling exist- ed between them, exeept with regard to one question, viz. : that of slavery in the United States, and whether a Christian minister should or should not take part in the effort to bring that condition of slavery to an end. Mr. May regarding it his duty to take such part, and to seek to induee his hearers to do the same, several persons were so much dissatisfied as to withdraw themselves from the society. One or more others who remained being similarly dissatisfied, Mr. May de- cided to resign his office rather than be a cause of di- vision, and the connection was closed in the summer of 1846.
Mr. May has continued to have his residence at Leicester to the present time. In 1835 he was married to Sarah Russell, third daughter of Nathaniel P. Rus- sell, of Boston. Their children, all born in Leicester, and still living, are Adeline, Edward, Joseph Russell, and Elizabeth Goddard. The daughters reside with their parents. Edward is a pay director of the United States Navy, and Joseph R. is in commercial life in Boston. Edward married, in 1871, Mary Mig- not Blodgett, of Boston. They have four children.
Soon after resigning his position at Leieester, Mr. May was minister of the First Ecclesiastical Society, Brooklyn, Ct., until June, 1847. Then he became the general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-slavery So- eiety. He held this place, with the exception of about a year and a half of impaired health, for eighteen years, and until 1865, the time when, by amendment of the Constitution, slavery in the United States ceased to exist. He was also, for several years, corresponding seerctary of the American Anti- slavery Society.
From 1841 to 1865 Mr. May refused to take any political action under the United States Constitution because of its recognition and support of slavery- refused, that is, to vote for officers who must take an oath to support the Constitution. When the Constitution was amended he resumed the exercise of the citizen's duties. At the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion, in 1861, he gave sneh aid as he could to the cause of the Union, and to its armies in the field, speaking and acting publicly.
He early took a decided stand against the use of intoxicating drinks ; was a member of town, county and State societies formed to promote total abstinence from their use; and joined with others to establish the Leicester llotel as a house in which no such drinks should be sold.
Mr. May served upon the town School Committee, at two different periods, for twenty-one years. He was
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Pliny Carle.
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chosen one of the directors of the town's publie library at its establishment, in 1861, and still con- tinues as such, having served nearly twenty-eight years. In 1874 he was elected a trustee of Leices- ter Academy. In 1875 he was a member of the State Legislature, representing, with Mr. Pliny Litchfield, of Southbridge, the district formed of the towns of Leicester, Spencer, Charlton, Southbridge and Anburn. As House chairman of the Committee on Federal Relations, he took an active part in the State's commemoration of the one hundredth anni- versaries of the battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill. At the town's celebration of the een- tennial of American Independence, July 4, 1876, Mr. May was chairman of the town's committee. He edited the pamphlet which records in full that day's doings in Leicester.
IIe is a member of the American Social Science Association, of the Worcester Society of Antiquity, and of the Bostonian Society. He was chosen secre- tary of the Class of 1829, Harvard College, at the time of graduating, and has held the office to the present time. He aided in the compilation of the large pamphlet which records the one hundredth anniver- sary of the foundation of Leicester Academy, and the proceedings of that occasion, September 4, 1884.
PLINY EARLE, A.M., M.D.1
Dr. Pliny Earle was the fourth son of Pliny Earle, the great-grandson of Ralph Earle, who came to Leicester in 1717. llis mother was the daughter of William Buffum, of Smithfield, R. I. Ile was born December 31, 1809, and his childhood was passed in the home of his father at Mulberry Grove. He was a pupil in Leicester Academy, and afterwards in the Friends' School, in Providence, R. I., where he was a teacher in the winter of 1828-29, and also from 1831 to 1835, when he was made principal.
Ile pursued the study of medicine, first with Dr. Usher Parsons, of Providence, and afterwards at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he was graduated with the degree of M.D. in 1837. The next two years were spent in Europe; one in the medical school and the hospitals of Paris, and the other in 'a tour of professional and general observation, "in which he visited various insti- tutions for the insane, from England to Turkey." The results of these observations were published in 1840, in a pamphlet entitled " A Visit to Thirteen Asylums for the Insane in Europe." He had an office in Philadelphia for a short time, but in the spring of 1840 became resident physician of the Friends' Asylum for the Insane, near Frankford, now a part of Philadelphia. In 1844 he was appointed medical superintendent of the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane, in New York City. In 1849 he made
another tour in Europe, visiting thirty-four institu- tions for the insane in England, Belgium, France and the Germanic countries, and, upon his return, pub- lished his book upon "Institutions for the Insane in Prussia, Austria, and Germany." In 1853 he was elected a visiting physician of the New York City Lunatic Asylum, on Blackwell's Island.
In 1855 lie returned to Leicester for rest and the confirmation of his health, and passed several years on the homestead of his grandfather, Robert Earle near Mulberry Grove (now called "Earle Ridge") During this time, however, he spent the winters of 1862-63 and 1863-64 in the care of the insane soldiers of the army and navy, at the Government Hospital for the Insane near Washington, D. C., of which his former pupil, Dr. Charles HI. Nichols, was superin- tendent. He also wrote for the medical periodicals, and acted as an expert in the trials of several impor- tant cases involving the question of insanity before the legal tribunals of Massachusetts and the adjoin- ing States.
It was in these years of comparative rest that he rendered the town essential service as a member of the School Committee. In this relation the writer, together with Dr. J. N. Murdock, was associated with him. In this period the public schools were subjected to a thorough reorganization, and new and more prac- tieal methods of instruction were introduced. In these services Dr. Earle exhibited the same executive force, the same mastery of details, the same practical wisdom, the same contempt of shams and ability to puneture them, and the same personal integrity and demand for strict uprightness and fidelity in those who were under his supervision, which characterized his administration of the institution in Northampton, of which he was afterward the head. In one respect he was in advance of the time. He came early to appreciate the importance of objective illustration, and the practical application of school instruction. IIe required pupils to use books only as instructors, and to know things and not mere words.
Without seeking the position, he was appointed superintendent of the State Lunatic Hospital at Northampton, Mass., July 2, 1864, and held the office twenty-one years and three months, resigning it Oeto- ber 1, 1885. He made that hospital in many respects a model institution for the insane; and its trustees, in the resolutions passed at the time of their acceptance of his resignation, expressed as follows not only their own conviction, but the general judgment with refer- ence to the value of his administration : "In its man- agement he has combined the highest professional skill and acquirement with rare executive ability. By liis patient attention to details, by his wisdom and firmness, his absolute fidelity to duty and devotion to the interests of the hospital, he has rendered invalna- ble service to the institution, and to the community which it serves." They also express the hope that "he will continue to make his home in the institution,
1 By Rev. A. II. Coolidge.
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that they may continue to profit by his counsels ; and they will provide that his rooms shall always be open and ready for his use." This offer Mr. Earle accepted, although his summers have been spent at Mulberry Grove.
The Northampton Hospital had been erected in opposition to a widely prevalent opinion that it was not, and never could be, needed,-an opinion which delayed its construction, made the obtaining of appro- priations very difficult, and finally compelled the trustees to put it in operation in a very incomplete condition, internally. The Civil War had tended to restrict the price of board for public patients to a very low limit, and in 1864, when Dr. Earle took charge of it, it had never paid its current expenses. He imme- diately addressed himself to the task of making it not only a first-class curative institution, but a self- supporting one as well. He purchased supplies at wholesale and in open market. He reorganized and reduced to a very complete system all the departments -domestie, economical, financial and medical-with cheeks and counter-checks for the detection of loss, or of waste by carelessness, as well as for the exposure of unfaithfulness in the discharge of duty toward the patients, or in other respects. The so-called "moral treatment " of the patients was amplified, made more diversified, and extended over a greater portion of the year than in any other American hospital.
The pecuniary results of this system were the pay- ment of current expenses in the second year, and, during the whole period of Dr. Earle's service, the purchase of land at a cost of over twenty-five thou- sand dollars; the payment for all ordinary repairs, and over one hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars for buildings and other improvements, and an increase in cash assets and provisions and supplies of over forty-three thousand dollars, all of which became, of course, the property of the State, without any assistance from the State. The results as productive of an improved curative institution, being less tangi- ble, cannot well be illustrated, but, as reflected in current public opinion, they were equally success- ful.
The importance of occupation for the insane was early recognized by Dr. Earle, and it has nowhere in New England been practically applied to a greater extent than at Northampton. As early as 1870 it was estimated that not less than two-thirds of the manual labor necessary to the running of the hos- pital was performed by patients.
Believing that a large part of the execssive cost of such hospitals as that at Danvers adds nothing to the curative capability of the institutions, Dr. Earle con- demmed such expenditure as unwise political econ- omy, ostentatious charity and gross injustice to the payer of taxes.
Dr. Earle has been instrumental in introducing im- portant changes in the treatment of the insane. In 1845 he established a school for the patients in the
men's department of the Bloomingdale Asylum, and this was continued for two years. As early as 1840, while in the Frankford Asylum, he gave illustrated lectures on physies to the inmates. "This was the first known attempt to address an audience of the insane in any discourse other than a sermon, and has led to that system of entertainments for the patients now considered indispensable in a first-class hospital." At Northampton he gave a great variety of lectures, upon miscellaneous subjects. One course of six lec- tures was upon diseases of the brain, which are ae- companied with mental disorder. The average number of patients who attended them was two hundred and fifty-six. "This is the first time," he says in his annual report, "that an audience of insane persons ever listened to a discourse on their own malady." His observation of the effect on the audience was not unlike that of other preachers. If the listeners were slow to take the application to themselves, they were quite ready to appropriate it "to their neighbors." IIe also secured lectures and entertainments from other sources, and provided amusements in which the inmates participated.
Dr. Earle is the author of many papers upon in- sanity and other subjects, which have been published in the Journal of Insanity, the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, etc. Some of these have been issued in pamphlet form. He anticipated by many years the valuable treatise of Dr. B. Jay Jeffries, in a paper on "The Inability to Distinguish Colors." His twenty-two reports of the Northampton Hospital are classies in the literature of mental disease. By a combination of causes the publie, so far as they knew or cared about the subject, had come to the belief that from seventy-five to ninety per cent. of the insane can be enred at the hospital. Dr. Earle became convinced of the erroneousness of this belief, and was the first hospital superintendent who com- bated it. His researches upon the subject extended over a series of years, were embodied in his annual reports, and at length in 1887 collected and published by the J. B. Lippincott Company, in a book entitled " The Curability of Insanity."
The doctor showed that one cause of the false opinion in regard to curability was the reporting of repeated recoveries of the same person, in paroxysmal insanity. One patient was reported cured six times in one year, another seven times, a third sixteen times in three years, and a fourth forty-six times in the course of her life, and she finally died a raving maniac in one of the hospitals. Judging from the results of the doctor's researches, not one-third of the persons ad- mitted to the Massachusetts insane hospitals have been permanently cured.
Of his work on The Curability of Insanity a re- viewer writes: "This book may mark an epoch in the literature of insanity, since it has changed the whole front of that literature, and set in motion in- vestigating forces which will carry out its main doc-
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trine into many useful details, upon which the veteran anthor has not dwelt."
He wrote the article on insanity in the United States Census of 1860, and about ninety articles of reviews and bibligraphical notices of insane hospital reports and other publications on mental disorders, which appeared in the American Journal of Medical Science between the years 1841 and 1870.
In a third visit to Europe, in 1871, he visited forty- six institutions for the insane in Ireland, Austria, Italy and intervening countries. His several foreign tours gave him opportunity to form the acquaintance and enjoy the hospitality of many professional, philanthropic and literary people; he was well ac- quainted with Elizabeth Frye, knew the poet, Sam- ucl Rogers, and. at their homes and tables, met socially the lowitts and Charles Dickens. Ile also cherishes pleasant memories of American missionaries in the Levant fifty years ago; of Rev. Jonas King and other missionaries in Athens; Ceplias Paseo, at Patrass: Simeon Calhoun and David Temple, of Smyrna; Win. Goodell, Rev. Mr. Shantller and Henry A. Homes, at Constantinople. lle received kind attentions from all of them, and the home hospitality of several.
Dr. Earle was one of the original members and founders of the American Medical Association, the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the New England Psychological Society, of which last-mentioned association he was the first president. He wasalso president. in the official year 1884-85, of the Association of Superintendents. Besides holding a membership of various medical so- cieties, he is a member of the American Philosophi- cal Society; fellow of the New York College of Phy- sicians and Surgeons; corresponding member of the New York Medico-Legal Society and the Med- ical Society of Athens, Greece, and honorary mem- ber of the British Medico-Psychological Association. In 1853 he delivered an adjunct course of lectures on " Mental Diseases " at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, and in 1863 he was ap- ·pointed Professor of Materia Medica aud Psychologie Medicine in the Berkshire Medical Institute at Pitts- field, Mass. Insanity had never before been included among the required subjects of instruction in any full professorship at any one of the American medical schools. After the delivery of one course of lectures the doctor resigned his professorship. as he had been enlled to the superintendeney of the Northampton Hospital.
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In his specialty Dr. Farle is recognized as an author- ity. " Ile was one of the medical experts summoned to the trial of Charles JJ. Gnitean, for the murder of President Garfield. After an attendance of one week his health gave way, and he was obliged to leave; but he approved, and still approves. the verdict which held the prisoner responsible for the homicide."
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In ISSS he published a large volume on the geneal- ogy of the Earle family, a work of great labor, and a
model of its class. From this book many of the dates and material facts of this biography are taken, Dr. Earle still holds his birthright membership in the Society of Friends.
Dr. Earle's generous and valuable gift to the Acad- emy in which he pursued his early studies has been elsewhere noticed. He has never wavered in his at- tacliment to Leicester, and its people claim him as one of her honored sons. It is their hope that the day may yet be long deferred when it will be suitable to pronounce his enlogy, and give full expression to the general respect and regard in which he is held in his native town.
JOSHUA MERDOCK. 1
Joshua Murdock, the principal founder of the ex- tensive card-clothing establishment of J. & J. Mnr- dock, was the son of Deacon Joshua Murdock. Hle was born in Leicester. October 3, 1815; educated.in the town sebools, in Leicester Academy and Amherst Academy. At the age of sixteen years he engaged himself to the firm of Smith, Woodcock & Knight, serving a regular apprenticeship of nearly tive years, and remaining with them till 1838, when he entered the employ of James Smith & Co., of Philadelphia. In 1840 he returned to leicester and commenced the card-clothing business with Samuel Southgate, Ji. As has already been stated. after the retirement of Mr. Southgate in 1844, Mr. Murdock continued in business alone till 1848, when his brother Joseph, who had been engaged in trade at the South, returned and associated himself with him under the firm name of J. & .. Murdock. He lived to see the gradual growth of the enterprise from the small beginning and to witness and enjoy its great prosperity. Mr. Mur- dock was for several years a selectman of the town, also a director of the National Bank and a trustee of the Savings Bank. Under the district system he was for many years the prudential committee of the centre schools. He discharged the duties of this office with exceptional wisdom and efficiency, and to him the marked excellence and improvement of. the .. village schools at that period are largely due. Hle mited with the First Congregational Church in Philadelphia in 1840 and removed his relation to the First Church in Leicester in 1842. Ile was always interested in the welfare of the church and society, and was a lib- eral contributor for the support of its ordinances, . lie was wise and cantions in judgment and was identified with all the public enterprises of the.place. Ile. was so extremely modest and retiring, he shrank so instinc- tively from all obtrusion upon the public, and from the expression of his views, and especially his feelings, that he was fully known only to the few who were placed in intimate relations with him .. He was in- telligent, sound in judgment, a man of deep and kindly feelings, and positive decision of character. :
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1 By Rev. A. H. Coolidge.
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Mr. Murdock was first married in Philadelphia, by Rev. Albert Barnes, D.D., June 16, 1842, to Angelina Maull, who died June 2, 1846. He was married by Rev. John Nelson, D. D., January 10, 1849, to Julia Trask, the daughter of Samnel Hurd of Leicester. Their only child Caroline, is the wife of Alexander De Witt of Worcester. Mr. Murdock died March 27, 1883.
EDWARD SARGENT. '
Joseph Sargent, from whom one branch of the Sargent family in town descended, was born in Malden in 1716. According to the family tradition he accompanied his cousin Nathan Sargent, who "came to dwell in Leicester, February 28, 1741."* He was married in Leicester, January, 1746, to Hannah Whittemore. He was a most worthy citizen, for six years a seleetman of the town, and always prominent in public affairs. Among his descendants have been men of more than ordinary intelligence and standing, some of whom have already been noticed in this work.
His grandson, Col. Joseph Denny Sargent, who was born in 1787 and died in 1849, was one of the most enterprising and successful business men in the town. and one of its most public spirited and highly honored citizens. He married Mindwell Jones of Spencer April 16, 1818.
Edward Sargent, the subject of this sketeh, born March 25, 1832, was their youngest child. He re- ceived his education in the public schools, and in Leicester Academy.
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