USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Salem > Sketches about Salem people > Part 23
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It may be interesting to note one or two estimates of Captain Haraden. One commentator says, "Captain Haraden was in his person tall and comely; his coun- tenance was placid and his manners and deportment remarkably mild. His discipline on board ship was excellent, especially in time of action. Yet in the com- mon concerns of life he was easy almost to a fault. So great was the confidence he inspired, that if he but looked at a sail through his glass, and then told the helmsman to steer for her, the observation went round, 'If she is:
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an enemy, she is ours.' His great characteristic was the most consummate self-possession on all occasions, and in midst of perils, in which if any man equalled, none ever excelled him. His officers and men insisted he was more calm and cool amid the din of battle than at any other time; and the more deadly the strife, the more imminent the peril - the more terrific the scene, the more perfect his self-command and serene intrepidity. In a word, he was a hero."
Charles W. Upham said of him, "He fought some of the most desperate actions, and achieved some of the most wonderful triumphs, which the ocean has ever wit- nessed. In private life he was amicable and upright. His temper was mild and his manners gentle; but on the quarter deck, and amid the thunders of battle, the great and commanding energies of his noble nature were glori- ously displayed. . . . He was not only brave himself, but he made all around him brave also. So evident and certain was it that he knew no fear, that fear vanished from the breasts of all under his command. His con- summate and extraordinary courage, by thus imparting itself to his whole crew, made him invincible against all odds, and gave him, as was justly observed by one who who understood his character and history 'a name of terror on the ocean.' "
And Ralph D. Paine - "The United States Navy, with its wealth of splendid tradition, has few more command- ing figures than Captain Jonathan Haraden, the foremost fighting privateersman of the Revolution and one of the ablest men that fought in that war, afloat or ashore. His deeds are well nigh forgotten by his countrymen, yet he captured one thousand cannon in British ships and counted his prizes by the score."
The privateers had undoubtedly been of great value to the country from a military or naval point of view, but with a few notable exceptions their owners were on the verge of bankruptcy at the end of the Revolution. Captain Haraden among many others found himself not only in straitened circumstances but in failing health. He forsook the sea at the close of the war and passed
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BY SAMUEL H. BATCHELDER
the last years of his life in the brick house on the south- erly side of Essex Street where the First National Stores have recently erected a new building. During these latter years he owned and carried on a rope walk on Brown Street. He made the rigging for the mainmast of the Frigate Essex in 1799. It will be remembered that this ship was built by popular subscription in Salem, so that it was distinctly a Salem vessel from keel to truck. The rigging for the other two masts was made at two other rope walks in Salem. It is said that when the huge hemp cables were ready to be carried to the frigate, the workmen who had made them conveyed them to the shipyard on their shoulders, the procession led by a fife and drum.
Dr. Bentley records the death of Jonathan Haraden in these words :
"Nov. 23, 1803. Died in this town Captain Jonathan Haraden, aet. 60. He was one of our most intrepid Commanders in the Revolution. He was an accomplished gentleman, of cool temper, of generous courage, & a most successful Officer in all his engagements at Sea. No man had a higher reputation, or could have greater favour among all who were under him. After the war his health failed, & his circumstances were narrow, & he finally died after a very lingering sickness of Con- sumption. He owned the Rope walk in Brown street near the New Burying Ground. His second wife was a daughter of the Revd. James Diman of this town. His present wife was not of Salem. He has left two daugh- ters, & a good name behind him. He was from Glouces- ter."
DR. EDWARD AUGUSTUS HOLYOKE
BY RICHARD HALL WISWALL
The life of a man so venerated by his fellow citizens that he became almost a symbol of virtue should present no difficult subject to one whose task it is briefly to por- tray it. And if, in addition, that man had been con- tinually active for eighty of the most interesting years in the history of Salem, the only problem would seem to be that of choosing what material to use and what to dis- card. Between the year 1749 when Dr. Holyoke first came to live in Salem and the year of his death in 1829 many of the great fortunes were made by the merchants of this city, the Revolution was fought and won, the United States of America was born and engaged Great Britain in another war, the people were thrilled by the privateers and the glorious actions of the ships of our new navy, and the country was shaken by the bitterness of political and religious factions. The life of almost any other man of that time comparable in renown to Dr. Holyoke would almost inevitably have been so colored by these stirring events of public moment that no account of him, however brief, could be separated from them. And yet so intent was Dr. Holyoke on concentrating all the energies of his mind and body upon that task to which he had devoted his life that an account of the political events of his time is not only unnecessary to an understanding of him, but is out of tune with the story of his career. Few men have known better how to mind their own business, and few have done their own busi- ness better than he.
No circumstance of personal isolation accounts for his detachment from the political events of his time. He was in constant contact with men of every degree, from the poorest laborer to the most honored merchant. The ministers were his friends, and the justices of the Supreme Judicial Court dined at his house. Almost literally he knew everyone in Salem, and many men of note in Cam- bridge and Boston. His natural thirst for information
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DR. EDWARD AUGUSTUS HOLYOKE
must have been satisfied by the discussions and arguments of his many friends. But if he was stirred by the thrill- ing march of history during the last sixty years of his life, it influenced him not at all to deviate in the slightest degree from the particular furrow to which he had put his hand. Ready as he was to recognize a different genius in others, he knew his own and was not tempted to try unfamiliar tasks.
Dr. Holyoke lived to be almost 101 years old, and he practiced medicine in Salem for the last eighty years of his life. That is his history as people know it, and as he doubtless would have it himself. Other things are known of him, but every other fact of his life is sub- ordinated to that extraordinary lifetime of skilled help- fulness. It can hardly be presumptuous to say that he would not himself set store by the honor in which he is held for his eminent contribution to the progress of litera- ture and natural science in Salem, as compared with the affectionate veneration of his fellow citizens for his work as a beloved physician among them.
The vital facts about the subject of a narrative, the dates of birth and of death, are ordinarily a necessary record devoid of particular interest. In the case of Dr. Holyoke they are perhaps the most extraordinary fact to be told about him. To say that he was born on August 1, 1728 and died on March 31, 1829 recounts in itself a span of life so unusual as to excite some interest. But to speak of these dates in terms of historical events is far more surprising. When Dr. Holyoke was born it was but thirty-six years since the last of the Salem witches had been condemned and hanged on Gallows Hill - an event so strange to all our experience that it seems but a legend of antiquity. When Dr. Holyoke died, only nine years were to elapse before the trains of the Eastern Railroad began to arrive in Salem. And that remarkable physician's lifetime search for scientific accuracy and the betterment of life is but a reflection of the astonishing development of Salem from a superstitious village to a busy nineteenth-century town. Dr. Holyoke knew men who had seen the witches hanged, and he knew men who
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BY RICHARD HALL WISWALL
helped to build the industries of the New England of today. He heard of Cotton Mather as a contemporary from his father; and he lived to read Channing's mem- orable sermon in Baltimore. What men have packed within their span of life, events of more significance !
Although it was in Salem that Dr. Holyoke began and completed his life's work, that city can claim to be neither the place of his birth nor the home of his forebears. His great-great-grandfather, Edward Holyoke, came of a respectable family in Warwickshire, and settled in Lynn in 1638. The son of that Edward, Elizur, moved to Springfield where he became one of the prominent inhabi- tants of that town. His son, of the same name, moved to Boston, where in 1689 was born Edward Holyoke, the doctor's father. The latter graduated from Harvard Col- lege at the age of 16 and eleven years later was settled as minister in Marblehead, thus returning the family tem- porarily to the county in which they had first settled. He stayed as minister in Marblehead for 21 years and it was there that he married as his second wife, Dr. Holyoke's mother, Margaret Appleton of Ipswich.
Edward Augustus Holyoke, the subject of this account, was born in Marblehead on August 1, 1728, the second of his parents' eight children and the eldest son.
On May 30, 1737, Reverend Edward Holyoke was chosen President of Harvard College to succeed President Wadsworth. Mr. Holyoke was an Orthodox Calvinist minister, as indeed was then a necessary qualification for the office to which he was elected in Cambridge. He had considerable distinction in astronomy and in mathe- matics and was an accomplished classical scholar. Har- vard College at that time had about one hundred stu- dents who were instructed by the President himself assisted by four tutors. Mr. Holyoke was President of the College for 32 years and died at the age of 80 on June 1, 1769.
Edward Augustus Holyoke was nine years old when the family moved to Cambridge and established them- selves in Wadsworth House, which had recently been built for the use of the President and which is still stand-
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DR. EDWARD AUGUSTUS HOLYOKE
ing on Massachusetts Avenue close to Harvard Square. The business of moving to Cambridge was somewhat more of an undertaking then than it is today, and on the date of September 2, 1737 President Holyoke notes in his diary, "This day Finch sailed with my goods for Cam- bridge and arrived there on the 5th."
."Not much is known of the early days of Dr. Holyoke. The family was a united one and the references to each other in the diaries of President Holyoke's family are evidence of the affection which they bore to one another. In his boyhood he was always referred to by his father and brother as Neddie, and in view of his extraordinary length of life and rugged endurance it is of some interest to note that when he was seven years old he was so exceed- ingly ill that his father omitted his daily tasks, a fact of some significance in those days of emotional restraint and spartan devotion to duty. Neddie recovered, how- ever, and matriculated at Harvard College in 1742 when he was fourteen years old. Here he stayed during the regular course and was graduated in 1746. It was dur- ing this period of attendance at the College when he wrote his diary. This diary was contained in interleaved line- a-day almanacs and is perhaps the least interesting of the Holyoke diaries and of little significance in an account of his life, except to show that even then he had acquired the methodical habits and gift of careful observation which were so useful to him in his later life. It is for the most part merely an enumeration, without comment, of lectures, studies, deaths, trials and meteorological ob- servations.
This last subject was one of continual and lifelong - interest to him and even while he was at Harvard Col- lege no unusual temperature, no appearance of a comet, or display of northern lights escaped notation in his diary. Upon his graduation from Harvard, Neddie dis- appears from his father's diary and "my son Edward" takes his place. President Holyoke records that in Au- gust of 1746, the year of his graduation, Edward went to keep school in Lexington and the following year went to Roxbury again as a schoolmaster. For six months'
EDWARD AUGUSTUS HOLYOKE, M. D. 1728 -1829
Centenarian physician of Salem. From the portrait painted in 1824 by his grand-daughter Mary Holyoke Ward, now in the possession of Miss Mary E. Nichols.
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BY RICHARD HALL WISWALL
service at teaching school Edward received $38.50 out of which he paid his board of 67 cents per week.
On August 22, 1747 President Holyoke records the beginning of his son's distinguished career as a physician, for on that day he went to Ipswich to live and study medicine with Col. Thomas Berry. Dr. Holyoke's in- structor in the art of medicine was more familiarly known by his title as Colonel than by that of Doctor. The latter title was, in those days when anyone who cared to pre- scribe could practice the art of healing, of little dignity in itself, and although Col. Berry had a remarkably extensive practice and was the most eminent doctor in the vicinity of Ipswich, he was also in his later life Pro- bate Judge, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas and Colonel of the Regiment. Dr. Holyoke's course of study was short. It probably consisted of helping Col. Berry compound his prescriptions, of riding about with him to see his patients and absorbing such knowledge as he could from observation and conversation with the Colonel. He spent two years in Ipswich and in June 1749 he came to Salem, where from that moment until his death eighty years later, he was to live and practice his profession without interruption. Notwithstanding the recent death of Dr. Cabot and the probable absence of trained and intelligent competition, Dr. Holyoke found the prospects so discouraging that he despaired of success. His father records in 1749, "my son went to live at Salem and found nothing." Even after two years' trial his practice was so meager that he had serious intentions of abandoning Salem for some more promising location. The memorial to Dr. Holyoke, published shortly after his death in 1829 by the Essex South District Medical Society, accounts for his persistence in persevering at Salem by the settled resolution of his character and the rugged health of his body. It was during these two years, however, that he had perhaps the most serious illness of his life, for his brother John records that in August of 1748, when the family were visiting Edward at Ipswich, the young physi- cian was taken ill of a nervous fever which was serious enough to confine him to his house for some six weeks.
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DR. EDWARD AUGUSTUS HOLYOKE
The devotion of his brother John to Edward and the family interest in his success is suggested by the entry in John's diary of November 29, 1748, "Neddie had a new great coat" followed by the entry two days later, "My great coat turned into a jacket."
The ultimate success of Dr. Holyoke, however doubt- ful it seemed to him at first, was certain from the start. He was well-connected, temperate, whole-heartedly inter- ested in his profession and possessed of a remarkable degree of application to his work. His health apparently improved as he grew older, for during almost his entire life in Salem he was well and enduring, and of a calm and unruffled disposition. His intellectual attainments were above the average and his manner was affable but of sufficient dignity to inspire the confidence of his pa- tients. The standards of medical training and education at that time were very low and the success of a practi- tioner depended far less than today upon training and education and far more upon the attainments and natural ability of the individual. These Dr. Holyoke possessed to an exceptional degree and it could be only a matter of time before the citizens of Salem would come to pre- fer the ministrations of such a man to the care of mid- wives and ill-trained practitioners to whom the art of healing was but incidental to more profitable enterprises. When it is recalled that Dr. Holyoke's first visits were charged at the rate of 8 pence each, it is perhaps surpris- ing that he was able to devote himself exclusively to the practice of his profession and to resist the lure of greater profit from commercial adventure which tempted almost all others with whom he was in contact at that time.
From the beginning of his life in Salem, Dr. Holyoke must have associated on terms of intimacy with the lead- ing citizens of the town for in 1755 he married Judith, the daughter of Col. Benjamin Pickman, one of the rich- est and most influential men of that time in Salem. The tragedies of Dr. Holyoke's family life, however, began early, for his infant daughter survived her mother by only two weeks.
On November 22, 1759, he married his second wife
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BY RICHARD HALL WISWALL
Mary, the daughter of Nathaniel Vial, a merchant of Boston. This event necessitated one of Dr. Holyoke's very infrequent absences from Salem for, according to the custom of the times, social convention required that newly-married couples spend a considerable time at the bride's home receiving the visits and good wishes of their friends. This was recorded by the young physician as "very tedious and irksome" and he was doubtless glad when he could take his wife back after nearly two weeks in Boston and install her in his house at Salem. The house to which he took her was apparently the same house to which he had first gone when he came to Salem, next to the corner of Essex and Union Streets, where he boarded with Madame Turner. Later, in 1763, he pur- chased the Capt. Bowditch house which stood next east of the site of the present Naumkeag Block, and there he lived with his family until he died. The second Mrs. Holyoke also predeceased her husband by many years, but lived to bear him twelve children and to be his most devoted companion for more than forty years of his pro- fessional life in Salem. The child-bearing of Mrs. Holyoke was almost a continued record of sorrow for twenty years. Her first child, a daughter, Mary, was born in 1760 and died four years later. The second child, Margaret, known to her family as Peggy, was born in 1763 and lived unmarried with her father until 1825. After her mother's death she was her father's most devoted companion and support and her death shortly before his own was a great shock to him and undoubtedly to a great extent lessened his zest for life. After the birth of Peggy came five children, no two of them more than two years apart, and none of them lived to see a first birthday. There were two other Marys among them, an Edward and an Edward Augustus, as well as a Nancy, but none survived. The diary of Mrs. Holyoke during this period, bare as it is of any introspection or display of emotion, is indeed a pathetic calendar of entries. With intervals of scarcely over a year she notes that she was brought to bed and delivered of an infant. The child was named and some days or weeks later is the record
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DR. EDWARD AUGUSTUS HOLYOKE
of the baby's illness, the names of her friends who "watched" with her, and the inevitable death. Between these tragic dates is always a brief and continuous account of dinners, tea-drinking, picnics and dances, at which the young Mrs. Holyoke doubtless tried to play the part of her doctor-husband's wife and forget the immediate and miserable past. The direct cause of this appalling mortality seems to have been generally a seizure of fits, and finally an autopsy was performed and in the doctor's words "the disorder was found to be in the bowels." Whether this meant dysentery, and if so what was its cause is not certain, but the experiences of Dr. Holyoke and his wife in this regard seemed to have been even more disastrous than was to be expected in those days of waste of infant life. Two other infants died, one of them another Edward Augustus, and three others lived to grow up. One, Betsy, died at the age of eighteen, and brief though the entry of her death is, it is eloquent of Mrs. Holyoke's grief. Judith, named for the doctor's first wife, was born in 1774 and married William Turner, well-known as a dancing master of his time in Salem. Susanna, born in 1779, was the only one, with Judith, of the doctor's many children who outlived their father. She married Joshua Ward and moved to Boston. Her daughter Susan married Charles Osgood, the portrait painter.
Social life in Salem, prior to the Revolution, as recorded in Mrs. Holyoke's diary was gay enough. In the earlier years of his marriage at least, the doctor escorted his wife on many of the parties which she constantly attended. They were often entertained by Colonel Benjamin Pick- man at his summer house on Castle Hill, where he pre- sided at many functions of one kind or another for his friends, and in the winter they dined frequently at his town house on Essex Street nearly opposite St. Peter Street, which is still standing as a shell only of its former self. They were often, too, at the house of Richard Lech- mere, who in 1760 lived in the Browne mansion where the Essex House now stands. They danced at Jeffries and at Tapley's, and often went on picnics referred to .
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BY RICHARD HALL WISWALL
as Turtle Parties, doubtless because the chief delicacy was provided by large turtles brought into port from southern waters. They skated in the winter, a form of sport of which Dr. Holyoke was very fond, until as he aged he gave it up as inconsistent with the dignity required of his profession. Perhaps the particular form of social pleasure that appealed most to Dr. Holyoke was the Mon- day Night Club which met at the houses of its members, and which is frequently referred to in Mrs. Holyoke's diary. It had for its object the improvement of the minds of its members, particularly in philosophy and literature, by informal reading and conversation. To it belonged many of the leading men of the time in Salem, among them Andrew Oliver, Benjamin Lynde, Reverend Thomas Barnard, the elder, then minister of the First Church, Colonel Benjamin Pickman, Colonel Browne and Samuel Curwen. In this club originated the "Social Library" and the "Philosophical Library" which later united to form the Salem Athenaeum, of which Dr. Holyoke was the first President from its organization in 1810 until his death. His historical interest was keen and he was the president of the Essex Historical Society, which was incorporated in 1821. He was one of the incorporators of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was the president of that organization.
Mr. Charles W. Upham in a memoir of Francis Pea- body read at the Essex Institute in 1868 said, in describ- ing the efforts which had been made in Salem to promote literature, philosophy and history, "It is quite remarkable that in each stage of the progress a leading part was taken by one man, Dr. Holyoke; he signed the call for the meeting at the home of Mrs. Pratt, and was an original subscriber to the fund then raised to establish the Social Library; he was one of the purchasers of Dr. Kirwan's books, thus cooperating in founding the Philosophical Library; he was the first president of the Salem Athe- næum and also the first president of the Essex Historical Society."
Such leisure as his profession and social intercourse afforded him he spent in reading and experimentation.
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DR. EDWARD AUGUSTUS HOLYOKE
From his boyhood until his death, he had an extraordi- nary and persistent interest in meteorology, and he kept an accurate and minute record of his observations daily for eighty years. His thermometer was almost as much of a Salem institution as was the doctor himself, and Dr. Bentley's diary is filled with references to the read- ings of that famous instrument. If ever the weather was unusually cold, a rainy season especially prolonged, or the heat of the summer excessive, the record of it and comparisons with other years and other seasons was always to be had of Dr. Holyoke. He kept a daily table in which was recorded the temperature at four hours of the day, as well as the wind and weather, and these are now in the custody of the Essex Institute. His accounts of unusual storms or of the progress of comets were detailed and scientific in their accuracy. On one notable occasion when his famous thermometer was stolen by some malefactor, it was believed that the culprit must have come from out of town for no such sacrilege could be committed by a citizen of Salem.
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