USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester county; a narrative history, Volume II > Part 40
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prisoner for debt. He died a month later. His friend, Isaiah Thomas, announced his death in the Spy by a solitary line of type.
Mount Bigelow, in the Maine wilderness, remained Timothy Bigelow's only monument for over three quarters of a century. But on the 19th of April, 1861, when the country which the Revolutionary soldier helped so long and valiantly to create was about to enter upon its second war for liberty, there was dedicated to his memory the monument on Worcester Common, hard by the ground where he stood in front of his lines of Minutemen as prayer was said for them, and whither he marched away to war. Beneath the marble structure rests his dust. On it we read: "In memory of the Colonel of the 15th Massachusetts Regiment of the Continental Army in the War of Independence. This monument is erected by his great-grandson, Timothy Bigelow Lawrence." And, telling in half a dozen words the record of service : "Quebec, Saratoga, Valley Forge, Monmouth, Verplanck's Point, Yorktown."
General Charles Devens, Jurist and Soldier of the Rebellion, 1820- 1891-Charles Devens, gallant soldier of the Civil War, justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, Attorney-General of the United States in the Cabinet of President Hayes, was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and in 1854 established himself as a practicing attorney in Worcester. When the news of war was flashed to Worcester in 1861, he turned over to another lawyer the case he was trying, telegraphed the offer of his services to President Lincoln, and on the night of April 16 made an address in crowded Mechanics Hall which fired the excited patriots to action.
He was elected major of the 3d Battalion Rifles, and departed with his men for Fort McHenry. Later he was given command of that great fight- ing regiment, the 15th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He led his men in the disaster of Ball's Bluff, and with them swam the river to safety, and for his skill and gallantry was commissioned a brigadier-general. He fought in various of the great battles in Virginia, was twice badly wounded, and had the distinction of commanding the first body of Union troops to enter Richmond, of which city he was in command until after the final surrender.
Two monuments are his, Fort Devens at Ayer, which was the famous Camp Devens of World War days, and Daniel Chester French's magnificent bronze equestrian statue which stands on the embankment of Court Hill at Worcester, as a memorial to the men of Worcester County who served in the Rebellion.
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John Boynton, Founder of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 1791- 1867-John Boynton, native of New Hampshire, resident of Templeton, was the founder of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which originally was the Worcester Free Institute of Industrial Science. The first thirty years of his life he worked as a farmer, and then started the manufacture of tinware which he peddled over the country from a wagon. His own youth was lacking in opportunities and he determined to do his part to give young men who came after him an adequate start in life. To this end, in 1865, he set aside $100,000 for the endowment and perpetual support of the new school. It was chartered in the same year, and its first class entered upon its studies in 1868, the year following Mr. Boynton's death. It was one of the first schools of its kind in the country, and has maintained to the present day its place as one of the great engineering colleges.
Mr. Boynton's motive in founding the institute is embodied in his state- ment announcing his gift, as follows: "I have long been satisfied that a course of instruction might be adopted in the education of apprentices to mechanicai employments, whereby moral and intellectual training might be united with the processes by which the arts of mechanism, as well as skill in the use and adaptation of tools and machinery are taught, so as to elevate our mechanics as a class in the scale of intelligence and influence, and add to their personal independence and happiness, while it renders them better and more useful citizens, and so more like our Divine Master, whose youth com- bined the conversations of the learned with the duties of a mechanic's son, and whose ideas and teachings now underlie the civilization of the world." Looking back over the history and the record of Worcester Tech, it is easy to see where John Boynton's dream has been realized a thousand times over.
Alexander Hamilton Bullock, Governor of Massachusetts, Civic Leader, 1816-1882-Alexander Hamilton Bullock was born in Royalston, son of Rufus Bullock, manufacturer, representative of his town in the Legis- lature, State Senator, Presidential Elector on the Whig ticket in 1852, and a trustee of Amherst College. He fitted for college at Leicester Academy, and graduated from Amherst in 1836. He taught school for three years, but his ambition was the law, and he studied for the profession in the office of Emory Washburn at Worcester and at the Harvard Law School, and was admitted to the bar in 1841.
Like his father he was a Whig, and quite naturally was drawn into the political field. In 1845, 1847 and 1848 he represented Worcester in the Gen- eral Court, and in 1849 served as State Senator from his adopted city. From 1853 to 1856 he was commissioner of insolvency, and the next two years was judge of insolvency. In 1859 he was elected mayor of Worcester.
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He was serving on the military staff of Governor John Davis when for two years from 1848 to 1850 he edited Worcester's Whig newspaper, the National Aegis.
Governor Bullock was a staunch supporter of Abraham Lincoln's candi- dacy for the Presidency, and of John A. Andrew for Governor of Massa- chusetts. He was widely known as an orator, his fame extending far beyond the borders of his State, and in these campaigns, and in connection with the Civil War, his speeches were many and influential in framing public opinion and in stimulating patriotism. It was characteristic of him when he said, on the occasion of the 25th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry's departure for the front : "Bring me your tax bills and send out the`regiment! Every man or woman who has anything to spare owes it to the country, this month and next, to place a portion of it, at least, in the public stocks. Every dollar invested for the government will transcend in appreciation the annals of usury ; and even if it is lost, it will be riches to the losers, for it would be recoined in the wealth and treasure of the heart."
In the autumn of 1861 he was again elected to the Legislature, where he served for five years, the last four of which as Speaker of the House. Upon the announcement by Governor Andrew that, the war being about to end, he would not accept renomination, Mr. Bullock received the unanimous nomina- tion of the Republican Convention and was elected in November, 1865. He held the post of chief executive for three years.
Governor Bullock was a conspicuously useful figure in his home city. He was president of the Worcester County Institution for Savings and the State Mutual Life Insurance Company, and director of the Worcester National Bank. At Amherst he was a trustee, chairman of the finance committee of the board and president of the Alumni Association. His college and Harvard University conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.
Luther Burbank, the World's Greatest Plant Breeder and the Origi- nator of Many New and Valuable Varieties of Flowers, Fruit and Vege- tables, 1849-1926-Luther Burbank, greatest of all creators of new and useful forms of vegetable life, whose flowers and fruits have become com- monplaces in our daily life, was born in Lancaster, son of a maker of brick and pottery. His early education in the science of agriculture and horticul- ture was confined to knowledge gleaned from such books as chanced to come to his hand. Nor does there seem to be anything in his inheritance to which could be traced the great genius which was his. Yet he was hardly of age when he made his first success as a plant breeder-the creation of the Bur- bank potato. And he was still in his young manhood when he launched out on his great life's work at Santa Rosa, California.
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He was educated in the village school and at Lancaster Academy, and took full advantage of access to the town library which, for that day, was a good one. He worked on the farm, and was only nineteen years old when he established a small market garden in the near-by town of Lunenburg, where he had Fitchburg as the market for his produce. It was in Lunen- burg that he developed the Burbank potato. From its sale to a Boston dealer he received $150, of which $140 was almost immediately spent for transpor- tation to California. His two brothers were already living there, and it was for that reason that he decided to make the Pacific Coast his home, and not that he expected the advantages of climate which were to play so important a part in his work.
At Santa Rosa he found his ideal spot, and he settled down on a little nursery garden having a greenhouse, and set out upon the quest which he was destined to carry far and with a success such as has been achieved by no man before or since. Thousands of men and women have specialized along similar lines, usually in a narrow field of endeavor, and some of them have had valuable results from their skill and labor. But Luther Burbank stands out apart from all these, for he was a super-genius, gifted with sensibilities towards things of the vegetable kingdom such as none other has ever had.
Multiple hybridization was his working principle, coupled with ruthless selection and destruction of everything which did not serve his definitely fixed purpose. He blended and mixed, breeding for definite characteristics, quick to see and take advantage of the unexpected. He searched the world for species which might give new traits of color, or perfume or form, or hardiness. Once in so often we learned of a new Burbank flower such as was never dreamed of, or a fruit or berry of a new lusciousness, or a vege- table or a grain or a grass. Each was always dependably established as a variety. There has been no reversion to ancestral traits. The Shasta Daisy and the Blue Shirley Poppy and many another Luther Burbank flower crea- tion are blooming each season in the gardens of his native shire, and, indeed, of the beautiful estates of his native town of Lancaster.
In the new Dictionary of American Biography, is a long and exceedingly well done sketch of Luther Burbank's life, from which we quote as follows :
"There was, always, immediately following the unusual production of variations the recognition of desirable modifications and the intelligent and effective selection of them, i. e., the saving of those plants to produce seed or cuttings which showed the desirable variations and the discarding of all the others. In Burbank's gardens the few tenderly cared for little potted plants or carefully grafted seedlings represented the surviving fittest, and the great bonfires of scores of thousands of uprooted others, the unfit in this close mimicry of Darwin and Spencer's struggle and survival in nature.
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"It was precisely in this double process of the recognition and selection of desirable variations that Burbank's special genius came into particular play. Right there he brought something to bear on his work that few, if any, other men have been able to do in a similar degree. This was his extraordinary keenness of perception, his delicacy of recognition of desirable variations in their (usually) small and to most men imperceptible beginnings. Was it a fragrance that was sought? To Burbank in a bed of hundreds of seedlings scores of the odors of the plant kingdom were arising and mingling from the first green leaves, but each from a certain single seedling or perhaps from a similar pair or trio. To the visitor until the master prover pointed out two or three of the more dominant single odors, the impression on the ol factories was simply (or confusedly) that of one soft illusive fragrance of fresh green leaves.
"Similarly Burbank was a master at seeing and a master at feeling. And besides he had his own unique knowledge of correlation. Did this plum seed- ling with its score of leaves on its thin stem have those leaves infinitesimally plumper, smoother, or stronger, or with more even margins and stronger petiole, or what not else, than any other among a thousand similar childish trees? Then it was saved for it would bear a larger, or a sweeter, or a firmer sort of plum, or more plums than the others. So to the bonfire with the others and to the company of the elect with this 'fittest' one. It was this extraordinary knowledge or correlation in plant characters, developed through many years of testing and perfecting that was perhaps the most important single new thing which Burbank brought to his work. He had enormous industry, utter concentration and single-mindedness, deftness in manipula- tion, and fertility in practical resource. So have other plant breeders. But in his special perception on variability in its forming his keen recognition of its possibilities of outcome, and in his scentific knowledge of correlations Burbank had a special advantage over his fellow-workers.
"But let us follow our saved plum seedling. Have we now to wait for six or seven years before a plum tree comes into bearing to know by actual seeing and testing what new sort of plum we have? No; and here again was one of Burbank's contributions (not wholly original to be sure, but original in the extent of perfection of its development) to the scientific aspects of plant breeding. This saved seedling and other similar saved ones (for from the examination of 20,000 seedlings, say, Burbank would find a few tens or even scores in which he had faith of reward) would be taken from their plots and grafted onto the sturdy branches of some full-grown vigorous plum tree, so that in the next season or second next one seedling stem would bear its flowers and fruits. Here are years saved. Twenty, forty, sixty, different
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seedlings grafted onto one strong tree (in a particular instance Burbank had 600 plum grafts on a single tree!) ; and each seedling stem certain to bear its own kind of leaf and flower and fruit. (It has long been known that the scion is not modified radically by the stock nor the stock by the scion, although grafting sometimes increases or otherwise modifies the vigor of growth and the extent of the root system of the stock.) If now the fruit from our variant seedling is sufficiently desirable; if it produces earlier or later, sweeter or larger, firmer or more abundant, plums, we have a new race of plums, a 'new creation' to add to the catalogue of results for by simply subdividing the wood of the new branch, i. e., making new grafts from it, the new plum can be perpetuated and increased at will.
"Although Burbank's experimental and creative work ranged over a long list of plant kinds his most intensive and long persisting work was done with plums, berries, and lilies. He had originated no less than two score new varieties of plums and prunes, some of which are among the best known and most successful kinds now grown. Most of these new plum and prune varieties are the result of multiple crossings in which Japanese plums played an important part. Hundreds of thousands of seedlings, the results of these crossings, were grown and carefully worked over in the forty years of plum experimentation.
"Next in extent, probably, to Burbank's work with plums and prunes was his long and successful experimentation with berries. This ran through about thirty-five years, involved the use of over fifty different species of RUBUS, and resulted in the origination and commercial introduction of ten or more new varieties mostly obtained through various hybridizations of dew berries, blackberries and raspberries.
Burbank's work with lilies came to culmination after sixteen years of study and experimentation in which he used more than half a hundred varie- ties in his hybridizings and produced a brilliant array of new forms. His love of his work and the satisfaction and thrill he found in it are well revealed in a brief paragraph in the account of the work with the lilies written for his new creations catalogue for 1893. "Can my thoughts be imagined," he said, "when, after so many years of patient care and labor, as walking among them on a dewy morning I looked upon these new forms of beauty on which other eyes have never gazed? Here a plant six feet high with yellow flowers, beside it one only six inches high with dark red flowers, and further on one of pale straw or snowy white, or with curious dots and shadings; some deli- ciously fragrant, others faintly so; some with upright others with nodding flowers ; some with dark green, woolly leaves in whorls or with polished, light green, lance-like scattered leaves.
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"Among Burbank's other and better known new flowers are numerous roses, several callas, including a fragrant variety, several poppies and clematises, the two giant Shasta and Alaska daisies, several Nicotianas, and a wax myrtle. The famous Shasta daisy, one of Burbank's special prides is the result of a multiple crossings between an American and a European species of field daisy and then between these hybrids and a Japanese form. The fragrant calla, known as 'Fragrance,' is descended from a single indi- vidual found by Burbank while critically examining a block of 'Little Gem' calla seedlings. He was surprised to note a fragrance resembling that of violets or water lilies, and found that it came from a single individual. This little seedling was removed and tenderly taken care of. No further selecting was done; this single plant was the immediate ancestor of the fragrant new race. The blue Shirley poppy was obtained solely by long selection from the crimson field poppy of Europe, but the Fire poppy, a brilliant flame-colored new variety, is the result of hybridizing a butter-colored species and a pure white species in the ancestry of which there was red of a shade much less bright than that characteristic of the new race.
"Burbank's new fruits, besides his plums and prunes, include notable varieties of apples, peaches, quinces, and nectarines, and certain interesting although not profitable crosses of the peach and almond and of the almond and plum.
"Of new vegetables Burbank introduced, besides the Burbank and several other new potatoes, new forms of tomatoes, sweet and field corn, squashes, asparagus, pears, etc. One of his most extensive and interesting experiments was that extending through sixteen years and resulting in the production of a series of luxuriantly growing spineless cactus useful for feeding cattle in arid regions. In this work selection was first made from three hardy northern cactus forms. These selective plants were then crossed with three southern forms, one from southern California, one from Central America, and one from Spain. On the whole pure selection proved to be more efficacious than hybridization in getting the desired results in this cactus work. The cross-bred forms tended constantly to revert to the ancestral spiny condition."
Elihu Burritt, "The Learned Blacksmith," 1811-1879-Elihu Burritt, who became known throughout the English-speaking world as "The Learned Blacksmith," was one of the great linguists of all time, and won additional fame as perhaps the first of the active apostles of universal peace. He was born in New Britain, Connecticut, where, after a few years in the village school, he served an apprenticeship as a blacksmith and labored for a time as a journeyman. But while he worked at forge and anvil, and in all his spare hours, his self-taught knowledge of the languages grew apace. When he was
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hardly passed young manhood, he was the master of fifty tongues. Then fate led his steps to Worcester.
He had religiously saved his money that he might visit Europe and pur- sue his studies there. Though most of his little hoard was swept away in the panic of 1837, he determined to carry out his ambition, and went afoot to Boston. There he found that the ship upon which he was to take passage had sailed. Hearing of the American Antiquarian Society and its library where books could be read for the asking, he trudged the highway to Worces- ter, and there found employment in a forgeshop, at a stipend of $12 a month.
Gradually he became known for his knowledge of languages. Finally a manuscript supposed to be written in Danish was brought to him for transla- tion. Harvard University had given it up. It was important, because of its possible bearing on the insurance of a missing ship. With some difficulty, the young smith found the key to the problem, and produced a translation of an account of the loss of the ship in the South Sea Islands. The language was a native dialect.
The incident, coupled with other minor successes, gave Burritt courage to write to William Lincoln, a fellow-townsman, offering his services as a trans- lator of German. The letter greatly impressed Mr. Lincoln, who called it to the attention of Governor Edward Everett. He. too, was deeply interested, and read the letter before a Teachers' Institute, and there bestowed upon the hitherto obscure Burritt the name of "The Learned Blacksmith," which clung to him through his lifetime, and appears in the anthologies of English litera- ture. The newspapers everywhere printed the Everett speech, and almost overnight Burritt's name was a household word. He was invited to pursue his studies at Harvard, but declined the privilege, preferring to remain at the Worcester forge. A suggestion of his life and character will be found in an entry in his diary at the age of twenty-six :
"Monday, June 18, headache; forty pages of Cuvier's Theory of the Earth, sixty-four pages French, eleven hours forging. Tuesday, sixty-five lines of Hebrew, thirty pages of French, ten pages of Cuvier's Theory, eight lines of Syriac, two ditto Danish, ten ditto Bohemian, nine ditto Polish, fifteen names of stars, two hours forging. Wednesday, twenty-five lines Hebrew, fifty pages of astronomy, eleven hours forging. Thursday, fifty-five lines of Hebrew, eight ditto Syriac, eleven hours forging. Friday, unwell; twelve hours forging. Saturday, unwell; fifty pages Natural Philosophy, ten hours forging. Sunday, lessons for Bible class."
Here is an incident which illustrates to what profound depths this lin- guistic phenomenon had gone while humbly laboring as a smith. He had found in the library of the Antiquarian Society a Celto-Breton dictionary and
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grammar, and he soon determined to write a letter in the Celto-Breton lan- guage to the Royal Antiquarian Society of France. He did so, and a few months afterwards received at his anvil a package containing a large volume, bearing the seal of the Royal Society, and containing a copy of his letter in Celto-Breton and an introduction from a scholar, in which it was stated that the latter was correctly composed.
It might be well to mention, also, that the Learned Blacksmith translated all the Icelandic Sagas relating to the discovery of North America; and also the epistles written by the Samaritans of Nablous to Savants of Oxford. Strange to say, Burritt always believed that his native genius was for mathe- matics and that his interest in languages was acquired !
Burritt came to be in great demand as a lecturer. It is related that he lectured sixty-eight times in the winter of 1842. But he did not abandon his forging, and from it maintained his bodily vigor. He became intensely inter- ested in the cause of peace, and established in Worcester a weekly periodical known as The Christian Citizen, which was devoted not only to peace, but to religion, anti-slavery, temperance and education, and was published for seven years. He founded what he called the "League of Peace Mission," which aroused a widespread interest, and in 1846 led him to visit England. There he was warmly received, and there he created "The League of Universal Brotherhood." Peace congresses were held in Brussels, Paris, Frankfort-on- the-Main, London, Manchester. Famous men, among them Victor Hugo and Carlyle, associated themselves with him in the movement, which had made great progress when the great blow fell-the outbreak of the Civil War in America. To the apostle it seemed that all the good that had been done, was now undone.
At the close of the Rebellion he represented the United States as consular agent at Birmingham, and while in England gathered experience which is recorded in his published works. These include Sparks from the Anvil, A Voice from the Forge, Peace Papers for the People, Thoughts and Things at Home and Abroad, and A Walk from John O'Groat's to Land's End.
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