USA > Maine > Men of progress; biographical sketches and portraits of leaders in business and professional life in and of the state of Maine > Part 14
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SYMONDS, JOSEPH WHITE, of Portland, Judge of the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine for six years, 1872-8, was born in Raymond, Maine, September 2, 1840, son of Joseph and Isabella (Jordan) Symonds. His grandfather was Nathaniel Symonds of Danvers, Massachusetts. His father having removed to Portland in March 1845, he was fitted for college in the Portland High School under Moses Lyford, entered Bowdoin in the fall of 1856, and graduated in the same class with Hon. Thomas B. Reed ; Hon. William W. Thomas, Jr., Ex-Minister to Sweden ; Dr. Phillips, distinguished among our missionaries in India ; Colonel A. W. Bradbury, United States District Attorney in Maine, and many other men who have distinguished themselves in various fields. The class itself was a celebrated one. Immediately after graduation Mr Symonds read law in the office of General Samuel Fessenden, father of William
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Pitt Fessenden, and subsequently in the office of Edward Fox, afterwards Judge of the United States District Court in Maine, and was admitted to the Bar in 1864. A few years later he became City Solicitor of Portland, having charge of the legal
JOSEPH W. SYMONDS.
affairs in which the corporation itself was interested. He had also acquired : very considerable general practice when, in Septer ber \872, he was appointed Judge of the Superior Court in the county of Cum- berland. After serving in this capacity for about six years he was appointed Judge of the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine, and remained upon the Supreme Bench six years, when he resigned to enter again upon general practice in Portland. Judge Symonds still continues in the practice of law in that city, and has won a distinguished and widely- extended reputation. His elder brother, William Law Symonds, a graduate of Bowdoin in the class of 1854, acquired renown as a literary man, although he died at the early age of twenty-eight. He wrote several articles for the Atlantic Monthly, among them " Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith," and the " Carnival of the Romantic," published in August 1860, which James Russell Lowell said was the finest essay ever contributed to the Atlantic. He was engaged for a long time upon the new American Encyclopedia, published by the Appletons, and wrote some of the heaviest articles for that work,
among them the articles on English Literature, History, Philosophy, and very many of the literary articles. The article on the Literature of the United States had been assigned to him when his death occurred in New York city. Judge Symonds is a Republican in politics. He has one son - Stuart Oakley Symonds.
THAYER, AUGUSTUS SPAULDING, M. D., Portland, was born in Paris, Oxford county, Maine, March 18, 1835, son of America and Caroline (Prentiss) Thayer. He is a descendant in the eighth genera- tion of Thomas Thayer, who came with the Massa- chusetts colony from Braintree, Essex county, Eng- land, about the year 1630, and settled in Braintree, Massachusetts. He was educated in the common schools of his native town, Gould's Academy in Bethel, Maine, and Paris Hill Academy in Paris, and pursued his medical studies at the Portland School for Medical Instruction, the Maine Medical School and the University of Pennsylvania, gradu- ating from the last-named institution March 12,
AUGUSTUS S. THAYER.
1864. In the following May he located in Portland as physician and surgeon, where he has continued, in active practice to the present time. Dr. Thayer was City Physician of Portland from February 1865 to April 1867, has been Instructor in the Portland
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School for . Medical Instruction since 1878, has served as Physician to the Maine General Hospital since 1874, and as United States Pension Examin- ing Surgeon since 1893. He is a member of the Portland Clinical Club, the Cumberland County Medical Society, the Maine Medical Association and the American Medical Association, also of the Portland Society of Natural History and the Fal- mouth and Fraternity clubs. In politics he is a Democrat. He was married January- 1, 1867, to Miss Mary H. Marble, of Paris, Maine, who died December 5, 1874, leaving a daughter, Mary Flor- ence Thayer, born October 30, 1872. In 1882, January 11, Dr. Thayer married Miss Annie L. Soule of Groveton, New Hampshire.
THOMAS, GEORGE ALBERT, Lawyer, Portland, was born in Portland, September 16, 1819; son ci Elias and Elizabeth (Widgery) Thomas. On the
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GEORGE A. THOMAS.
paternal side he is of Welsh descent and on the mother's side English, his maternal grandfather, William Widgery, having come to this country from Devonshire, England. Additional facts relating to his ancestry are given in the sketch of William Wid- gery Thomas, brother of George Albert, which appears elsewhere in this volume. The subject of this sketch received his early education in public
and private schools of Portland and at Portland Academy, was graduated at Bowdoin College in the class of 1841, studied at Harvard Law School, and was admitted to the Bar in November 1845. For several years up to 1849 Mr. Thomas was Librarian of the Portland Athenaeum. From early in 1850 to November 1854 he was in California, most of the time engaged in mining, where he had some good ciaits, but always declared that he left more gold than he brought away. After his return from the Pacific coast, he was engaged for several years in the purchase and sale of soldiers' bounty land-war- rants, in connection with parties in the West, and since then his time and services have been much employed as Trustee in the management of several large estates. Mr. Thomas has occupied for many years a prominent and unique place in the social life of Portland. He has held but few offices of a public nature, and none of a political character, having never been an office-seeker, nor an aspirant for office. As a singer, although not a professional, he is known all over Maine, having done a large amount of free singing for charitable purposes for many years, always responding when called upon for such occasions. In 1894 Mr. Thomas passed his third quarter-century, and his birthday anniver- sary was the occasion of an observance that was a striking demonstration of the popular esteem in which he is held, and a notable tribute of public appreciation of his life and character. " It seemed not a little odd," said a Boston newspaper in reporting the event, "that the celebration of the birthday of a man who never in his life held a public office, who was never prominent in any public movement, and who never made a speech in his life, or in any way tried to win public notice, should have called together scores of the notable people of Portland, until there was not a profession, and hardly a single line of the activities of life in the city, that did not have a representative on that unique occasion. George A. Thomas is the one man in Portland who has no enemies. He is the one man who is liked by all classes and conditions of men. His presence suggests that it is time to laugh. There is sunshine in the very makeup of the man, and it is but the simple truth to say that his life has been devoted to making others happy. A big banquet would be regarded as a failure with- out a song from Mr. Thomas. A concert would hardly pass off evenly without his presence and assistance. A public meeting would seem to lack something if he should not be seen on the platform,
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and it may be said of the bright man of seventy five, there are many of the otherwise friendless in the city who would hardly know what to do, were his substantial aid to be withdrawn by reason of his death. No other man in Portland is better known than he, no man is so loved and honored, and yet he has held no office, wanted no office, and has' been content all his long life to do good." A most interesting feature of the'celebration were the poems read, written for the occasion by Hon. George F. Emery, Mrs. Jordan, Mrs. Greene, and Professor. F. Nicholls Crouch, the venerable bard, composer of " Kathleen Mavourneen," who recently died in his eighty-eighth year, and to the very last adhered to the practice of writing a specific article, music, prose or poetry, every day ; the touching lines written by Mr. Thomas's brother, Edward H .- Thomas, the blind father of the lamented Charlie Thomas ; and the following letter, of special interest because of the high character and distinguished public services of the writer, and doubly prized by the recipient on account of the circumstances under which it was written, from Rev. Parker Pillsbury, the last of the great Abolitionists, then on a sick bed : "My Dear Friend Thomas - Letters are luxuries to me forbidden by high medi- cal authorities, but that must not prevent me from congratulating you on reaching one more milepost in life's checkered journey, and wishing you a happy continuance of the same, as long as it shall please the infinite Disposer of events to vouchsafe it. You and I have both reached a stage when every ailment becomes a warning. Let us heed the message so as to at all times be ready for the translation to those higher, diviner spheres, scenes and occupa- tions which await all the faithful ones, as we soar amid the unknown mazes of eternity. Wishing I may accompany you and your ' social corner ' com- panionship in that sublime journey through the ages, I am, as always, faithfully yours, Parker Pillsbury." The "social corner " referred to by Mr. Pillsbury was the old Thomas Mansion, that for years was the home of the anti-slavery apostles when in Portland, a home to which l'arker Pillsbury himself frequently went back after an exhausting conflict with those who thought him mad and would not listen to his message. The old Thomas Mansion has for many years sheltered many notable people. There has been in fact a very notable family group there. Among the family circle was Edward H. Thomas, who lived until past eighty, once a noted lawyer, but for many years blind, and
almost shut out from the world of speech, yet always bright and full of life. He accepted his physical troubles in a noble way, never complaining, never feeling that his life was thrown away, but trying his best to make life bright to those around him. He died February 2.1, 1896. Another member of the " social corner" of which Mr. Pillsbury wrote is Miss Charlotte Thomas, the sister of the two old inen. Whenever Charlie Thomas visited the city with one of his companies, they were all taken to the old Danforth-street mansion, that somehow never seemed to be full, no matter how many were present. They all learned from him to call her Aant Charlotte, and many of them found that the active, bustling woman could be a true friend ; Vice-President of the Burns Club, connected with many other organizations, earnest and helpful, the mistress of the old mansion will be long remembered. Another member of the same family, who is some- times one of the "social corner," is Hon. W. W. Thomas, who at ninety-two is still in business, is still the President of a national bank, and whose "eye is not dim, nor his mental powers abated." Mr. Thomas has been a member of various societies in the city and county, and an officer in some of them, including the Citizens' Relief Association, Aged Brotherhood, and Veteran Firemen's Associa- tion. He is a member of the New England Society of California Pioneers, also of the Haydn Associa- tion and Weber Male Chorus Club of Portland, and an associate member of the Music Teachers' National Association. In politics Mr. Thomas was originally a Whig, but has been a member of the Republican party from its organization. £ He is unmarried.
THOMAS, WILLIAM WIDGERY, for nearly three- quarters of a century a merchant, banker and real estate owner of Portland, and in his ninety-third year still in active business and a leading figure in the commercial life of the city, was born in Port- land, November 7, 1803, son of Elias and Elizabeth (Widgery) Thomas. He is a direct descendant in the eighth generation from George Cleeve, the first settler of Portland, and includes in his ancestry the Rev. George Burroughs, the first minister in Fal- mouth and a graduate of Harvard College, and John Proctor, both of whom were hung for witch- craft by the people of Salem. His father, Elias Thomas, born in Portland, January 14, 1872, was engaged from early life in mercantile pursuits in
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Portland, was Director of the Cumberland Bank, and for seven years from 1823 was Treasurer of the State of Maine ; he died in Portland after a long, honorable and useful life, at his home, corner of State and Danforth streets, August 3, 1872, aged one hundred years and six months ; the Thomas Block in Commercial street, Portland, was named in his honor. Mr. Thomas's niother. Elizabeth Wid- gery, daughter of the Hon. William Widgery, was married to Elias Thomas in 1801, and died in Portland in July 1861, greatly beloved and re- spected, at the age of eighty-three years. Hon. William Widgery was a prominent man of his time.
W. W. THOMAS.
He was chosen in 1787 the Representative from New Gloucester, Maine, to the General Court of Massachusetts, which office he held by virtue of repeated elections for eight years ; was in 1794 elected Senator to the Legislature of the State of Massachusetts from Cumberland county ; and in 1810 was chosen Representative to Congress from Cumberland district and earnestly supported the administration of President Madison, casting his vote in favor of conimencing hostilities against Great Britain in 1812, though against the wishes of his constituents. It is said of him in this connec- tion, by a gentleman writing to a friend in Portland : " Mr. Widgery.was in Congress a moral hero, prov- ing himself a man of moral firmness, unbending
integrity and self-sacrificing patriotism, by taking on himself the memorable position and dangerous responsibility of voting against the expressed will of his constituents for an unequal and hazardous war, with the best part of his wealth (his shipping) on the ocean uninsured, while his town property, just recovering from the desolation of the embargo, worse than the war for the infant seaport, must be- come unproductive, furnishing his declining years with a precarious support, while he would have to buffet the storm of popular indignation - which he did." Widgery Block, in Exchange street, Port- land, was named in honor of his memory and stands on the site of his former residence. At an early age William Widgery Thomas become a clerk in a drygoods store in Portland, and when only eighteen years old, in 1822, went into the business for him- self in that city. From this business he retired in 1835 after a successful career, and has since been actively engaged in various pursuits as merchant, banker and real-estate owner up to the present time. He has been for many years one of the largest real-estate owners in Portland, and to him the city is indebted for many of the substantial business buildings which adorn its streets. Mr. Thomas was elected a Director of the Canal Bank of Portland, then a state bank, in October 1836, and in 1849 became its President, to which position he has been chosen by annual elections ever since, and has therefore served as a Director of the bank fifty-nine years and its President for forty-six years, and still attends daily to the duties of the office. He represented the city of Portland in the State Legislature as a member of the House in 1855 and of the Senate in 1856, and in 1860 he was elected State Treasurer, but declined to serve. In 1876 he was elected Presidential Elector at Large, and at the meeting of the State Electors in Augusta was chosen President of the Electoral College of Maine ; he voted in favor of the election of Mr. Hayes. Mr. Thomas has served in both branches of the city government, and is perhaps best known as the first " War Mayor " of Portland, 1861-2. In that exec- utive office he was very active in his support of the Federal authority, and in caring for the soldiers and their families. He was a personal friend of Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln's famous War Secretary, and subsequently named a business building on Exchange street "Stanton Block" in his honor. Mr. Thomas was for twenty years one of the Board of Overseers of Bowdoin College, and for more than thirty years a corporate member of the American
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oard of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, both f which offices he resigned on account of increas- g years. He has been one of the Managers of ne Portland Benevolent Society for over thirty ears, and President for more than twenty years, till holding that position. In 1827 Mr. Thomas ith Neal Dow, W. D. Little and others organized ne Portland Temperance.Society, and he has now his possession the Secretary's book containing he preamble and a long list of signers, among them ome very prominent names. He has always been n earnest supporter of the cause of temperance, nd has never used intoxicating drinks or tobacco any form during his long life. He became a member of the Second Parish Congregational Church of Portland, Dr. Payson pastor, in 1827, nd is now the oldest living member. For nearly eventy-five years Mr. Thomas has taken an active nd prominent part in the business life of his native ity. He is to-day the oldest merchant and banker nd the most venerable and respected citizen of Portland. In the course of this long business areer he has accumulated an ample fortune ; but e has acquired every dollar of it by fair, open and onorable dealing. He has also ever been a cheer- ul giver. As his fortune increased, so also have is benefactions. Many are the institutions that ave been helped, and many the homes that have een brightened by the largess of his hand and he benediction of his heart. Mr. Thomas was harried March 5, 1835, /0 Elizabeth White God- lard, born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, May 5, 1812, daughter of Henry Goddard, for many ears a merchant in Portland. Mrs. Thomas died n Portland, April 27, 1884, lamented by all who new her for her many virtues. Of their children hree are living : General Henry G. Thomas, United States Army; William Widgery Thomas, Jr., Ex- Minister to Sweden, and Elias Thomas, a merchant f Portland.
THOMAS, WILLIAM WIDGERY, JR., of Portland, Ex-Minister of the United States to Sweden and Norway, was born in Portland, August 26, 1839, on of William Widgery and Elizabeth White Goddard) Thomas. He comes of an old, in fact he oldest, Portland family, being a descendant in he ninth generation from George Cleeve, the first white settler of the city, and Governor of the early Province of Ligonia, afterwards included in the State of Maine. He is a brother of General Henry
G. Thomas of the United States Army, a son of W. W. Thomas, Sr., Ex-Mayor of Portland, and now at ninety-three the oldest business man of that city, and a grandson of Elias Thomas, former State Treasurer of Maine, who married Elizabeth, daughter of William Widgery, Judge and Member of Congress. On the maternal side he is descended from Dr. John Goddard of New Hampshire, who declined a United States Senatorship. W. W. Thomas, Jr., received his earlier education in the public schools of Portland, entered Bowdoin Col- lege in 1856, and graduated in 1860 with the highest honors. During his college course, at the
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W. W. THOMAS, JR.
age of eighteen, he taught a winter district school for three months and a half in a little red school-house near the shore of Cape Elizabeth. Immediately after graduation he commenced reading law, but in the spring of 1862 left his studies, and as United States Bearer of Dispatches, carried a treaty to Turkey. Here he became Vice-Consul-General at Constantinople, then Acting Consul at Galatz in the Principality of Moldavia, and before the close of the year was appointed by President Lincoln one of the thirty " War Consuls" of the United States, and sent to Gothenburg, Sweden. For his services as Consul he received from Secretary William H. Seward "the special thanks of the Department of
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State." He resigned his Consulship and returned to America in 1865, was admitted to the Bar in 1866, entered upon practice in Portland, and at once won distinction as an advocate. During his three-years residence in Sweden, Mr. Thomas acquired the Swedish language and became familiar with the history and manners and customs of the people. On his return to his native land he earn- estly advocated Swedish immigration to Maine, and presented the first definite practical plan for the purpose. The State Legislature of 1870 passed an act authorizing this plan to be tried. Mr. Thomas was at once appointed Commissioner of Immigra- tion, and the fate of his undertaking was placed in his own hands. He immediately visited Sweden, recruited a colony of fifty-one Swedes, sailed with them over the ocean, led them up the St. John River on flatboats into Maine, and on July 23, 1870, founded the prosperous settlement of New Sweden in the primeval forest of his native state. Here he lived in a log-cabin with his Swedish pioneers for the better portion of four years, directing all the affairs of the colony until its success was assured. The colony has rapidly increased, and has con- stantly attracted Swedish immigration into Maine and the other New England states. In 1895 Maine's Swedish colony numbered fifteen hundred souls, owning real estate and personal property worth three quarters of a million dollars, while fifteen hundred more Swedish immigrants were settled in other portions of the state. New Sweden appro- priately celebrated the decennial and quarter-cen- tennial anniversaries of its settlement in 1880 and 1895, on both of which occasions Mr. Thomas deliv- ered the oration. In 1873 Mr. Thomas was elected by the city of Portland as Representative to the State Legislature, and was re-elected in 1874 and 1875. In the first session he made his mark as an able and courageous debater, and in the two later sessions he presided over the house as Speaker. He was also Senator from Cumberland county in 1879, declining a renomination. In 1875 he was President of the Maine State Republican Convention, and in 1880 a Delegate to the memorable Republican National Convention at Chicago which nominated General Garfield for the Presidency. On the Fourth of July 1883, Mr. Thomas delivered the oration at the quar- ter-millennial celebration of the founding of Portland by his own ancestor Cleeve. He had already been appointed Minister-Resident to Sweden and Nor- way, and on July 19, the eve of departure for his foreign post of duty, the sympathy and goodwill of
his fellow-citizens found expression in a public din- ner given him under the auspices of the Cumber- land Bar and the merchants of Portland. He re- sided at Stockholm as American Minister until the close of President Arthur's administration in 1885, and was the first Minister to Sweden to address the King in his own language, the first to hoist the American flag at Stockholm, and the first to effec- tively assist in starting a direct line of steamships between Sweden and the United States. On taking his departure he was honored by a public farewell banquet, tendered him by many of the first citizens of the Swedish capital, at the Pavilion of Hassel- backen in the Royal Deer Park, upon which occasion the Pavilion was decorated with American flags, and the Band of the Royal Second Life-Guards played American national airs In 1887 Mr. Thomas again visited Sweden, and married a Swedish lady of noble birth. The year following he was orator at the great Swedish celebration in Minneapolis, Min- nesota, where more than forty thousand Swedes assembled to commemorate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the first Swedish settlement in America, New Sweden on the Delaware, founded by Gustavus Adolphus. This was the largest gath- ering of the Swedish race that ever took place on this continent. In March 1889 Mr. Thomas was appointed Envoy-Extraordinary and Minister-Plen- ipotentiary to Sweden and Norway by President Harrison, and the Minister and his young Swedish wife were welcomed back to the Northland with dis- tinguished honors by both King and people. Dur- ing his second term he helped secure the appoint- ment of a Swedish jurist as Chief Justice of Samoa under the Treaty of Berlin, and a Norwegian states- man as member of the Tribunal of Arbitration be- tween the United States and Great Britain on the question of the fur-seal fisheries in Behring Sea ; and on September 14, 1890, on the deck of the American ship of war Baltimore, lying in the harbor of Stockholm, he delivered in an eloquent address the honored ashes of the great Swedish-American, John Ericsson, to the King and people of Sweden. During his second term, also, a freer market for American products was opened in Sweden, the Riksdag voting in 1892 to reduce the duties by one half on both grain and pork ; and it was by his sug- gestion, made to the Department of State in 1890, that he received instructions under which he com- menced negotiations with the governments of the United Kingdoms, that resulted in the full and sat- isfactory extradition treaties of 1893 between the
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