USA > New Hampshire > Hillsborough County > Peterborough > History of the town of Peterborough, Hillsborough county, New Hampshire > Part 47
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"My mother's father, John Hopkins, was a farmer. He was a man of an easy, happy temperament, who, it was said, would sit at work on his shoe-maker's bench, in winter, and sing Scotch songs all day long, without repeating a single song. His wife, however, Isabella Reid, was of a very different temperament, and belonged to a family of very marked and powerful characteristics. She was a woman of strong convictions, and of great energy of mind and body. She, like her daughter, Mary Ann, could do two or three days' work in one, and had no patience with the idleness or inefficiency of other people. She probably did for the Hopkinses what Mar- garet Wallace had done for the Morisons three genera- tions before, and introduced into the race a much more energetic type of character. She lived to a great age, with her son, James Hopkins, in Antrim. I remember her prompt and decisive interference on two or three occasions at my father's. Once, when I was a very young boy, I took a small amount of honey from one of our bee-hives, and escaped without injury. But when the same experiment was tried a second time, it seemed to me as if the whole swarm of bees, with their stings in active exercise, had settled down on my head. In-
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stantly, on hearing the cries sent out by the child, my grandmother appeared with a bowl of water, and quickly drove away my offended avengers of their rights. Not long before her death I saw her in Antrim. She was very feeble and very kind. Just before I left her, she unlocked a private drawer, and took from it two silver half-dollars which she asked me to give to my mother. I was greatly affected by her kindness, for it was prob- ably nearly all the money that she had.
" Here is a very slight sketch of those who have gone before us, and whose lives are transmitted through our veins to those who shall come after us. I believe in in- herited qualities, but it is difficult to reconcile with this belief the very different qualities of those who inherit the same blood. . For example, your grandfather, Will- iam Smith, and his wife, Elizabeth Morison, were the brother and sister of my great-grandmother, Mary Smith, and her husband, Thomas Morison. The blood in the two families was the same, and the circumstances under which they entered life were substantially the same. Yet every one of the six sons of William Smith was a man of marked ability, and not one of the sons of Thomas Morison was much, if at all, above mediocrity. Samuel was a shrewd, thrifty man. But that was all. Three of the daughters of Thomas Morison, however, were un- common women. Mary -the Aunt Polly who was so long in your father's store-was, I suppose, one of the most brilliant women ever born in Peterborough. Her sister Sally was, as Judge Smith used to say, a born lady. Her intellectual and moral qualities, and delicate, wom- anly susceptibilities, were admirably harmonized. She took snuff and smoked a pipe, and yet no one could meet her or talk with her without feeling that she was a refined and delicate woman. Margaret, the wife of Mat- thew Wallace, was said to be a woman of uncommon ability.
" We sometimes seem to recognize different ancestors in our different moods and feelings at different times. When I am indulging in the thought of projects vastly beyond my ability to carry out, I feel my great-great- grandmother, the ambitious Margaret Wallace, stirring my blood, and call to mind my grandfather's caution to his son to remember that his name was Morison, and not undertake more than he could do. When I feel very much fixed in any decision, and unwilling to be reasoned out of it, right or wrong, I feel something of the Holmes obstinacy rising up within my veins. When I am in an easy, indolent mood, and disposed to let the day go by without effort in pleasant dreams, I think of my grand-
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NATHANIEL MORISON.
father Hopkins, whose name I bear, and his Scotch songs. If I ever succeed in stripping off its surround- ings, and looking calmly and clearly into a difficult and important subject, without prejudice on either side, I rejoice to feel that I have in me something of the mild, unbiased good sense which has come down from the Smiths as they were before they were united with the Morisons. In this way I lead different lives, and feel myself swayed by widely different impulses, and brought under the influence of different ancestors, according to the mood that happens to be uppermost. Sometimes I feel as if I were my father, looking out from his eyes and walking in his gait, and then I detect the mother in the earnestness with which I find myself gazing on some person before me, as your uncle, Judge Smith, seemed to see his sister Betty when he put on her cap and looked at himself in the glass."
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Eliza Holmes, b. Fayetteville, N. C., July 10, 1805 ; m., Sept. 18, 1845, Stephen Felt ; d. Aug. 14, 1867. t John Hopkins, b. July 25, 1808 ; m., Oct. 21, 1841, Emily Hurd Rogers.
Horace, b. Sept. 13, 1810 ; m., July 27, 1841, Mary E. Lord ; d. Aug. 5, 1870.
Caroline, b. June 20, 1813 ; m., Aug. 29, 1837, George W. Moore, Medina, Mich. ; d. March 17, 1849.
t Nathaniel Holmes, b. Dec. 14, 1815 ; m., Dec. 22, 1842, Sidney B. Brown ; r. Baltimore, Md.
49 ¡ Samuel A.,
m., Nov. 9, 1847, Ellen Smith ; r. San Francis- co, Cal.
b. June 20, 1818 ;
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i James,
m., Ist w., Jan. 29, 1857, Mary Lydia Sanford, of Boston ; 2d w., June 16, 1868, Ellen Wheeler, of Keene.
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JOHN HOPKINS MORISON. The following autobiog- raphy was furnished at my request : -
" I was born in Peterborough, July 25, 1808, and was the second child and oldest son of Nathaniel and Mary Ann Morison. I remained at home till April 15, 1820. At the age of three I began to attend school in the sum- mer, but after I was six years old my services on the farm were thought too valuable to be dispensed with, and from that time forth till I was sixteen I went to school only in the winter, from eight to twelve weeks in
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a year. In the autumn of 1819, my father died, and his family was left in great affliction, and in very straitened circumstances. From 1820 to 1824, I lived with differ- ent farmers in the town, working hard, faring as well as they did, and receiving but scanty wages, never, I think, more than fifty dollars a year, even when I did nearly a man's work. I look back upon those four years as the most unhappy period of my life. The change from our own home to a place with strangers was a pain- ful one, not because I was treated unkindly, but from a feeling that I was fatherless and homeless, and from a longing for a better companionship and better means of education. My principal solace was to spend the Sun- day, once in a month or two, at my mother's house. My greatest happiness, intellectually, was in reading, often by fire-light with my head in a perilously hot place. The books which I enjoyed most were the Bible, Rollin's ancient history, Gibbon's Rome, and an odd volume or two of Josephus. The little Social Library kept by Mr. Daniel Abbot was a great resource to me.
"In October, 1824, I went to Exeter and lived there with Mr. Joseph Smith Gilman, 'tending' in a small grocery store, and doing what a boy might be expected to do about the place, for ten months. The position and most of its duties were distasteful to me. I made some ludi- crous and embarrassing mistakes. I was not good at a bargain, and my heart was not in my work. I was more homesick than I had ever been. I wondered then, and have not ceased to wonder yet, at Mr. Gilman's forbear- ance. He and his family were very kind to me, and I shall never think of them otherwise than with profound gratitude. But the young people whom I was thrown in with were more ignorant and had lower tastes and aims in life than any persons I ever knew ; but I had a good deal of time for reading and plenty of books. Before leaving Peterborough I had, for six weeks, attended a private school kept by Mr. Addison Brown, then a stu- dent in Harvard College. He had very rare gifts as a teacher. I felt that my intellectual nature was then for the first time waked up, and life assumed for me a new meaning. During the winter, in Exeter, I attended an evening school taught by Mr. Richard Hildreth, a man of fine genius, who took great interest in my studies. My progress with him was such that he and Mr. Gil- man, the next summer, called the attention of Dr. Abbot, the noble principal of Phillips (Exeter) Academy, to my case, and without any application on my part, I was allowed to take a place among the beneficiaries of the school. Here a new world was opening before me. Every
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branch of study seemed to offer a new delight. Even the primary elements of Latin and Greek had for me a singular fascination, and every step was an advance into a sort of fairy-land. I shall never forget the sensations of keen enjoyment with which I read the Odes of Horace, the Iliad of Homer, the Bucolics of Virgil and of Theocritus, or the utter absorption of mind with which I went through the higher branches of Agebra and Geom- etry, and, most of all, the Conic Sections. I remained in the academy four years, three as a scholar, and one mostly as a teacher, pursuing my sophomore studies by myself. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the teachers there, especially to Dr. Abbot and Dr. Soule.
"In 1827, '28 I had become acquainted with William Smith, a gifted, accomplished, generous young man. He introduced me to his father, the Hon. Jeremiah Smith, who, in brilliancy and strength of mind, in accuracy and extent of learning, and the higher qualities of his charac- ter, was fitted to take, as he did, an honorable place among the ablest of our distinguished men. In August, 1828, he invited me to become a member of his family, and I remained there a year, during which time his daughter died, and her death was followed by that of his son the next winter. Their illness and departure, espe- cially the rapid and fatal decline of his daughter, a most lovely and interesting woman, took me through a wholly new experience. This life could never again be to me what it had been before. The light of worlds beyond had been let in upon it.
"In August, 1829, I was admitted to the Junior Class in Harvard College. Of the hundred dollars which I had saved from my earnings during the previous year, I was required to pay ninety for instruction which I had not been able to receive during the Freshman and Sopho- more years of my class. But, notwithstanding this exac- tion which always seemed to me unjust, I have every reason to speak of my Alma Mater with grateful affection and respect. The last generation of American states- men numbered among its distinguished men no grander example of a faithful, disinterested, able public inan than Josiah Quincy, then President of Harvard University. He was kind to me from the beginning, and his kind- ness continued down to the last year of his useful and honored life. I taught school during six of the twenty- four months of my college course, so that I was really in college a little less than a year and a half. I earned what little I could, and practised a pretty severe econ- omy. My expenses were small, and Judge Smith had generously and very judiciously so arranged matters, that
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I never felt any great anxiety in regard to my immediate wants. I began life with nothing. I never have asked pecuniary assistance for myself. And yet I have never been unable to meet my engagements. Sometimes I could not see a month beforehand how the means could be procured, but they always came, and sometimes from the most unexpected sources.
"On graduating in 1831, I concluded to study law, hav- ing engaged to pursue my studies with a very learned lawyer of Baltimore, and to meet my expenses by instructing his two children. On account of this en- gagement I declined several advantageous offers of employment as a teacher. After waiting several weeks, when the time for such offers had passed by, the gentle- man sent me word that he had engaged another young man and would not need my services. This was a very great disappointment to me. It left me without occu-
pation, and without means of support, but it taught me a lesson as to the sacredness of engagements that has always been of great service to me. I remained in Cambridge through the fall and winter, teaching a few pupils, and attending some of the lectures of the Divin- ity School. At that time I became acquainted with Henry Ware, Jr., and his wife, and had a room in their house. In a social and religious point of view that season was a very profitable one to me. It gave me time to reconsider my choice of a profession, and en- abled me to approach the subject with different feelings and a better understanding.
"In March, 1832, I began to teach a small private school for young ladies in New Bedford, and remained there a year. That year was perhaps the most impor- tant in my life. I was then for the first time a man among men. I had leisure for study, and devoted my- self to it with the utmost intensity and enthusiasm. I read Cicero's philosophical writings, Cousin, Pascal, Madame de Staël, Dante, some of the old English prose writers, Wordsworth, and, above all in its influence on my mind, Coleridge, especially his Friend and Biographia Literaria. In the winter I gave a course of seven lect- ures on literary subjects to a very intelligent audience of perhaps a hundred persons. This was a new and exciting experience. It made me feel the responsibility of acting on the minds of others. But I had over- worked during the winter, and from the middle of March till the last of August, 1833, spent most of the time in Peterborough, in a state of physical exhaustion which I did not understand. Among the great advantages which I enjoyed at New Bedford, especially in the society of
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very intelligent people, that which I valued above all the rest was the privilege of hearing Dr. Dewey preach. It was the most quickening and uplifting preaching that I have ever heard, and of itself made an epoch in my life. "At the beginning of the academical year 1833 I joined the middle class at the Cambridge Divinity School, which was then under the able and conscientious charge of John Gorham Palfrey and the Henry Wares, father and son. There was an extraordinary degree of vitality and enthusiasm in the school at that time, especially in regard to philanthropical movements. I entered very heartily into these subjects, and took an earnest part in the preparation of elaborate papers, and in the debates. Both my moral convictions and my philosophy went much deeper, and looked to a much more thorough and radical reform than was usually contemplated in the social movements of the day. I was, perhaps, considered too conservative, because I was in fact too radical to be satisfied with the superficial measures that were sug- gested by the most zealous reformers. The labor ques- tion, which is just beginning to cast its portentous shadows before it now, was one on which I prepared a report that cost a vast amount of labor, and which came to conclusions that are now beginning to engage the attention of thoughtful men. During a temporary va- cancy in the department I taught political economy to the senior class of undergraduates, and read nearly everything that had then been published on that great but still incomplete science. I prepared two lectures for the Exeter Lyceum, and did not slight my studies in the Divinity School. In this way I overtasked my physi- cal powers. In May, 1834, I had a slight attack of typhoid fever, with a determination of blood to the head. After two or three weeks I went to my mother's in Peter- borough. But the disease did not leave me. I spent nearly a year in a dark room, unable to sit up, or to bear the presence even of a near friend. A strong con- stitution was seriously broken. For thirty years after- wards I was not able to do more than one-third the amount of mental labor which had once been a healthful and happy exercise. This was a constantly recurring grief and disappointment.
"For five years I was able to do very little hard work. I preached but seldom, and was not a candidate for set- tlement as a minister. I supported myself as a private teacher, in New Bedford, and was very happy in the home that was opened to me. In May, 1838, I was set- tled as associate pastor with Rev. Ephraim Peabody, over the First Congregational Society in New Bedford.
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My relation to him and to the society was a happy one. I could not have been associated with a better man. He had a lofty ideal of intellectual, moral, and religious culture. He was of a most generous and guileless nature, and was as much interested in my success as in his own. The five years of my New Bedford ministry were years of great enjoyment and improvement. Dur- ing that time, in October, 1841, I was married to Miss Emily Hurd Rogers, of Salem, and in December of the following year, my eldest son, George S. Morison, was born.
"In September, 1843, I gave up my salary, and asked leave of absence for an indefinite time. This I did partly because I thought Mr. Peabody's health was then such as to enable him to go on with his work alone, and partly in the hope that change of scene and entire free- dom from professional care for a year or two might reestablish my own health. During this vacation I pre- pared the Life of my early benefactor and kinsman, Jeremiah Smith .* In the autumn of 1845, I resigned my office in New Bedford, and in January, 1846, became the pastor of the First Congregational Parish in Milton, Mass., where I have continued to this day. The society is small. The duties of the place have not been oppress- ive. The people have been very indulgent. Among them I have found men and women whom it has been a great joy and privilege to know as friends. I could ask for no higher or more exciting employment than to do everything in my power for their instruction and im- provement. If there has been little to feed or gratify any lower ambition, there has been a great deal to cherish the best affections. The highest thought that I have been able to reach has always found a hospitable welcome. My one aim in life has been to prove myself in all things a faithful minister of Christ, and even in the apparently narrow sphere in which my lot has been cast I have found abundant opportunity for the exercise of all my faculties. I have written and published a commen- tary on the Gospel of St. Matthew,t and had hoped to extend the work so as to include the other evangelists. At different times I have edited the Christian Register, and the Religious Magazine or Unitarian Review. But the work of an editor was never to my taste. The pulpit, the parochial labors, and, above all, the studies, of a Christian minister have had for me greater attractions
* Life of the Hon. Jeremiah Smith, LL. D., Member of Congress during Washington's Administration. Judge of the United States Circuit Court, Chief Justice of New Hampshire, etc. Boston, 1845.
t Disquisitions and Notes of the Gospels. Matthew. Boston, 1860.
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than any other office or calling. They have been to me always a sufficient stimulus and reward. When drawn away from them for a season by failing health it has been an unspeakable happiness to come back to them again.
" In 1870, I asked for a colleague, that I might be able to complete my work on the Gospels. But other duties providentially put upon me filled up my time. After nearly three years of faithful and intelligent labor in his profession, my dear friend and associate, Francis Tucker Washburn, whose short ministry had revealed to me rare qualities of mind and heart, was taken from us, and with a sense of bereavement and loss I again took up the work which had fallen from his hands. I never engaged in my profession with a deeper sense of per- sonal responsibility, or entered with a more living inter- est or a keener sense of enjoyment into the great and solemn scenes which it presents. But I have reached an age when such a strain upon the faculties cannot long be continued with safety. I have therefore again asked to be relieved from my parish duties, and as the only effectual way of accomplishing this, I am now spending a year in Europe.
"My life has been marked by few events of any special interest. I have shrunk from prominent posi- tions, and have been very happy in the secluded labors of my profession, in the means of usefulness which it has given, in the literary studies and pursuits which are closely connected with it, and in the intimate and lasting friendships which it has helped me to form with some of the best people in the world. I hope still to live among the people . with whom I have lived, giving and receiv- ing such services as lie within our reach to smooth the pathway of life, and enable us to look forward with a stronger faith and a more fitting preparation for what lies beyond. With every new year I have had a richer experience of God's goodness and of his universal care, and it would indicate no small degree of intellectual and moral obtuseness, as well as ingratitude, if I had any fears for what is to come. I am not without hope that I may yet prepare a small work on the study of the Gos- pels, better than anything I have yet done. Most of it is in my mind, the result of many years of thought and study. It is very pleasant to think of the occupation which it may give, and thus to indulge the desire, per- haps more than the hope, to be still of some service to my fellow-men. All my studies and all my experience go to strengthen my faith in the substantial truthfulness of the Gospel narrative, and in the unspeakable value of the life and the truth which are revealed in them.
Monson
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HORACE MORISON.
"I have had many disappointments. But, as I look back, the predominant feeling in my mind is one of thankfulness. My life has been full of satisfactions and enjoyment. I have not attained to heights which I had once hoped to reach, in intellectual or spiritual culture. But in many ways life has been a rich and beneficent gift, especially in my home, which has had its trials and shadows ; but no heart-rending grief has ever entered it. My children, two sons and a daughter, and my wife, have been spared thus far, so that I close this brief out- line with devout gratitude and praise.
"JOHN H. MORISON.
" ROME, Feb. 16, 1876."
George Shattuck, b. Dec. 19, 1842 ; graduate Harvard University, 1863, LL.B., Harvard Law School, 1866 ; admitted to bar in New York, 1866; civil engineer, 1867 ; engaged in building Kansas City Railroad Bridge, 1867-9 ; built iron viaduct, two hundred and thirty-four feet high, for Erie Railway, at Portage, N.Y., 1875. Has published important papers on bridges and other professional subjects ; owns the Samuel Morison place, in the southern part of the town ; r. in New York.
Robert Swain, b. Oct. 13, 1847 ; graduate Harvard Uni- versity, 1869, and at Divinity School (B.D.), 1872 ; studied in Berlin and Tubingen, Germany, 1872, '73 ; ordained, 1874; settled at Meadville, Pa., 1874. Mary, b. April 30, 1851.
HORACE MORISON in his youth experienced similar hardships with his brothers, and was made early to earn his own support. On the death of his father he went to live with Thomas Steele, Esq., with whom he remained five years, till he was fourteen, performing such service on the farm as a boy of his age was capable of doing. After three years of employment at other places, he began, when he was seventeen years old, to learn the trade of a cabinet-maker, with Moses Dodge, at the North Factory Village, where he remained till he was twenty-one, serving out his full apprenticeship.
During this time he had shown a fondness for books, had attended regularly the town schools in winter, had been one term to the academy at New Ipswich, and had taught school one winter in Temple.
He entered Phillips (Exeter) Academy in September, 1831, to prepare himself for college, and remained there till August, 1834, when he entered the Sophomore Class of Harvard College. In college he took a high rank as
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HORACE MORISON.
a scholar, gained the highest Bowdoin prize for English composition, belonged to the best college societies, became a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and graduated, in 1837, the eighth scholar in his class.
From college he went directly to Baltimore, where he had been appointed an instructor in mathematics in the University of Maryland, which, with the charter of a col- lege, was in reality only a superior high school. The next year, 1838, he was appointed Professor of Mathe- matics in the same institution. He held this professor- ship till July, 1841, when he was chosen President of the Academical Department of the University. He remained in office till July, 1854, when he resigned, and returned to Peterborough, to live upon the old homestead of the family, which he had purchased in 1852. In 1841, he m. Mary Elizabeth Lord, dau. of Samuel Lord, of Ports- mouth, and niece of Nathan Lord, late President of Dartmouth College.
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