The history of the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, V. IV, Part 2

Author: Bicknell, Thomas Williams, 1834-1925. cn
Publication date: 1920
Publisher: New York, The American Historical Society
Number of Pages: 978

USA > Rhode Island > Providence County > Providence > The history of the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, V. IV > Part 2

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(VIII) Leander Remington Peck, son of Asa and Lucretia S. (Remington) Peck, was born at Ousame- quin Farm, Barrington, R. I., February 12, 1843, died in Providence, January 28, 1909, and lies at rest in Prin- cess Hill Cemetery, Barrington. After obtaining a good education in high school and academy, and busi- ness experience through association with his uncle, Jeremiah S. Remington, a merchant of Providence, he

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BIOGRAPHICAL

joined with his father in organizing the firm Asa Peck & Company. The business, buying and selling wool and woolen wastes, although new to Rhode Island, possessed elements of profit which attracted Mr. Peck, and he bent every energy toward bringing the venture to a success- ful issue. The firm, the oldest in this line in the State, has always kept its leadership by pursuing the policy worked out and followed by Leander R. Peck, who was its inspiration and its directing head until his death. In addition to the founding and developing of a stable business house, Leander R. Peck was president of the Lawton Spinning Company; a director and vice- president of the Union Trust Company of Providence; a director in other financial corporations, and filled an important place in Providence business life. He was a business man of keen ability, but he had other enthus- iasms, and regarded life as something more than a succession of business transactions. He bought the site he had previously selected for the Pomham Club grounds, and was one of the founders of the club, chair- man of its executive committee, and later its president.

He added to Ousamequin Farm and rendered the grounds around the house spacious and beautiful; the landscape gardeners being freely called upon to make the old home a place of beauty. He was a great admirer of the light harness horse, and owned some very speedy ones, but these were kept for pleasure driving only. His cultured wife, too, had her enthusiasms, the greenhouses and beautiful lawns showing plainly wom- an's taste. But her great joy was her private collection of silver and copper lustre. This collection was begun in 1899, with one piece left her by an aunt and one owned by her husband's grandfather. In one room at Ousamequin, known as the "Museum," there was but one piece of modern furniture, and that a tall standing lamp. The winter home of the family was in Prov- idence, the summer home at Ousamequin Farm.

Leander R. Peck married, September 3, 1866, Sarah Gould Cannon, daughter of Charles and Mary P. (Fisher) Cannon, a descendant through female lines of John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley, both of whom came from Leyden in the "Mayflower," Mrs. Peck being of the ninth American generation. Mr. and Mrs. Leander R. Peck were the parents of a son, Frederick Stanhope Peck, of further mention; and a daughter, Edith Rem- ington, born March 14, 1874, married, November 15, 1898, Frank N. Phillips, president of the American Electrical Works, and has a daughter, Charlotte, and a son, Donald Key Phillips.

There are many memorials to the memory of Leander Remington Peck to be found in the community in which he so long resided, two of them in the town of Bar- rington, and very near each other, being strikingly handsome and appropriate. In Barrington stands the modern high school building newly completed, erected on grounds, which, with the newly completed building, were donated to the town by Mrs. Sarah Gould (Can- non) Peck, in honor of her husband's memory, the building to be known as the "Leander R. Peck School." The design is beautiful, the construction and the loca- tion perfect, but the true value of the gift is the love which inspired it, and the true philanthropic spirit which could foresee the great and increasing value of

an institution which shall make men better by making them wiser.

The second movement referred to is the handsome memorial tomb erected in the cemetery at Barrington, in 1909, by Mrs. Edith Remington (Peck) Phillips, as a tribute of respect to the memory of her father. In order to make the gift doubly effective and to forever provide for its proper care and preservation, Mrs. Leander R. Peck and her son, Frederick S. Peck, have founded a $10,000 fund to provide for the perpetual care of the tomb.

(IX) Frederick Stanhope Peck, of the ninth Amer- ican generation, son of Leander Remington Peck, and grandson of Asa Peck, was born in Providence, R. I., December 16, 1868. He began business life in asso- ciation with his father in the firm of Asa Peck & Com- pany. He was a trusted and valued assistant to his father until January 1, 1903, when he was elected sec- retary and assistant treasurer. This position he held until the death of his father, January 28, 1909, when he succeeded to the presidency. He is also vice-president of the National Exchange Bank of Providence; vice-presi- dent of the Lawton Spinning Company, and vice-presi- dent of the Eastern Coal Company, and a director in many other business corporations. The business lives of these three men-grandfather, father and son-have flowed in similar currents, and each has exhibited that same public spirited enterprise and progressive ideas which have carried each a little further along as con- ditions changed, but in business intercourse with their fellowmen the same spirit of fairness and upright deal- ing has actuated them. Asa Peck & Company, Inc., is their business monument, a corporation just entering upon its second half-century of successful existence.

The old home "Ousamequin Farm," is now a valued possession of Mr. Peck, not only for its intrinsic value, but for its hallowed associations. Long before it be- came his property he had bought an estate adjoining it, calling his new residence "Belton Court," in memory of Belton, the early home of the Pecks in England. In politics he is a Republican, there departing from the faith of his father's, and rendering Barrington valuable service as councilman, State central committeeman, and representative to the General Assembly of Rhode Island, serving on the committee on finance during his entire membership and for six years as chairman. He is a member of the National Association of Wool Manufacturers, Boston Wool Trade Association, Rhode Island Historical Society, Rhode Island School of Design, Bank Clerks Mutual Benefit Association, Sons of the American Revolution, Society of Colonial Wars, and the Society of Mayflower Descendants. His clubs are the Bristol Reading Room, Barrington Yacht, Bay Spring Yacht, Commercial, Economic, Pomham, Provi- dence Art, Providence Central, Rhode Island Country, Squantum Association, Turk's Head and West Side.

Mr. Peck married, June 6, 1894, Mary Rothwell Bur- lingame, only daughter of Edwin Harris and Eliza (Aylsworth) Burlingame, and a descendant of Roger Burlingame, who appeared at Stonington, Conn., in 1654, Mrs. Peck being of the ninth American genera- tion. Mr. and Mrs. Peck are the parents of a daughter, Helen, who married Weir Williams, September 10, 1918.

HISTORY OF RHODE ISLAND

GEORGE LOTHROP BRADLEY-The name Bradley is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and is a compound of Brad (broad) and lea (a field or meadow). It is local in derivation, and it can be readily seen that William of the broad lea would in the evolution of sur- names become William Bradley. The earliest mention of the name in England occurs in the year 1183, when the Lord High Bishop of Durham mentions an estate in Wollsingham which contained three hundred acres, and another at Bradley of forty acres, held by Roger de Bradley.

Arms-Gules a fesse argent between three boars' heads couped or. Crest-A boar sable bristled and hoofed or, gorged with a garland vert.

There are numerous townships bearing the name located in Cheshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Southamp- ton and Staffordshire, the latter of which counties con- tains Bradley estates and townships of very great ex- tent. In 1437 there is mention of the Bradleys of Bradley. Again in 1475 the will of Sir John Pilking- ton, Knight, of Yorkshire, bequeathed to his brother Charles a place named Bradley. There are great and small Bradley parishes in Suffolk, and Lower and Upper Bradley in Kildwick. Yorkshire. John Bradley was Bishop of Shaftsbury, in 1539. In 1578 Alexander Bradley resided in the See of Durham, and about the same time Cuthbertus Bradley was curate of Barnarde Castle. Thomas Bradley was Doctor of Divinity and chaplain to King Charles I., and afterward prebend of the Cathedral Church of York and rector of Ackworth. His son, Savile, was fellow of Magdalen College, Ox- ford, and another son, Thomas, was a merchant in Virginia.

During this period the persecutions and religious in- tolerance in England led many to emigrate to America; emigration increased to such an extent that a tax aimed at curtailing it was levied on all who left the country. This led many to slip away by stealth, leaving no record of their departure. Among the original lists of emigrants, religious exiles, etc., a number of Bradleys are mentioned. There are several distinct branches of the family in America tracing their lineage to the sev- eral founders who came to the New World in the sev- enteenth century. Few branches have produced as dis- tinguished a progeny as the Massachusetts Bradleys, of which family the Hon. Charles Smith Bradley, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, was a member.

(I) Joseph Bradley, the immigrant ancestor and founder, was born in London, England, in 1649, and settled in Haverhill, Mass., in 1659. He married, April 4, 1691, Hannah Heath, of Haverhill, and rose to prom- inence in the life and affairs of the town toward the close of the seventeenth century. The fifth garrison was in his house and under his command. The Bradley family was among those of early Haverhill who suffered severely from the Indian raids. In 1697 Joseph, Martha and Sarah Bradley were captured by the Indians. On April 17, 1701, Daniel Bradley was reported missing. The wife of Joseph Bradley was captured twice. The garrison at his house was sur- prised February 8, 1704, and his wife taken for the second time and carried away. An infant child, born to

her soon afterward, died of exposure and want, or was killed, as the following ancient tradition states. Hannah Bradley received no kindness from her cap- tors, subsisting on bits of skin, ground nuts, bark of trees, wild onions and lily roots, on the terrible journey to Canada, after the birth of her child. The child was sickly and annoyed the Indians with its crying. They thrust embers from the fire in its mouth, gashed its forehead with their knives, and finally, during her temporary absence from it, ended its life by impaling it on a pike. She managed to live through the journey and was sold to the French in Canada for eighty livres. She was kindly treated by her owners. In March, 1705, her husband started for Canada on foot, with a dog and small sled, taking with him a bag of snuff to the Governor of Canada from the Governor of Massachusetts. He redeemed his wife and set sail for Boston. We are told that during one attack on the Bradley house she poured .hot soft soap on an Indian and killed him, and that the torture of her child was in retaliation. Joseph Bradley died October 3, 1729; his widow Hannah, November 2, 1761.

(II) Isaac Bradley, son of Joseph and Hannah (Heath) Bradley, was born in Haverhill, Mass., in 1680. During an Indian raid, Isaac Bradley, aged fifteen and Joseph Whitaker, aged eleven, were taken captive while in the open fields near Joseph Bradley's house on Parsonage road, near the north brook. Jos- eph was, tradition tells us, a large, overgrown, and exceedingly clumsy boy. On their arrival at the Indian camp at the lake, the boys were placed in an Indian family until the spring, when the Indians intended to take them to Canada. Isaac contracted a fever, and the kindness and care of the squaw alone saved his life. On his recovery he planned to escape, managed to get away with his companion, and continued to the south- ward all night. The Indians pursued them the follow- ing day, and their dogs found the boys. They gave the meat they had taken for food to the dogs, who knew them, and were saved by concealing themselves with the animals in a hollow log. Some days later they came upon an Indian camp, but escaped without detec- tion. They continued almost without food or clothing for eight days. On the morning of the eighth day, Joseph sank down exhausted, and Isaac Bradley went on alone, shortly afterward reaching a settler's camp, and return- ing for young Whitaker, whom he left at Saco, con- tinuing on to Haverhill alone.

Isaac Bradley married, at Haverhill, Mass., intentions dated May 16, 1706, Elizabeth Clement.

(III) John Bradley, son of Isaac and Elizabeth (Clement) Bradley, was born at Haverhill, Mass., April IO, 1709. He married, and resided in Haverhill, all his life, a prosperous and well known member of the community.

(IV) Lieutenant Jonathan Bradley, son of John Brad- ley, was born at Haverhill, Mass., and baptized there, February 22, 1746-47. He served with valor during the American Revolution, and held the rank of second lieu- tenant in Captain Stephen Webster's company, Fourth Essex County Regiment, in 1778. He married (first) intentions dated, February 11, 1773, Sarah Osgood, of Andover, where she died September 14, 1790, aged forty ; he married (second) April 14, 1791, Sarah Ayer,

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BIOGRAPHICAL

who died October 20, 1820, aged sixty-five, at Andover. Lieutenant Jonathan Bradley was a resident of Andover for the greater part of his life, and was one of the leading men of the town in his day. He died there, February 23, 1818, aged seventy-three years.

(V) Charles Bradley, son of Lieutenant Jonathan and Sarah (Ayer) Bradley, was born at Andover, Mass., December 17, 1792. He married (intentions dated at Newburyport, November 14, 1817) Sarah Smith, of Hav- erhill. She was a daughter of Jonathan K. Smith, and a granddaughter of Rev. Hezekiah Smith, a famous chaplain of the Massachusetts troops in the Revolution, and for more than forty years one of the fellows of Brown University. Charles Bradley was a prominent merchant of Boston, and afterward a manufacturer in Portland, Me.

(VI) Hon. Charles Smith Bradley, son of Charles and Sarah (Smith) Bradley, was born in Newburyport, Mass., July 18, 1819. He enjoyed excellent educational advantages, and prepared for college in the Boston Latin School. He entered Brown University, drawn to it by the regard he had for his great-grandfather. and in 1838 was with the highest honors in his class, which contained an unusual number of brilliant men. Several years following were spent in post-graduate study in the University, and after taking the degree of Master of Arts he chose the legal profession for his work in life, and entered the Harvard Law School. Completing his studies for the bar in the law office of Charles F. Tillinghast, of Providence, he was admitted to the bar in 1841. In the same year he formed a partnership with Mr. Tillinghast.

He sprang rapidly into prominence through his elo- quence as a speaker. His public utterances were all characterized by a masterly power of reasoning, com- prehensive knowledge, and a polished diction which led to his appointment often to speak on political and liter- ary occasions. In 1854 he was elected by the town of North Providence to the Senate of the State, where he was influential in securing the Act of Amnesty to all who had taken part in the Dorr Rebellion of 1842. At a public meeting in Providence, June 9, 1856, relative to the assault of Brooks on Sumner in the United States Senate, he said :

Is it not well that the second city in New England, the first which is not connected by any personal ties with Mr. Sumner, should speak of this outrage, not in the first flush of our indignation, but in the tones of deliberate condemnation? * * We know that brutality and cowardice go hand in hand, because brutal passions and true moral courage cannot har- monize in the same character. If the South upholds this act, the antagonism of their civilization and ours will mount higher and come closer and closer; and it requires no horoscope to show the future.

Judge Bradley was a conscientious member of the Democratic party throughout his life, but had the sup- port and confidence of men of all parties in the city and State. He represented Rhode Island repeatedly in the National Democratic Conventions, notably that of 1860, when the party was divided, and he adhered to the Unionists, casting his vote for Stephen A. Douglas. In 1863 he was the Democratic nominee for Congress. In February, 1866, he was elected Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, as successor of Hon. Samuel Ames, receiving the honor at the hands of a Republican Legislature. After two years on the bench,

years in which he discharged the duties of his office with consummate ability and with the greatest honor to himself and to the State, he resigned to give his entire attention to his private practice. On the occa- sion of his retirement from the bench the "Providence Journal" observed :

He has discharged the duties belonging to that high position with a success, and, we may add, a judicial distinction, in which the people of the State feel both a satisfaction and pride, and which they had hoped he would long continue to illustrate in a sphere so honor- able and important.

On the occasion of the opening of the Rhode Island Hospital, Judge Bradley, a generous donor to the fund of $80,000 which was raised at the time, remarked in his address :

Every human being is united, by mysterious ties, with all the past and all of the future. Those who most fully realize the greatness of our being have the strongest desire to live after death, even on earth. It is no personal ambition, but a diviner instinct, which leads such nature to found, or to ally themselves with, great institutions, whose perennial existence of benefi- cence shall outlast their names and their memories among men. * Our State will bear proudly on its bosom through coming centuries this institution, expressing in its object, and its architecture the hu- manity of the age. * In aiding, you place stones of beauty in these walls, whereon the All See- ing Eye, it may not irreverently be said, shall read your name, though time and storm shall have written their wild signatures upon them. . . The sons and daughters of toil, as the day calls them to work and the night to rest, will look upon these towers, blending with the morning and the evening sky, with their tearful benedictions. In the time of illness and accident, if the struggle of life presses too hard upon them, this shall be their honorable refuge, builded with a beneficence akin to, and sanctioned by, the Divine.

In 1866 Judge Bradley received the honorary degree of LL. D. from Brown University, and was also elected one of the fellows of that institution. For three years he officiated as lecturer in the Law School of Harvard University. In 1876 he was chosen professor of that school, and filled the chair with remarkable ability until 1879. On his retirement the board of overseers, through their chairman, Judge Lowell, said :

We have suffered a great loss in the resignation of Hon. Charles S. Bradley, whose lucid and practical teaching was highly appreciated by the students, and whose national reputation added to the renown of the school. We had hoped that some incidental advantage of quiet and freedom from care might be found to out- weigh other considerations, and that the professorship was permanently filled.

Judge Bradley travelled widely in America, and at different times had visited nearly all portions of Europe. With his love of letters and broad scholar- ship he united a genuine and strong love for agricul- ture and rural enjoyments, which was perhaps in a large degree an inherited passion. The grounds about his elegant residence in Providence, his farm property and products, and his attachment to ancestral estates, were a proof of his appreciation of all that belongs to the oldest and most important of human occupations. His tastes and culture were manifested in his great love for superior works of art, of which he had many noted specimens in his home. His oration before the Alumni Association of Brown University in 1855, his oration on the 250th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, his remarks on the retirement of President Caswell from the presidency of the Univer- sity in 1872, and his oration before the Phi Beta Kappa

HISTORY OF RHODE ISLAND

Society of Harvard University in 1879, were models of rich thought, graceful diction, and lucid argument, vindicating his right to be classed as one of the most impressive orators of his day in the United States. Of his address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the Boston "Daily Advertiser" observed :

If there were any need for justification of the custom of annual addresses before the college societies, such an address as Judge Bradley's yesterday gave that jus- tification completely. It is, indeed, remarkable to see an audience of so distinguished men of leading posi- tion in every walk of life. It is remarkable to have so much good sense, so many important suggestions, nay, so many of the fundamental truths upon which civil- ized society rests crowded into one hour. The power of the speaker on his audience, the hold with which he compelled their fascinated attention were again and again referred to through the afternoon. This is not simply the attention which people give to what they hear with pleasure, it was the satisfaction with which the audience received important principles, of which they felt the value, whether they were or were not new to the hearer. Vero pro gratiis indeed might well be taken as the motto of the address. The passage which showed how the bar of the country must be relied upon to maintain at the highest the dignity of the bench was received with profound sympathy and interest. It deserves the careful attention of the bar in every part of the country.

His oration on "The Profession of the Law as an Element of Civil Society," pronounced June 29, 1881, before the Societies of the University of Virginia, was regarded "as a learned and profound discussion of this subject, in which he argued that the bar is essential to the administration of justice, that the administration of justice is essential to the existence of society, and the existence of society essential for the protection of man in his endeavors to live according to the laws of his being."

Judge Bradley married (first) April 28, 1842, Sarah Manton, daughter of Joseph and Mary (Whipple) Manton, of Providence, R. I. She was born March 10, 1818, and died December 12, 1854, survived by three sons : I. Joseph Manton, who died March 7, 1879, 1In- married. 2. Charles, of whom see forward. 3. George Lothrop, of whom see forward. Judge Bradley mar- ried (second) Angust 4, 1858, Charlotte Augusta Saunders, of Charlottesville, Va., and she died in May, 1864, her daughter, Janet Laurie, dying in the same month. He married (third) in May, 1866, Emma Pendleton (Ward) Chambers, of Winchester, Va., who died February 28, 1875. Judge Bradley died in New York City, April 29, 1888, while on a visit to his son, the late George Lothrop Bradley.

(VII) Charles (2) Bradley, son of the late Chief Justice Charles Smith and Sarah (Manton) Bradley, was born in Providence, R. 1., May 6, 1845. He received his early education under Dr. S. F. Smith in a private academy in Newton, Mass., and later attended the Uni- versity Grammar School of Providence, where he pre- pared for college. He entered Williams College, and was graduated therefrom in 1865. Shortly afterward he entered business life and went to Chicago, where he was engaged in business for several years. He next went to Colorado, where he was interested in gold mining, but, tiring of this venture and of business life, he returned to Providence, where he determined to enter the legal profession.

He prepared for the bar in the office of his father in Providence, and after being admitted at once began the practice of his profession in the office of Bradley

& Metcalf, of which noted law firm his father was senior member. His legal practice dealt more with the technical and involved problems of jurisprudence, and was for the greater part conducted in his office. He was well known in the ranks of the legal profession in Providence, as a lawyer of fine capability and masterly reasoning powers, but was of a retiring disposition, eschewing public life. Mr. Bradley spent much time on his country estate in the town of Lincoln, taking great pride in its beauty. He was essentially a home- loving man, and his home was that of the man of cul- ture, refinement and scholarly tastes. His library and art collection, the nucleus of which had been left him by his father were his special attractions. He was a member of the Hope and Rhode Island clubs of Prov- idence, and of the Rhode Island School of Design and the Providence Art Club. Mr. Bradley died in the prime of life November 9, 1898, in the fifty-fourth year of his age.

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The history of the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, V. IV, Part 2

Author: Bicknell, Thomas Williams, 1834-1925. cn Publication date: 1920 Publisher: New York, The American Historical Society Number of Pages: 978

Author: Bicknell, Thomas Williams, 1834-1925. cn
Publication date: 1920
Publisher: New York, The American Historical Society
Number of Pages: 978