Letters of Asa Gray; Vol. 1

by Asa Gray

Robert Gray, my great-grandfather, died in Worcester, January 16, 1766. He married Sarah Wiley[2] about the year 1729. They had ten children; the eighth was Moses Wiley Gray, my grandfather, born in Worcester, December 31, 1745. About the year 1769, he married Sally Miller, daughter of Samuel and Elisabeth (Hammond) Miller, of Worcester, and removed to Templeton, Mass. About 1787 he removed to Grafton, Vermont, where his wife died in 1793. In 1794 he removed to Oneida County, N. Y., and settled in the Sauquoit Valley,[3] where he died from injuries received from the fall of a tree, May 8, 1803.

My father, Moses Gray, was the youngest of the (eight?) children of his mother. There were three half-brothers and a half-sister by a second wife, born in Oneida County, none of whom survived my father. He was born in Templeton, Mass., February 26, 1786.[4] He was therefore in his eighteenth year when his father died. He used to say that he had only six weeks of schooling; whether before or after his father’s death I am ignorant. But soon after that event he was apprenticed to a tanner and currier (Mr. Gier) at Sauquoit, in whose employment he must have been for a part of the time after he came of age, for I was born in a little house which had been a shoe-shop on the premises of the tan-yard.

The fact of being born supposes a maternal ancestry. July 30, 1809, my father married Roxana Howard. She was born in Longmeadow, Mass., March 15, 1789; was a daughter of Joseph Howard, who was born in Pomfret, Conn., March 8, 1766, and of Submit (Luce) Howard, born at Somers, Conn., April 3, 1767;[5] and he was the grandson of John Howard of Ipswich,[6] Mass., and of Elisabeth Smith, of the same town. He was the descendant of Thomas Howard, who, with his wife and children, came from Aylesford (or Maidstone), Kent, in the year 1634.

My mother came with her parents to Oneida County and the Sauquoit Valley when only a few years old.[7] Her father there joined a company which set up an iron-forge. One of the early pieces of work of its trip-hammer was to forge off three of my maternal grandfather’s fingers. This appears to have qualified him to be the cleric in charge, or manager, of the office and store of the Paris Furnace Company, which established a small iron-smelting furnace on the Sauquoit, two and a half miles above the village of Sauquoit, in a deep and narrow valley which had the name of Paris Furnace Hollow, now called Clayville, the furnace long since having disappeared, a natural consequence of the exhaustion of the charcoal furnished by the woods of the surrounding hills. My earliest recollections are of Paris Furnace Hollow, for not long after I was born, as aforesaid, in Sauquoit, on the eastern or Methodist side of the creek, on the 18th of November, 1810, my father and mother removed to Paris Furnace with me, their first-born, and set up a small tannery there. Of this I retain some vivid recollections, especially those connected with the first use to which I was put, the driving round the ring of the old horse which turned the bark-mill, and the supplying the said mill with its grist of bark,—a lonely and monotonous occupation.[8] I was sent to the district school near by when three years old; and I either remember some of my performances of that or the next year, or have been told them in such way as to leave the matter doubtful.[9] My earliest distinct recollections of school are of spelling-matches, in which at six or seven years I was a champion.[10] There was a year or two of early boyhood in which I was sent to a small “select” or private school, taught at Sauquoit, by the son of the pastor of the parish; a year or two following, in which I was in my maternal grandfather’s family, near by, as a sort of office-boy; and at the age of twelve, or near it, I was sent off to the Clinton Grammar School, nine miles away, where I was drilled after a fashion in the rudiments of Latin and Greek for two years, excepting the three summer months, when I was taken home to assist in the corn and hayfield. For my father, buying up, little by little, lands which had been cleared for charcoal, had become a farmer in a small way, an occupation to which he was most inclined. So about these times he sold out the tannery and bought a small farm nearer to Sauquoit, mainly of the land which my maternal grandfather had settled on, including the house in which he had married my mother. To it he removed, and there resided until he bought out an adjacent small farm in addition, with an old house very pleasantly situated, which he rebuilt and lived in until after I had attained my majority. But soon after that he bought a small farm close to the Sauquoit village on the western or Presbyterian side, hard by the meeting-house the family had always attended. There my father indulged his special fancy by rebuilding another old house, and the place, after his death, and, much later, after that of my mother, fell to my eldest brother, who still possesses it.[11]

I am not sure, but I think it was after two years of the Clinton Grammar School that I was transferred to Fairfield Academy.[12] Fairfield, Herkimer County, lies high on the hills, between the West and East Canada creeks, seven miles north of Little Falls. I went there first in October, 1825, the date I fix by that of the completion of the Erie Canal. For that autumn, I think in November, I walked one afternoon, along with some other students, down to Little Falls to see there the arrival of the canal-boat which bore the canal-commissioners, with the governor, De Witt Clinton at their head, on their ceremonious voyage from Buffalo to New York city. It reached Little Falls near sunset, and we walked to Fairfield that evening. The reason for my being sent to Fairfield Academy was that the principal of the academy was Charles Avery, uncle of my companion from infancy, Eli Avery, of our town, who died two years ago, who had been educated by the help of Eli’s father, Colonel Avery, one of the owners of Paris furnace. Charles Avery several years later took the professorship of chemistry, etc., at Hamilton College, lived to over ninety, I think, and through all his later years seemed to be very proud of having been my teacher. I cannot say that I owe much to him, even for teaching me mathematics, which was his forte. My capital memory allowed me to “get my lessons” easily, and that sufficed; and I had none of the sharp drilling and testing which I needed. He lingers in my memory in another way. He was sharp at turning a penny in various ways; among them, he for the first year and more jobbed the board of his nephew Eli and myself, who were chums, paying for it in cooking-stoves and the like from Paris furnace, in which through his brother he had an interest, and boarding us round, from one house to another (we had our room in the academy buildings) until the stove which cooked our dinner was paid for. Sometimes our fare was good enough; but one poor widow, who took us in her turn, fed us so much upon boiled salt cod, not always of the sweetest, that the sight of that dish still calls up ancient memories not altogether agreeable. I think it was not at that time, but at a somewhat later date, and with less excuse, that we mended our diet upon one occasion, one winter’s night, by carrying off the principal’s best fowls from the roost, skinning them, as the most expeditious and neatest way, and broiling them in our room as the pièce de résistance, for they were tough, in a little supper we got up.

I here recall a favor which Mr. Avery did me. A year or two after I had taken my M. D., my dear old friend Professor Hadley, of Fairfield Medical College, who had been filling the place at Hamilton College pro tem., made me a candidate for the professorship there of chemistry, with geology and natural science. But my old teacher, Mr. Avery, an alumnus of the college, entered the lists and carried the day. I wonder if I should have rusted out there if I had got the place.

I must go back to say something of my omnivorous reading, which was, after all, the larger part of my education. I was a reader almost from my cradle, and I read everything I could lay hands on. There was no great choice in my early boyhood. But there was a little subscription library at Sauquoit, the stockholders of which met four times a year, distributed the books by auction to the highest bidder (maximum, perhaps, ten or twelve cents) to have and to hold for three months; or if there was no competition each took what he chose. Rather slow circulation this; but in the three months the books were thoroughly read. History I rather took to, but especially voyages and travels were my delight. There were no plays, not even Shakespeare in the library, but a sprinkling of novels. My novel-reading, up to the time when I was sent to school at Clinton, was confined, I think, to Miss Porter’s “Children of the Abbey” and “Thaddeus of Warsaw”—the latter a soul-stirring production, of which I can recall a good deal; of the former nothing distinctly. One Sunday afternoon, of the first winter I was at Clinton, I went into the public room of one of the two village inns, where half a dozen of the villagers were assembled; and one was reading aloud “Quentin Durward,” which had just appeared in an American (Philadelphia) reprint. This was my introduction to the Waverley novels. The next summer, when at home for farm work, I found “Rob Roy” in the little library I have mentioned, took it out and read it with interest. In the autumn, when I went back to school, some college (Hamilton College) students were boarding at the house where I boarded and lodged. One of them, seeing my avidity for books, introduced me to the librarian of the Phœnix Society of the college, which had a library strong in novels, which I was allowed, one by one, to take home for reading. I suppose that I read them every one.[13]

It was intended that I should go to college, and my father could have put me through without serious inconvenience; but he was buying land about this time, and he persuaded me to give up that idea and to go at once at the study of medicine, which I did, in the autumn of 1826, beginning with the session of 1826-27 in the medical college (of the western district), then a flourishing country medical school at Fairfield. I had already attended its courses in chemistry, given by Professor James Hadley (father of Professor James Hadley of Yale College, then a lad), my earliest scientific adviser and most excellent friend. I had a passion for mineralogy in those days, as well as for chemistry. The spring and summer of 1827 I passed in the office of one of the village doctors of Sauquoit, Dr. Priest, and on the opening of the autumn session returned to the medical school at Fairfield.[14] That year, in the course of the winter, I picked up and read the article “Botany” in Brewster’s “Edinburgh Encyclopædia,” a poor thing, no doubt, but it interested me much. I bought Eaton’s “Manual of Botany,”[15] pored over its pages, and waited for spring. Before the spring opened, the short college session being over, I became a medical student, after the country fashion, in the office of Dr. John F. Trowbridge of Bridgewater, Oneida County, nine miles south of my paternal home; continued there for three years, except during the college sessions, where I attended four annual courses before taking my degree of M. D. at the close of the session of 1829-30.[16] The fact will appear, which I did not reveal at the time, that I took this degree six or seven months (I passed my examination, indeed, eight or nine months) before I had attained the legal age of twenty-one. But I looked older, and was in fact such an old stager in the school that no one thought of asking if I was of age. That degree gives me my place high enough on the Harvard University list to entitle me to a free dinner at Commencement.

I have mentioned my interest in botany as beginning in the winter and out of all reach either of a greenhouse or of a potted plant. But in the spring, I think that of 1828, I sallied forth one April day into the bare woods, found an early specimen of a plant in flower, peeping through dead leaves, brought it home, and with Eaton’s “Manual” without much difficulty I ran it down to its name, Claytonia Virginica. (It was really C. Caroliniana, but the two were not distinguished in that book.) I was well pleased, and went on, collecting and examining all the flowers I could lay hands on; and the rides over the country to visit patients along with my preceptor, Dr. Trowbridge, gave good opportunities. I began an herbarium of shockingly bad specimens. In autumn, going back to Fairfield for the annual course of medical lectures, I took specimens of those plants that puzzled me to Professor Hadley, who had learned some botany of Dr. Ives of New Haven, and had made a neat herbarium of the common New England and New York plants, which I studied carefully that winter. At Professor Hadley’s suggestion I opened a correspondence with Dr. Lewis C. Beck of Albany,[17] who was the botanist of the region. The next summer I collected more easily and critically. The summer after, I think, or probably the summer of 1830, I had an opportunity to make a little run to New York, being sent by Dr. Trowbridge to buy some medical books, driving in a one-horse wagon, with my own horse, ninety miles to Albany, thence by steamer to New York over night; one night there, and back next day by boat to Albany, and so driving back to Bridgewater in company with a man of business who joined me in this little expedition. I stopped to see Lewis C. Beck at Albany Academy; there I first saw a grave-looking man who I was told was Professor Henry, who had just been making a wonderful electro-magnet. I had procured from Professor Hadley a letter of introduction to Dr. Torrey, whose “Flora of the Northern United States,” vol. i., was our greatest help so far as it went, and which on that journey I bought a copy of. I took also a parcel of plants to be named. Finding my way to Dr. Torrey’s house in Charlton Street with my parcel and letter, I had the disappointment of finding that he was away at Williamstown, Massachusetts, for the summer. It was not until the next winter that at Fairfield I received a letter from Dr. Torrey, naming my plants, and inviting the correspondence which continued thence to the end of his life.

In addition to Dr. Hadley’s summer course of lectures on chemistry, Dr. Lewis C. Beck used to come and deliver a short course of lectures on botany. He gave this up the year in which I received my M. D., so Professor Hadley invited me to come and give the course instead. The course was given in five or six weeks, beginning in the latter part of May. I prepared myself during the winter, gave this my first course of lectures, cleared forty dollars by the operation, and devoted it to the making of a tour to the western part of the State of New York, as far as Niagara Falls, Buffalo, and Aurora,—a dozen or more miles off,—where I visited an uncle, my mother’s brother, a well-to-do country merchant, also a chum, Dr. Folwell, in Seneca County, high up between the two lakes, where I passed a week or two; thence to Ithaca, and across the country by a stage-coach back to Bridgewater. I hardly know what I did the next autumn and winter, but in early spring a Mr. Edgerton, a pupil of Amos Eaton, at Troy, the professor of natural sciences at the flourishing school of Mr. Bartlett at Utica, died. I applied for the vacancy, received the appointment, and for two or part of three years, minus a long summer vacation, I taught chemistry, geology, mineralogy, and botany, to boys, making with the boys very pleasant botanical excursions through the country round. My first summer vacation, if I rightly remember, was in cholera year, the disease being very fatal in Utica. About the time it made its appearance in New York I started off from Bridgewater, taking a little country stage-coach down the Unadilla to Pennsylvania; visited Carbondale and made a collection of calamites and fossil ferns; thence by stage-coach through the Wind Gap to Easton; thence out to Bethlehem, where I passed a day with old Bishop Schweinitz,[18] gave him a Carex which he said was new, but I told him it was Carex livida, Wahl. (and I was right); back to Easton; thence up to Sussex County, N. J., collecting minerals (Franklinite, etc.); thence to adjacent Orange County, N. Y., collecting spinelles, etc., as well as botanizing; thence down to New York early in September; there I met Dr. Torrey for the first time, and we took a little expedition together down to Tom’s River in the pine barrens, and back to New York in a wood-sloop.