He was sent first to common schools till he reached the classical school where he studied Latin in a class with the late John K. Young, D.D., Dr. George W. Kittredge, and Hon. John H. White, but was taken from school after having read two books of Virgil. Judge White says: "Tappan was a good scholar, energetic and self-reliant. I was in the Latin class with him, and was told by the father that he was too poor to keep him in school." He then spent about three years in Portsmouth, in a North End grocery store.
From Portsmouth he went to South Berwick, Me., into the stores of the late Benjamin Nason and Alphonso Gerrish, successively, as clerk. He there attracted the attention of Hon. William Burleigh, a then member of Congress from York district, by a spirited article he had written in favor of Mr. Burleigh's reëlection. Mr. Burleigh now offered to take him as a law student, and the young clerk entered upon the study of law, and was admitted to the bar in York County in 1826. After seven years' successful practice in his profession in South Berwick and Great Falls, he came to Lowell, bringing some seven thousand dollars with him.
He now seemed to form his life plan of work, professionally and financially,—diligence in his profession and all possible investments in real estate. At his death his $7,000 had swollen into nearly $300,000, during his forty-five years of Lowell life.
During these years he became a leading member of his profession, was often in offices of trust in city affairs, at different times in both houses of the Legislature, and a member of Congress from 1853 to 1855.
After assigning "pride of ancestry and name" as one reason for Mr. Wentworth's munificence to Dartmouth, Judge Crosby says:
"Another reason for the gift to the college is found in his appreciation of the value, the power, and the beauty of education. He had had hard experience in relation to it. He had hungered for it when he could not get it. He had obtained it in limited departments, by hard work, at great odds and under great embarrassments, when other claims must be postponed in its behalf. And as he looked over our college studies he found many branches he had never pursued and could not approach."
"The fund is not given for scholarships, professorships, libraries, or buildings. It is given for the support of the institution, to make instruction independent, learned and cheap; given to invite the youth to come here, and to give them the best opportunities of cultivation at lessened expense, to lay foundations of learning and mental enlargement for any department in life. It will maintain ten learned professors or twenty tutors, or give 20,000 volumes of books annually, as the honorable Trustees shall think the demands of the college require.
"It may enlarge, repair, or ornament these grounds; it may be turned into laboratories, museums of natural history, or art; it may raise the curriculum to higher studies and extended courses. It is not restrained by his personal judgment and direction in the future, but left to the better judgment of living mind."
Should Dartmouth ever lose her maiden name, she would not hesitate in regard to the new one.
William Reed was born at Marblehead, Mass. Compelled to abandon the hope of a public education, he afterwards engaged in mercantile pursuits, which he followed with great energy and activity and with a good degree of success.