Charles Carleton Coffin: War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman

by William Elliot Griffis

It was not all toil for Carleton. The time of love had already come, and the days of marriage were not far off. The object of his devotion was Miss Sally Russell Farmer, the daughter of Colonel John Farmer, of Boscawen. On February 18, 1846, amid the winter winds, the fire of a holy union for life was kindled, and its glow was unflickering during more than fifty years. In ancestry and relationship, the Farmers of Boscawen were allied with the Russells of England,—Sir William, of bygone centuries, and Lord John, of our own memory. Carleton found a true "help-meet" in Sally Coffin. Though no children ever came to bless their union, it was as perfect, though even more hallowed and beautified, on the day it was severed, as when first begun.

The following summer was one full of days of toil in the engineering department of the Northern railway, Carleton being engaged upon the first section to be opened from Concord to Franklin. The engineering was difficult, and the work heavy. Breakfast was eaten at six in the morning, and dinner wherever it could be found along the road. Seldom could the young engineer rise from his arithmetical calculations until midnight.

Weary with such exacting mental and physical labor, he resigned his position, and became a contractor. First he supplied the Concord railroad with 200,000 feet of lumber, which he purchased at the various mills. This venture being profitable, he engaged in the lumber trade, furnishing beams for a large factory, timber for a new railway station at Concord, and for a ship at Medford. It was while transacting some business in Lowell, that he saw President Polk, James Buchanan, Levi Woodbury, and other political magnates of the period, who, however, were rather coldly received on account of the annexation of Texas, and war with Mexico.

Wishing for a home of his own, Carleton now bought a farm in West Boscawen, and began housekeeping in the following November. He carried on extensive lumber operations, hiring a large number of men and teams. He rose between four and five in the morning, and was in the woods, four miles away, at sunrise, working through the day, and reaching home after dark to care for the cattle and horses and milk the cows. None of his men worked harder than he.

Although railroad building stimulated prices and gave activity to business men, the flush times were followed by depression. To secure the construction of a railway to the mast yard, Carleton subscribed to the stock, and, under the individual liability law of that period, was compelled to take as much more to relieve the company from debt. Soon he found, however, in spite of hard work for both himself and his wife, that farming and lumbering together rendered no adequate returns. Relief to mind and body was found in the weekly arrival of Littell's Living Age and two or three weekly papers, in agricultural meetings at Concord and Manchester, and in the formation of the State Agricultural Society, of which Carleton was one of the founders.[Back to Content]

CHAPTER V.

ELECTRICITY AND JOURNALISM.

The modern age of electricity was ushered in during Mr. Coffin's early manhood. The telegraph, which has given the world a new nervous system, being less an invention than an evolution, had from the labors of Prof. Joseph Henry, in Albany, and of Wheatstone, of England, become, by Morse's invention of the dot-and-line alphabet, a far-off writer by which men could annihilate time and distance. One of the first to experiment with the new power—old as eternity, but only slowly revealed to man—was Carleton's brother-in-law, Prof. Moses G. Farmer, whose services to science have never yet been adequately set forth.

This inventor in 1851 invited Mr. Coffin to leave the farm temporarily, to construct a line of wire connecting the telegraphs of Boston with the Cambridge observatory, for the purpose of giving uniform time to the railroads. In this Carleton was so successful that, in the winter and spring of 1852, he was employed by Mr. Moses Farmer to construct the telegraph fire alarm, which had been invented by his brother-in-law. The work was completed in the month of May, and Charles Carleton Coffin gave the first alarm of fire ever transmitted by the electric apparatus. The system was a great curiosity, and many distinguished men of this country, and from Europe, especially from Russia and France, came to inspect its working.