A fuller history of Plymouth schools than I propose to give in these memories, may be found in my Ancient Landmarks of Plymouth, and I must content myself with saying that after the school became the high school in 1826, the teachers, omitting those already mentioned, were Addison Brown, Harvard, 1826, George W. Hosmer, Harvard, 1826, who married Hannah Poor, daughter of Rev. James Kendall, Horace Hall Rolfe, born in Groton, N. H., July 20, 1800, graduated at Dartmouth, 1824, married, 1828, Mary T., daughter of Stephen Marcy, and died in Charleston, S. C., February 24, 1831, Josiah Moore, Harvard, 1826, who married in 1831, Rebecca W., daughter of Wm. Sturtevant, Charles Clapp, Mr. Jenks, Philip Coombs Knapp, Dartmouth, 1841, John Brooks Beal, Thomas Andrew Watson, Harvard, 1845, Samuel Sewall Greeley, Harvard, 1844, Wm. H. Spear, J. W. Hunt, Frank Crosby, Edward P. Bates, Admiral P. Stone, George Lewis Baxter, Theodore P. Adams, Harvard, 1867, Joseph Leavitt Sanborn, Harvard, 1867, Henry Dame, George Washington Minns, Harvard, 1836, Gilman C. Fisher, and Charles Burton, who was succeeded by teachers with whose names my readers are familiar.
There are two of the above of whom I am able to furnish meagre sketches. Charles Burton, son of Thomas and Elizabeth (Deane) Burton, was born in Wolverhampton, England, December 16, 1816, and about 1818 came to America with his widowed mother and one brother and four sisters, and settled in Pittsburgh, where in early life he learned the trade of pattern maker. In Pittsburgh he became acquainted with Lemuel Stephens, who was instructor there in Daniel Stone’s private school, and about 1839 sailed with him for Germany in a vessel belonging to I. and E. Morton. After a year’s study in Gottingen and Heidelberg, he returned home, and soon after came to Plymouth with messages from Mr. Stephens, whose sister Sarah he afterwards married. He taught first a private school on Watson’s Hill in a building erected for the purpose, and for many years afterwards was associated with the public schools of Plymouth, either as principal of the high school or as superintendent of schools. He died November 25, 1894.
George Lewis Baxter, son of William W. and Ann E. (Weld) Baxter, was born in Quincy, Oct. 21, 1842, and graduated at Harvard in 1863. In 1864 he was principal of the Reading High School, and afterwards for three years principal of the high school in Plymouth. In 1867 he was appointed headmaster of the Somerville high school, in which capacity he is still serving with about four hundred and thirty scholars under his charge. In 1872 he married Ida F. Paul, and has a son, Gregory Paul Baxter, who graduated at Harvard in 1896.
I entered college at sixteen, the usual age at that time, while now it is eighteen. There are persons who believe that everything is lovely in our day, and that our fathers were uneducated, ignorant men. They claim that our public schools are more efficient in instruction, and their pupils further advanced than formerly. This I doubt. I began to study Latin at nine, and I have no reasons to think that I was an exception. They explain the advanced age of freshmen, by claiming that the requirements for admission to college are greater, and this claim I also doubt. They further claim that a higher scholarship is reached by the graduate of the present time. But to substantiate this claim, they should show first that the old instructors were inferior to the present, and second that the various activities of life are now represented by abler men than ever before. But are Professor Felton in Greek, Professor Beck in Latin, Professor Channing in Rhetoric and Elocution, Professor Pierce in Mathematics, and Professor Longfellow in French, outclassed by recent professors? Then if we turn to the various professions we find among the graduates of the earlier half of the last century in the ministry, Wm. Ellery Channing, James Walker, Frederick Hedge, George Putnam, Wm. P. Lunt, Henry W. Bellows, and Edward Everett Hale; in law, Samuel Dexter, Lemuel Shaw, Sidney Bartlett, Benjamin Robbins Curtis and William Whiting; in literature, Wm. H. Prescott, George Bancroft, Jared Sparks, Francis Parkman, J. Lothrop Motley, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes; in medicine, John Collins Warren, Henry Bigelow and George H. Gay, and in statesmanship, John Quincy Adams, Josiah Quincy, Harrison Gray Otis, Edward Everett, Charles Sumner and George F. Hoar; in science, Benjamin Pierce, Asa Gray and B. A. Gould. Is a comparison with recent graduates unfavorable to these men? I was told not many years ago by a distinguished scholar, a graduate of Harvard, and one of its professors, that in his opinion Harvard did not graduate as good scholars as it did fifty years before. If this be true, I think there is a reason for it. Many persons mistake bigness for greatness, but I believe that sixteen hundred undergraduates cannot be moulded as well as four hundred. There is not that personal interest felt in the student by the instructors, which was once felt. I am inclined to doubt whether in the faculty today there is more than one member able to recognize and call by name fifty students. In my day it was different, and to apply the reductio ad absurdum, there was Charles Stearns Wheeler, Greek tutor, the Pinkerton of the faculty, who boasted that if day or night he could see the heel of a student going round a corner he could give his name—ex pede herculem. Only a few incidents in my college career are worthy of mentioning. I think I am one of very few students whose pardon has ever been asked by a professor. One day while solving a problem in geometry before Professor Pierce, or Benny, as we called him, and performing my work with ease and rapidity, he stopped me suddenly and sent me to my seat, telling me to begin at the next recitation at the beginning of the text book, which we were then half through. At the next recitation he called me to the blackboard and asked me how far I was prepared. I told him, “Up with the class,” and then he began to screw me, giving me three problems in different places in the book, which I solved with ease. He then said, “Take your seat, and remain after the class leaves the room.” When we were alone he said, “Davis, I thought you were copying at the last recitation, but I am satisfied that you were not, and I beg your pardon.” The students sometimes marked difficult points in the problems on their cuffs, and sometimes on a slip of paper, and the professor seeing me doing my work so glibly, thought I had an auxiliary somewhere about my person. He never alluded to the matter again, but he manifested his regret by inviting me very frequently to spend a part of a night with him, or his assistant in the observatory to aid in recording magnetic or astronomical observations.
No professor was more interesting to me than Edward Tirrell Channing, at the head of the department of rhetoric and elocution. I think he made a deeper and broader mark on the undergraduate mind than has been felt since his day. His custom was to take up the themes, which he had examined, and criticise them before the class. On one occasion, taking up mine he said, “Davis, I have only one thing to say to you, when you have written anything which you think particularly fine, strike it out.” A member of my class published a book of poems during his college course entitled, “Pebbles from Castalia,” which we boys called, “Brickbats from Kennebunk.” On one occasion he wrote a theme in verse, and Channing taking it up said, “Mr. Blank, I see that in your theme every line begins with a capital, what is the reason?” “It is poetry, sir.” “Ah, poetry, is it, I did not think of that, but hereafter, leave out some of your capitals.”
In my day there were five degrees of punishment: expulsion, suspension, public admonition before the faculty, private admonition by the president, and mild censure by the professor, who had a room in college. There was a race course a little more than a mile from the college which the boys often attended to see trotting races under the saddle. One rider was easy and graceful in riding jockey hitch. At one time I was called before Professor Lovering who held the position above referred to, and told by him that I was reported for attending the race on the Wednesday before. I said, “Yes, I was there, and saw you there.” “Well, how do you like jockey hitch,” he asked, and after we had exchanged our views on that style of riding, he bade me good morning. This mild censure reminds me of a story told of Professor Felton, one of whose brothers, some twenty years younger than himself, was an undergraduate, and was reported for swearing in the college yard. The faculty requested the professor to speak to his brother, so sending a messenger for him to come to his recitation room he told him that he had been reported as above mentioned. “Yes,” his brother said, “I plead guilty, but I do not often indulge in profanity.” “Damnation, John, what do you mean by using the word profanity. There is no such word; profaneness, John, profaneness, not profanity—you may go.”
Josiah Quincy, born in Boston, Feb. 4, 1772, a Harvard graduate of 1790, was president during my term. He had occupied the positions of member of congress, state senator, mayor of Boston, and Judge of the Boston Municipal Court, when he was chosen president in 1829, serving until 1845. He was sixty-six years of age, when I entered college, but appeared much older. He bore the reputation of being absent minded, but though many of the stories illustrating this mental condition, are probably untrue, an instance of it once occurred under my own eye and ear. He and Hon. Tyler Bigelow, the father of Chief Justice Geo. Tyler Bigelow, were intimate friends, and their families were also intimate. Meeting one day in the waiting room of the Old Colony station some years after the death of Mr. Bigelow’s wife, Mr. Quincy asked him how Mrs. Bigelow was. Putting his hand to his ear, as he was very deaf, Mr. Bigelow said, “What did you say?” Mr. Quincy raising his voice said, “How is Mrs. Bigelow.” Mr. Bigelow said, “Speak louder,” and Mr. Quincy called out in his loudest voice, attracting the attention of every one in the room, “How is Mrs. Bigelow.” “Dead, dead,” said Mr. Bigelow, much to the amusement of the crowd. Mr. Quincy was a noble man. He loved Boston, and was devoted to its interests. The city owned what was called city wharf, opposite the Quincy Market, and when he was about eighty years of age the city government voted to sell it by auction. Mr. Quincy protested publicly against the sale of property which in his judgment would appreciate largely in value in the near future. No attention was paid to his protest, and the sale went on. He bought it, and then offered it to the city at the price he paid, but his offer was refused. I have heard his profits on the purchase put as high as a half a million of dollars. He died in Quincy, July 1, 1864, at the age of ninety-two.
CHAPTER XXXV.
As has been already stated, in the early days of the Plymouth Colony, town meetings were held in either the Governor’s house, or the meeting house. The last meeting in the meeting house, so far as the record shows, was held July 6, 1685. In that year Plymouth County was incorporated with Plymouth, the shire, and though I can find no record of the event, it is probable that the County Court house, which stood on the site of the present town house, was built in that year, and that from that time it was the meeting place of the town. There are scattering records of town meetings held there before it was taken down in 1749, in which year the present town house was built by the county as a Court House. In anticipation of the erection of the present house it was voted by the town at a meeting held in the Court House, Oct. 10, 1748, “to give towards building a new house three hundred pounds old tenor, provided that the town shall have free use and improvement of the said building, as long as it stands, to transact any of the public affairs of the town in.” On the 6th of March, 1749, it was voted “that the town will add to their former vote for building a Court House, the sum of seven hundred pounds old tenor... provided that the Court of General sessions for this county at its next sessions shall order that the said Court House shall immediately be built, and that the town have the privilege of transacting their public affairs in the same so long as the said house shall stand.”
At the next session of the court it was voted to accept the additional grant and a copy of the vote was attested by Edward Winslow, clerk.