Letters of Asa Gray

CHAPTER I.. Autobiography.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

1810-1843.

My great-great-grandfather, John Gray, with his family, among which was Robert Gray, supposed to be one of his sons, emigrated from Londonderry, Ireland, to Worcester, Mass., being part of a Scotch-Irish colony. The farm they took up was on the north side of what is now Lincoln Street.

Robert Gray, my great-grandfather, died in Worcester, January 16, 1766. He married Sarah Wiley 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, 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. 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; and he was the grandson of John Howard of Ipswich, 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. 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. 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. My earliest distinct recollections of school are of spelling-matches, in which at six or seven years I was a champion. 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.

I am not sure, but I think it was after two years of the Clinton Grammar School that I was transferred to Fairfield Academy. 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.

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