DORR Manuscript Collection. Smead. IIII No. 1524E HASTINGS, MN LOS ANGELES-CHICAGO-LOGAN. OH McGREGOR. TX-LOCUST GROVE. GA U.S.A. Dorr Manuscript Collection (DMC) This file contains unique ancestry documents I selected from the Dorr Collection at the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Copied in 2005 by NEHGS staff. they provided this researcher with the most unique ancestry information extant. As a member of the NEHGS, my only research visit to the Newbury St. site on January 15, 2005 introduced me to the unprocessed Dorr collection. After taking eleven pages of handwritten notes (contained in Series V), I requested that several hundred manuscript pages that I selected be photocopied. On October 14, 2015 Timothy Salls of the R. Stanton Avery Special Collections gave permission to "use" their intellectual property. As I explained in Creating Acadia National Park (Bar Harbor, ME: Friends of Acadia, 2016), Dorr Estate Trustees in 1947 did not gift to the NEHGS a page-numbered chronological ancestry; instead, the page numbers are often non-consecutive, reflecting George B. Dorr's incremental biographical and narrative process over the last two decades of his life-and perhaps the inattentiveness of the executors involved in this donation. This is the best primary documentation of the lineage of George Bucknam Dorr available at the time this research was undertaken. The essays bear occasional markings by my hand and have been arranged in reverse chronological order. Family members in this direct line span eight generations, terminating with the July 22, 1674 arrival of Edward Dorr (1649-1734) in Casco Bay, Maine from Dorsetshire, England (See the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry). George B. Dorr was carrying a New England upper class "Grandfather on the Brain" tradition that Cleveland Amory delineated in 1947 in his satirical The Proper Bostonians. That is, the "filial duty" of many merchant class family members to educate his descendants about the challenges and achievements faced by their family. Dorr's maternal uncle, Samuel Gray Ward published in 1900 The Ward Family Papers, including therein a copy of family papers authored by his grandfather, William Ward. Since Dorr was a bachelor, his intended audience is unknown though it possible that his motives were aligned with his friend, William Endicott Jr., the renown preservationist of New England culture. 2. The seventeen undated biographical profiles appear in several instances in two versions; the lineage follows the paternal line with occasional digressions into the maternal. Testimonials offer perspectives outside the family context. Content is heavily weighted to the two generations that preceded the birth of George. B. Dorr whop authored authored all the biographical profiles, with at least one exception. His father, Charles Hazen Dorr, authored an essay on his paternal father, Samuel Dorr. Included are three handwritten essays by an unknown hand; stylistic features suggest that Dorr's father may have been the author. Included are several essays on other related families which Dorr thought worthy of inclusion; not included are family relatives over the centuries that Dorr omitted, we might suppose for a lack of evidence. Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. Dorr NEHGS Collection The Dorr Collection at the New England Historic Genealogical Society New England Historic Genealogical Society Page 1 of 2 ? Help fir SECURITY ewEnglandAncestors.org New Search New England Historic Genealogical Society 1 Founded 1845 CATALOG LOGIN NEHGS Home I Research Libraries I Education Center I Join NEHGS I Contribute (Search History) Start Over Save Records Limit/Sort Search Another Search LOCAL CALL NO SG DOR 10 [116] System Sorted Search Limit search to available items Result page: Previous Next More Resources Author Dorr, George B. (George Bucknam), 1853-1944. Title Dorr collection. [manuscript] Rating Location Call No. Status Manuscripts SG DOR 10 [116] - AVAILABLE Description 1 ctn., 1 flat storage box. Summary 1 & 1A. Genealogical notes on the Edward Dorr family of Roxbury, Mass. 2. State legislative service of the Hon. Samuel Dorr including notes on men serving with him. 3a. Genealogical notes on the Edward Dorr family and his estate at Roxbury, Mass., 3b. the Rev'd Joseph Dorr, 3c. Hon Joseph Dorr and notes on Nathan Bucknam, minister, 3d. Hon. Samuel Dorr-Adams, Lazinby, Brown, house of Samuel Dorr in Boston, children of Samuel Dorr by his first marriage + Susan, daughter by second marriage, 3e. Notes on places in connection with Dorr genealogy. 4. Letters relating to Dorr genealogy. 5&6. Notes on places. 7a. Elizabeth Weld Gardner's last request to her husband, 7b. William Ward's letter to his grandchildren, 7c. Memo of William Ward's last communication to the Sec. of State, Sept 25, 1819, 7d. Last will of William Ward, 7e. Fragment from Ward genealogy (1786), 7f. prayer, 7g. estate of Samuel Gray, 7h. Samuel Gray's will, 7i. prayer, Mrs Gray, 7j. William Ward's story, 7k. Misc. papers. & charts. Note George Bucknam Dorr was born 29 December 1853 Jamaica Plain MA. He graduated from Harvard in 1874. He was a member of NEHGS from 1922- 1939. George B. Dorr died 5 August 1944. http://library.nehgs.org/search/?searchtype=e&searcharg=SG+DOR+10+%5B116%5D&SO... 9/2/2007 R. Stanton Avery [copy:2 - -clean] Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 COPY 1871 - GBD & WWD go to London- then join parents at Baden-Baden (Good copy - to be read for typographical errors) 1872-1874 - C.H.D. to Paris for winter, going to Riviera and &WWW to Rome; ChD. returned home in spring; GBD & WWD going again, the same spring to England, Scotland and Wales, with Mr. Dana as a companion on the trip; in the fall of 1873 WWD returned home, & CHD joined GBD for a winter in Paris and on Riviera, returning home in the spring of 1874. (Good copy, but change has to be made, as it is written incorrectly. ) 1874 - 1878 -- Abroad - Rome, etc. (unfinished) 1878 - trip to Brittany ; trip to Spain, winter of 1877 to be added to the story. 1882 - Trip to Central Italy & Sicily - Rough Copy 1891-1892 - Trip to Palestine & Up Nile - Good Canoeing Trip to Moosehead Lake with Sam Warren - 1895 1902 - Trip with Geologists - Good 1903 - GBD & Vanderbilts - Good 1904 - To Sierras - Good 1907 - Last Trip Abroad Rough A trip through Virginia Staying at Biltmore Estes Park - (Col. Fordyce Births. Samuel Don The five children above four was from of Joseph & Cathamic mentioned are recorded in Dor. at Mendon June 23rd 1774 the town. book book No 3 have 103 by Lucy T Fox T Clark Town clerk was from at Fitchbing June 1811. of Joseph of Meny Fox September 6th 1776 Janua Arguments Dons fammel For Door, form Jame 8th 1812 form August 26th 1804. Preson E lizabeth for from March George Bucknam Dor. being Thursday 2 from January 23rd 1806. b harles Hazan Dorr, Albert Henry for born August 27th 1821 from December goth 180y being in Monday. and Don In son of DFD. Martha Arm Dorr from Jame 11th 1836 at New York from December 20th 1809. Aagan for Francis Fiske Don. from November 30th 1837 from March 16th 1811 at New York R. Stanton Avery Special Dept. New Genealogical 101 Newbury England Collections Historic Society Street Street Boston, MA 02116 COPY Births. Children of martha law Edwards of Charles Hborr Henry Dor Edwards William Ward Dorr 4 born at Pans- France, March 5th 1830. born at Jameisa Plain mafolls Friday 31st January 1851, Henry Augustro Edwards at nine o'clock evening born at Boston May 9th 1832. George Bucknam Lucy Jane Edwards born at Jamaica Plain, map Thursday. 29th December 1853. born at Boston January yth 1834 at 314 o'clock morning. Emily E tomat Boston. August ryth 1835. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. COPY New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society COPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 September 19, 1925. [Charles H.] Dear Mr Dorr: ^ In clearing up papers on my desk which came at a crowded time some weeks ago I came upon a letter from you dated August 2d with regard to ob- taining a news item concerning Governor Brewster's visit to me. I had no opportunity to answer at that time but I do not wish your letter to go un- acknowledged. You ask concerning what branch of the Dorr family I am a member of. All in America who bear the name I believe to be descended from Edward Dorr who came out of England about 1660 and settled first in Boston, then in Roxbury, where he held property, taking an active part in the Town's affairs, and where he died, leaving several sons. Edward and Ebenezer were the elder. I am descended from a third son, Joseph, who went to Harvard College and became a minister, marrying the daughter of John Wilson, first minister of the First Church in Bos- ton. The Dorr family was prominent in the Town of Roxbury till a century ago when the younger genera- 2. tion spread out widely over the country, east and west. My father was Charles Hazen Dorr of Boston, whose signature Charles H. Dorr was the same as yours. With regards, I am Sincerely yours, [G.B.Dorr] GBD-0 Mr. Charles H. Dorr, Dorr News Service, 7 Bank Street, New York City. INFORMATION FOR DORR GENEALOGY CHARLES E. DORR, Syracuse, N. Y., Compiler 83% are Name, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Father's Name, Names of other Ancestors (Dorr Side), in order, as far back as possible. (Note-Following questions apply to Subject of this sketch, not to ancestors.) Where Educated, Occupation, Place of Residence, If not living, date of death, Whom Married, of (Town and State) Names of children and dates of births, Public or Church Offices held, Other important events in life of subject and standing in community, also of wife or husband R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. CICOPY New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Contributed by Date Dear Mr. Dorr, I send you a copy of the memoranda I happen to have concerning my Dorr ancestors. I have added two or three names at the end, to bring the line down to myself. Sincerely yours, Barrett Wendell. 358 Marlborough St., June 22, 182. Mema. Dorr Edward m. Elizabeth Hawley R. Stanton Avery Ebenezer m. 1709 Mary Bordman Special Collections Dept. b. 1687 New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Ebenezer m. Amy Plympton Boston, MA 02116 b. 1712 d. 1782 Ebenezer m. 1762 Abigail Cunningham b. 1738 d. 1809 John m. 1793 Esther Goldthwaite b. 1770 d. 1855 00 Sally m. N. A. Barrett Mary m. Jacob Wendell Barrett Wendell Barrett Wendell 358 Marlborough Street 9 March, 1910 Dear George: It appears that my grand-uncle Joseph Dorr had no H. in the middle. My aunt Sarah suggests that the J.H. Dorr, who wrote the letter in 1832, may perhaps have been Joseph Hawley Dorr, whom she faintly remembers, and whom she had supposed to be a near kinsman - brother or cousin - of your grandfather. The Harvard Quinquennial contains the name of Joseph Hawley Dorr, as Doctor of Medicine in 1837; he took his bachelor$ degree at Bowdoin College in 1827, The dates would precisely fix the letter of 1832. I will return the letter to you instead of writing Mr. Harrison directly, for the reason that these suggestions of my aunt's may perhaps bring to your mind more about this J.H.Dorr. Having no envelope long enough fortthe letter at this moment, I shall keep it till to-morrow. Meanwhile, Ilsend this line. Sincerely yours Barrett Wendell COPY R. Stanton Avery Special Collection New England H Genealogical 101 Newbury Poston. MA Ox Charles Hazen Dorr. Version 1 98. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street 8 uston, MA 02116 CHARLES HAZEN DORR By his son, George Bucknam Dorr 1938 Charles Hazen Dorr, youngest son of Samuel Dorr, was born in Boston on August 27th, 1821, in his father's house overlooking the harbor. He was named for his uncle by marriage, Charles Hazen, the husband of his mother's younger sister, Elizabeth Brown. His mother was Susan Brown, born in Boston on August 16th, 1779, the eldest child of Joseph Lazinby Brown and his wife, Susannah Adams, in their house on Middle Street, now Hanover Street, at the North End. When he was still in his third year his father sold the house where he and all his father's other children had been born and purchased a house on Tremont Street, opposite the Common and not far from the foot of Park Street, which was his home thereafter until he died, in 1844. Young as he was when his father sold the house in which he was born, my father recalled distinctly raising himself by his hands to look out of the nursery window and see the ships sailing in and out of the harbor -- a remarkable instance of early memory. 7 COPY 99. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Growing up in his father's house on Tremont Street, he attended the Boston schools and played with his com- rades on Boston Common or in old gardens of the period, or, best of all, around the wharves where vessels belong- ing to their fathers and their fathers' friends lay un- loading cargoes come from distant ports, and there were sailors to talk with and glorious opportunity for climb- ing. He did not go to college. His father, ill content with his experience in sending to Harvard two older sons, brought him up to be, as he had been himself, a business man and merchant from the start. His father died when he was but twenty-three years old, leaving him, as he did his brothers of the elder group, his share in his estate to employ freely as opportunity offered and he deemed best. With this as capital and a friend for partner he entered business as a commission merchant and took what came, of good and ill, to the outbreak of the Civil War. At times, with two major panics in the period, the ill predominated and he went through difficult and trying times, but he came through with credit, forgot them and went on. COPY Avery 100. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 5 On June 4th, 1840, he married Mary Gray Ward, daughter of Thomas Wren Ward of Boston, of whom and his family there is an account elsewhere. Taking delight in the country, they built them- selves a house at Jamaica Plain, on the border of Jamaica Pond -- a deep, spring-fed basin fringed round with trees from which the first water-supply of Boston was taken in 1795, led to the vicinity of Fort Hill, near the harbor, through white pine logs bored length- wise and tightly jointed. There two children were born to them, William Ward Dorr, on January 31st, 1851, and George Bucknam Dorr, second of the name, on December 29th, 1853. I was that second child, arriving at night in the midst of a wild snow-storm, through whose deep drifts my father ploughed his way on foot the following day to carry the news to my mother's father in his Park Street home. A year or two after I was born, my mother fell ill of consumption, of which a sister and two brothers died, and her father's family physician, Dr. Jackson, who had attended her sister in her illness, gave little hope. COPY R. Stanton Avery 101. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 My father, acting on his own initiative, took her that fall to Florida, then difficult to reach and little visited, and on to St. Augustine, where they spent the winter. The climate conquered and her life was saved. During their absence, we children my brother and I -- were left at home under the care of a devoted nurse, a Welsh woman, who, first coming for my brother, was with my mother when I was born and cared for me thereafter as though I were her own, remaining with us always till she died. The life at Jamaica Plain comes back to me as I grow older in scenes flashing across the screen of memory, as chance may call them up, like the pictures in an old-time Magic Lantern show. In one I see my mother and father on horse-back, going off together for a ride and turning back to wave to me as I stand watching at the door. In another I see myself out driving with them on a mellow Indian Summer afternoon, sitting beside my father who was driving, and asking, on being told that snow was coming, what snow was -- I could not recall it. Again, I see our lake, Jamaica Pond, frozen in winter, with people skating -- my mother with me and my father on his skates close by. ALCOPY 102. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Then come gay sleighing scenes upon the snowy Boston road, with friendly racing and the sound of bells. And yet again I see our lake in summer; great white swans with arching necks come sailing by, owned by our neighbor Edward Perkins, whose beautiful home, Pine Bank, along with our old home, has long since passed into public possession as part of Boston's Metropolitan Park. Then in the summer, when the dog-days came, we would pack up and go off, sometimes to Lenox, more often to Newport where my mother as a girl staying with friends in the quaint old town had sketched and had ridden on horseback, letting down the bars of pasture lands where a generation later in my own early days Bellevue Avenue ran, straight and stiff, bordered by palatial residences. Then the whole scene changed suddenly in April, 1861, with the firing on Fort Sumter and the outbreak of the Civil War. I recall well the coming of that fateful news to our home at Jamaica Pond, sunlit and peaceful. My father, deeply stirred, at once enlisted. FLOORY 103. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston MA 02116 It was planned that he should go as major in a Massa- chusetts regiment commanded by his friend and neighbor at Jamaica Plain, Colonel Francis Lee. Few in the north had military training at the war's commencement and my father, anxious to be ready when his regiment should entrain, threw himself without stint into the work of preparation. In the midst of his training, he caught a typhoid fever and was ill for weeks; recovering, and impatient at the delay, he took up his training again while yet the seeds of the fever were in his system and suffered a relapse which was all but fatal and left him invalided for years thereafter. His regiment left for the south and he remained behind -- a bitter blow. The following year we moved to Boston to occupy my Grandfather Ward's old home on Park Street, he having died three years before and my grandmother, left alone, having built herself a house adapted to her needs on Commonwealth Avenue, upon the new-filled lands beyond the Public Garden, where we later joined her, building our own house alongside of hers. There, in Boston, a new life began. COPY 104. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 To my brother and to me that war-time period was an unforgettable experience. We saw the troops assemble, the older brothers of our friends among them, to be entrained; we were told of the battles and the losses that our troops sustained; we saw them returning with torn banners and depleted ranks; and we were drilled ourselves at school -- everywhere the war was in our thoughts. Then, at last, one April morning in 1865, the war at an end, my father came up to where we were dressing for breakfast, the morning paper in his hand and tears in his eyes, to tell us, in a broken voice, that Pres- ident Lincoln had been shot. Great tragedy as it was alike to North and South, it was a fitting end to a great drama. COPY R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. 107. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 To me, from Mrs. William Hunt, wife of the artist and one of my father's oldest friends: Vevay, Suisse March 9, 193 Grand Hotel du Lac My dear George, Before the grief that must be your mother's, I really dare not try to say any words of sympathy at this time, but inasmuch as I have been a life- long admirer of the beautiful character and ac- complished mind of your father, I hope I do not intrude in sending you these few words of heart- felt sympathy in your late loss. As it has been told to me, it has seemed for him a beautiful and merciful translation. I have seen myself so much terrible physical pain in the parting of body and soul, that to me it would seem a great mercy that you did not have to stand helpless by the bedside to see him suffer. I have come to feel that this is all I shall ask for, in mercy, when my loved ones must go on. COPY R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. 108. New England Historic Genealogical Society 1 Newbury Street MA 02116 I hope this will have brought you both much consolation. For the loss of the beloved companion there seems to be no help but memory! I have always had an abiding sense that perhaps we did not fully realize the beauty of such a character and influence, as it claimed so little recognition for itself the fine apprehension, so many-sided, the sympathy for others, the wit adorning a character which as I contemplate it seems really faultless. Oh! this must be an everlasting possession and con- solation. Truly, I can hardly recall another so free from blemish. I will not try to speak of myself and the personal loss which I feel it to be, but only send this leaf of tribute to add to the many that must come to you. Ever faithfully and affectionately, Louisa D. Hunt. CLPO - or Avery Special Collect Dept. 109. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 To me, from Dr. Francis S. Watson, a friend and school- mate of my own who had been called down from Boston some years before as a surgeon to operate on my father: Sunday Evening. Dear George, Will you let me express my sincere sorrow which the news of your father's death has just given me -- and my sympathy for you and your mother. Ever since the time when my professional attendance upon Mr. Dorr gave me the opportunity to know better his many lovable and noble traits of character, I have felt a very strong affection and admiration for him. I can never forget his extraordinary patience, pluck and cheer at the time when I operated on him at Bar Harbor. In all my experience of courageous and enduring people in sickness, I have never known his con- duct on that occasion equalled, and I do not remember ever being SO impressed by the attitude of anyone toward pain, suffering, and death as I was then, and have been since, by his view of these 1 COPY R. Stanton Avery 110. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 matters. He had a quality of endurance and of readiness to meet and accept whatever might be in store for him which was entirely apart from anything I have ever seen in anyone else. It was a beautiful and a helpful thing to see and I have always been grateful that I had the chance to see it -- and to feel its influence. I wish this might have come to you at some other moment than that in which your Mother was already under the strain of her own trouble, giving you the double anxiety of her illness and your Father's upon you at the same moment. If there should be anything that I can do to help you in any way, I beg you will let me know. Sincerely, Francis S. Watson. 263 Clarendon St. Avery 111. ctions Dept. Historic Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 To me, from Mary Elliot, the wife of a classmate of mine, Dr. John W. Elliot and daughter of one of my father's oldest friends, sister of Col. Henry Lee: Dear Mr. Dorr, John and I are filled with sorrow at the sad- ness of your father's death. We both send you our most affectionate sympathy. Your father was to me just the type of a true gentleman. Our Sunday with you at Lenox was one of the most completely happy days I have passed and I treasure the recollection more because of the oppor- tunity of seeing him and knowing him a little. I have seldom seen a Father and Son whose relation to each other seemed so happy and so perfect as yours and though the loss is all the greater, the memory of it must be a comfort to you I am sure. Believe me always Yours truly, Mary Elliot. 75 Marlborough Street January 29th, 1893. COPY R. Stanton Avery 112. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 To my mother, from Mrs. William James, with her husband a recent guest at Oldfarm: 16 Piazza del Independenza Florence, March 4th, 1893. Dear Mrs. Dorr, Last week a letter from home told us of Mr. Dorr's death, but gave us no particulars. I have waited a little, thinking that we should hear, but I must write, for nothing that can be told will make more imperative the expression of my deep sympathy with you and your son in the loss of that great and beautiful presence. And yet, you will understand what I mean when I say that it seems so natural, SO normal, to think of him as quietly stepping over the boundary and entering into his spiritual inheritance. Do you remember that you seated me next to him at the table during our visit to you at Mt. Desert? I always felt serene after being beside him; he dwelt in so beneficent and sweet an air. I am SO glad that I knew him, even a little. The thought of what his going means to you fills me with tender- est sympathy. 11, Ever affectionately yours, COPY Alice H. James. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. 113. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 To my mother, from Helen Bell, the daughter of Rufus Choate, an old and intimate friend: Vienna, Feb'y 21st. Dearest Mrs. Dorr, I shrink from even speaking of your great loss in that "blameless life" and yet thinking so much of you and your perfect love as I do I must tell you of my great sympathy and try to spare you any poor, futile words. I am coming home on March 22d and perhaps you will let me come to see you. With love to George, Affectionately and always gratefully yours, Helen Bell. COPY 114. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 To my mother, from William D. Curtis, the old inn- keeper at Lenox who had known my mother since her girlhood days: Curtis Hotel, Lenox, Massachusetts. February 28, 1893. Dear Mrs. Dorr, We were shocked to hear of Mr. Dorr's death and extend to you our sympathy. All my recollections of Mr. Dorr are most delight- ful. He was one of God's noblemen and made everybody and everything he came in contact with better and purer. With kind regards for Mr. George, Yours very respectfully, William D. Curtis. COPY Charles Hazen Dorr. Version 2. CHARLES HAZEN DORR Youngest son of Samuel Dorr 2 Lesson R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic al Genealogical Society 13 COPY 101 Nowbury Street CHARLES HAZEN DORR, YOUNGEST SON OF SAMUEL DORR Charles Hazen Dorr, youngest son of Samuel Dorr, was born in Boston on August 27th, 1821 in his father's house overlooking the harbor. He was named for his uncle, Charles Hazen, the husband of his mother's younger sister, Elizabeth Brown. This house by the waterfront his father sold when he was just under three years old, but my father remembered always the sight of the harbor from his nursery windows with the ships sailing in and out over the sunlit waters. In the new home his father purchased upon Tre- mont Street, opposite the Common, my father grew up, going to the Boston public schools and playing with his comrades upon the Common or in long-vanished, friendly gardens, or -- best of all -- round the wharves where vessels belonging to their fathers and their fathers' friends lay unloading cargoes come from distant ports and there were sailors to talk with and glorious opportunity for climbing up the masts and rigging. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society COPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Charles Hazen Dorr) 2. He did not go to college; his father, critical of his experience with the two sons he had sent, brought him up to be from the start a business man, as he had been himself, and with him as he grew up found himself well satisfied, making him in his will trustee of his sister Susan Dorr's estate -- a trust, soon after entered on, which he fulfilled faithfully and well for over forty years. His father died when he was but twenty-three years old, on December 18th, 1844, at seventy years of age, his mother having died three years earlier, on February 25th, 1841. His father left him outright, as he did his brothers of the elder group, an equal share in his estate to invest or employ as he deemed best. With this as cap- ital and a friend for partner, he entered as a merchant upon business life, and took what came, of good and ill, in the shifting markets of the day, until the coming of the Civil War. At times, with two major panics in the period, the ill predominated and he went through diffi- cult and trying experiences, but he came through with credit, and, undiscouraged, started out afresh. COPY R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Charles Hazen Dorr) 3. On June 4th, 1850 he married Mary Gray Ward, daughter of Thomas Wren Ward of Boston, of whom and of his family there is an account elsewhere. Taking delight in the country, they built them- selves a house at Jamaica Plain, an old, delightful residential section then, on the border of its Pond -- a deep, spring-fed glacial basin from which the first water-supply of Boston was taken in 1795, the water being led to Fort Hill by the harbor's edge through pipes formed of white pine logs, bored through the middle and tightly clamped together. There two children were born to them, William Ward Dorr, named for his great-grandfather on his mother's side, William Ward of Salem, on January 31st, 1851, and George Bucknam Dorr, second of the name, on December 29th, 1853. I was that second child, arriv- ing at night in the midst of a wild snowstorm, through whose heaped-up drifts my father ploughed his way on foot the following day to carry the news to my mother's father in his Park Street home, where she and her brothers had been born and we for a time lived afterwards on leav- ing Jamaica Plain. Special Collections Dept. R. Stanton Avery New England Historic Genealogical Society ALCOPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Charles Hazen Dorr) 4. A year or two after I was born my mother fell ill of consumption, of which her older sister Martha had but lately died, and the family physician, Dr. James Jackson, who had cared for this sister in her illness, gave my father little hope of her recovery. My father, acting promptly, took her that fall to Florida, then but recently made accessible by rail as far as to St. Augustine, beyond which all was wild. There was risk in the long journey and primitive ac- commodation, but the climate conquered and her life was saved. We children were left with a devoted nurse, a Welsh woman, who, first coming for my brother, was with my mother when I was born and cared for me as if I were her own, her home remaining with us afterward until she died. The life at Jamaica Plain comes back to me now in scenes that flash across the screen of memory as chance may call them up, like the pictures in an old- time magic lantern show. In one I see my mother and father on horse-back, going off for a ride and turn- ing to wave to me as I stand watching at the door. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society COPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Charles Hazen Dorr) 5. Again, I see myself out driving with them on a mellow Indian Summer afternoon, sitting beside my father who was driving, and being told that snow soon would come, and asking what snow was -- I could not recall it. In yet another I see our delightful little lake, Jamaica Pond, frozen in winter with people skating on it, my mother with me and my father on his skates close by. Then, later, come gay sleighing scenes upon the snowy road, with racing and the sound of bells. And again I see the lake in summer, deep among high, wooded banks, on whose smooth, sheltered surface great swans with arching necks and black, formidable-looking beaks marked with red come sailing by, kept by our neighbor, Edward Perkins, at his estate, Pine Bank, now become a children's museum, a part of the Metropolitan Park, which has taken over, too, the site of our old home. Then comes the memory of an early summer day, the garden where I was sent out to play flooded with sunshine, when my brother was desperately ill of scarlet fever and a sudden crisis had come, and our good, kind doctor at Jamaica Plain, Dr. Wold, summoned in haste, told my father R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. COPY New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston MA 02116 (Charles Hazen Dorr) 6. that the one chance of saving him lay in giving him a stimulant to pull him through, but there was risk in it and my father must decide. The stimulant champagne, I think was given, and the danger passed. All this I was too young at the time to realize; what I remember is the flooding sunshine out-of-doors, the tense anxiety within, and the doctor's galloping horse. In April, 1861, with the bombardment of Fort Sunter, the Civil War broke out. I recall well the coming of that fateful news. My father at once en- listed. It was arranged that he should go as major in a Lassachusetts regiment of which his friend and neighbor at Jamaica Plain, Francis Lee, was tc be -- and later was -- the colonel. Few at that time in the North had military training; there was much to learn, much training to be undergone, and my father, his whole heart in it, trained hard, going daily into Boston for drill upon the Common, on foot and often at double-quick for the training sake. Dept. COPY Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Charles Hazen Dorr) 7. In the midst of this my father caught a typhoid fever and for a time was seriously ill. Then, recover- ing and impatient at the interruption to his preparation, he over-trained while yet the seeds of the fever were in his system and suffered a relapse which was all but fatal, and left him invalided long after. His regiment, in due course, entrained and marched off without him -- which was to him a bitter blow. Late that summer, following the Battle of Bull Run, so disastrous to the Union cause, my father went to Wash- ington upon some mission for Governor Andrew, Massachusetts famous war-time governor and his personal friend, and my mother went with him, and I remember well on their return her description of the scene, wonderfully real and vivid, with the Confederate Army encamped opposite, across the Potomac, almost within cannon-shot of the Capital, and all in uncertainty what the near future might bring forth. That fall -- my Grandfather Ward having died three years before and my grandmother, left alone, having built herself a house better suited to her lessened need on Commonwealth Avenue, near the Public Garden we moved to Boston, taking possession for a time of my grandfather's Special Collections Dept. R. Stanton Avery New England Historic Genealogical Society A COPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Charles Hazen Dorr) 8. house on Park Street, looking west across the Common toward the setting sun, and close below the State House, where my father, unable to serve in the field, gave aid as need there was to Governor Andrew. I remember well that house, roony and spacious, and opening directly on my brother's and my playground on the Common, with its broad malls and arching elms, and the old John Hancock house adjoining the State House close above, torn down soon after to the future's great regret. For my mother, the Park Street house was full of old associations for it had been her birth- place and her home through all the years that followed till her marriage; to my brother and myself a home rich in the mystery of the past. But, for children and all, in the years that followed the great and all-absorbing matter was the Civil War, which dominated all else as the news from the battlefields came in. To my brother and myself, young as we were, that war-time period was, in its entirety, an unforgettable experience. The cause that flowed from it, slavery -- whatever historians or writers may say -- and the war alike were ours, and all relating Stanton Avery Social Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 C O P Y (Charles Hazen Dorr) 9. to it, seen or heard, fixed itself indelibly in our memory: The marching off of troops at the war's beginning, the news that followed of their being mobbed at Baltimore as they marched through the city on their way to Washington, the disastrous tidings of the Battle of Bull Run, the growing list of killed and wounded or made prisoners from among the circle of our friends, the battle at Hampton Roads between the Monitor and Merrimac that changed in a few hours the whole system of naval warfare of the world, Lee's second invasion and the Battle of Cettys- burg which definitely turned the tide -- all this sank in, to be part of us through life. The war finally had reached its close when, early one morning as my brother and I were dressing for break- fast in our new house on Commonwealth Avenue, next to my grandmother's, our father came up to our room, the morning paper in his hand, tears in his eyes, to tell us that President Lincoln had been shot. He was pro- foundly moved; and for me, who still can see him stand- ing there as he told us, that has always remained, throughout the years, one of life's great moments. R. Stanton Avery COPY Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Generological Society meany Street 14 02116 (Charles Hazen Dorr) 10. When we were old enough, my brother and I went to Dixwell's School. Epes Dixwell, son of an old Boston merchant, had been headmaster of the Boston Latin School -- a public school of high standing and old tradition -- but left it to found his own private school, training boys for Harvard. It was the leading private school in Boston; in fact, I recall no other. The boarding schools which have become since so prom- inent a feature did not then exist, except St. Paul's and the Phillips Exeter and Andover Academies, and to these few boys I knew were sent. Mr. Dixwell's school had some fifty-odd boys, divided into six classes, entering at about twelve years of age and leaving generally at the end to enter Harvard. The school had a high reputation but the course of study was of the old, traditional stamp under which one learnt lessons and recited them -- Latin all through the six-year course; Greek the last two years. It was a training in memory, not in the power to think, and took little or no account of in- dividual character and needs. Special Collections Dept. R. Stanton Avery New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street COPY Boston, MA 02116 (Charles Hazen Dorr) 11. The boys lived at home, attending school from nine till two, with half an hour out for recreation. After- noons were free for play, and play it was. Sports in the organized sense of today were then in their begin- ning only. Football was played, and was a favorite game with all of us, bringing out, in the open game we played, one's full activity. Baseball was coming in. Rowing, as a competitive sport, came at Harvard only, not before. Tennis did not as yet exist. The families of all the boys attending Dixwell's School had summer homes to which they moved in spring, returning in the fall, a custom then of recent origin made possible by the railroad. Some went to the North Shore or the South Shore, where there was splendid opportunity for bathing and for sailing; others yet -- like ourselves -- out into the country. We went to Canton, an old town on the Boston and Providence Rail- road a few miles beyond Milton and the Blue Hills a part of early Dorchester -- in order to be near my grandmother, who had a summer home there and a famous garden, taking many prizes at the Boston shows. It came about because my grandfather, told by his doctor R. Stanton Avery COPY Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Charles Hazen Dorr) 12. to get himself a country home where he could be, for a portion of the time at least, out of the atmosphere and anxieties of business, bought an old homestead there built by some member of the Nichols family, relations of his close friends, the Bowditches. There, in real country, with woods and a lake for neighbors, dogs and horses for companions, my brother and I grew up, springs and falls, till col- lege days. It was great country for us. . My brother, a born sailor by inheritance from my mother's family, rigged up a row-boat with a sail, and sailed on the lake; I roamed the woods, meadows and pasture-lands about us, gathering wild flowers and collecting birds' eggs in the spring. But when the hot, dry summer came we went to the seashore for my mother's sake, and it was on one of these mid-summer trips that we first came to Mount Desert. R. Stanton Avery COPY Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 COPY Dictaphone, April 12, 1940. Opposite the head of Hanover Street as it comes up from the North End rises steeply up beyond the present Scollay Square the north ascent of Beacon Hill. The short straight street carries it to Pemberton Square beyond which the Court Houses rise built in my own time, some forty years ago, rise up forbiddingly like a precipice, hiding the summit of Beacon Hill beyond, Back of the Bulfinch State House, the summit now cut down but which anciently present rose in a steep cone to the height of the State House dome, a bare steep cone on whose sannix height the beacon fire lay ever ready to be lighted in old Colonial times to warn and arouse the whole countryside about. steep The frontage of this northern rise of the hill looking out over the early city and the harbor with its islands must have been one of great beauty and should at all cost have been kept clear. On this slope, facing down the North End which held practically the whole city then, John Cotton built his house when he came, in 1633, three years after the foundation of the city, fleeing the per- secution at home, and became the !Teacher! of the First Church in Boston, of which John Wilson was the Pastor. John Cotton was a kindly man, much beloved among the Puritans in England and it was in his honor that the new Colony of Massachusetts Bay was given its name of Boston R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. 2. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street COPY Boston, MA 02116 for St. Botomph's Town, the like named city with its famous tower on the Wash or broad estuary of the Humber River where he had earlier preached and been pastor for years before he fled. boyhood Until my father's thro time this slope continued to be a choice site for the homes and gardens of leading citizens. And in my father's boyhood the home and broad terraced gardens of one of the wealthiest citizens of the town, Mr. Gardiner Greene, rose up above the latter Pemberton Square, walled about with high, gloomy-looking office build- ings and Gardiner Greene's delightful gardens where the children of his friends were free to come and play passed wholly from my father's memory until one day, a few years before he died, these houses were torn down to make space for the Court House and as my father walked up Street with the western sky before him, freed from the buildings that had hidden it SO long, the full memory, in all detail, of the Gardiner Greene gardens which he had played in SO happily came back to him suddenly as in a vision. Coming home, he told me of it with the greatest interest. The pictured memory had stayed with him all those years, lost beyond all power to recall until suddenly the open sky ahead brought it back to him, vivid and clear as though present still, from out the depths of memory. 3. R Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. NE England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 COPY I have tried to reconstruct the Boston of my father!s and my mother's early days since they have gone but find it, in the presence of the great growth & changes have that has been so steadily in the making most difficult. For not the city only but the people, I realize now, in these later days, have been changing with it and whether for gain or loss I am not sure. The gains are immeasurable, so profound are they, and they are in the making still. In fact we seem to be rather at the beginning of a great new era than at the end of an old one, great in new thought and discoveries as it has been. And never has my life been so full of unanswerable questions as it is today. And it is not man that can have changed in a period SO short; it is his environment shaping the self he is, its thought, its feelings and its actions. The Boston Home of Samuel Dorr NOTE ON THE HOME OF SAMUEL DORR, IN BOSTON. The early home of my grandfather, Samuel Dorr, in Boston, where his children of both marriages were born and the older ones grew up, was by the harbor front, still at that time a much sought residential section, convenient to the merchants' warehouses and offices and pleasant in outlook. One of my father's earliest recollections was of raising himself up by his hands at the nursery window to look out on the harbor and see the ships come sailing in. That house his father sold when he was not quite three years old, removing, for his older children's sake, to Tremont Street, near the foot of Park Street, a growing center then of social life. But the harbor front with its wharfs and shipping and all the movement of a busy port was a favorite playground of my father and his comrades as he grew up; and he looked back always on its memories with great pleasure. In those days, before railroads or steamboats or the use of steam power in mills, Boston was a city of merchants still, whose prosperity was founded on the sea R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street C O C O P Y Boston, MA 02116 (Home of Samuel Dorr) 2. and who, owning or having an interest in vessels, had warehouses and counting houses where the ships came in, on India and other wharves or their neighborhood. The masts and rigging of the ships gave wonderful oppor- tunity for climbing, and the cargoes that they brought from distant ports wore full of stimulus to the imagi- nation for the boys who played about as the vessels were unloading. But the Common opposite the new home on Tremont Street was a great playground, too, with its broad, shady malls, ideal in spring for marbles and all kinds of running games; its rolling grasslands, Frog Pond and good winter coasting; its Election Days band concerts and parades; and the broad Back Bay beyond for skating. The house on Tremont Street, facing the Common, carried with it a right to pasture, and my father and his sister were brought up for several years on the milk of a cow my grandfather kept for them on the Common. They were among the last, en ordinance pass- ed by the City ending the privilege in practice, though the legal right remained, and still remains, inherent in the property. 1 COPY (Home of Samuel Dorr) 3. In 1822, four years after my grandfather had retired from the importing business to become presi- dent of the New England Bank, the Boston Athenaeum with its book and art collections and reading rooms moved from its early home on Tremont Street, in a house built originally by the loyalist rector of King's Chapel, looking down west on its old burial ground, to a mansion on Pearl Street, a quiet and pleasant residential section then, beautified by stately houses and shade trees, which was given it by James Perkins, the wealthy merchant, whose home it had been; and new shares were offered by the corpora- tion to meet the expense of moving. Samuel Dorr pur- chased one of these, becoming a 'proprietor' and there- after took an active interest in its affairs, contrib- uting to its purchases of books and works of art, and serving as a trustee in 1826 and 1827. The share he purchased was No. 179, as carried on the Athenaeum's books, and has remained in the family continuously since, passing from him to his son Charles Hazen Dorr, and from Charles Hazen Dorr to me, George Bucknam Dorr, who still retains it. O COPY (Home of Samuel Dorr) 4. When the Boston Art Museum was built, in 1870, on Copley Square, the Athenaeum transferred to it the main portion of its art collections, prints apart, and withdrew from the art collecting field, but till then its art gallery and loan exhibitions were notable features of the city's cultural life and had a far-reaching influence on the younger generation, leading on toward the subsequent great development of art museums and private art collections in America. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 The Honorable Samuel Dorr, his Home & Lineage ION. SAMUEL DORR -- Home of Samuel Dorr, in Boston Adams -- Lazinby -- Brown 2 R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 25 COPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 021:6 SAMUEL DORR, SON OF HON. JOSEPH DORR Samuel Dorr was born on the 23rd of June, 1774, in Mendon, Massachusetts, in the house built by his grandfather, the Rev'd Joseph Dorr, in which his father, the Hon. Joseph Dorr, had been born. There he lived until he was twelve years old, when his father moved to Ward, now Auburn. At six- teen years of age he entered the store of Parkman & Brigham, in Westborough, Massachusetts, about twenty miles from Boston along the line of the present Boston & Albany Railroad. Parkman & Brigham were among the leading mer- chants of New England in that day, large importers of goods from the West Indies and elsewhere, and carrying on a good New England business as distrib- utors. Samuel Dorr did not go to college, but had an excellent English education. He had a great love for books of the more serious sort, and all his life was a constant and thoughtful reader. But in the current fiction of the time he took little interest, his choice R. Stanton Avery COPY Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 2. leading him to such works as Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Milton, Dr. Johnson, Pope, the Iliad and Odyssey in translation, the sermons of Archbishop Tillotson, Young's Night thoughts, and many others which I do not now recall. He also read constantly the English and Scotch quarterlies of the day. Before Boston was made a city (March, 1822), Samuel Dorr was for a time chairman of the Select- men. Later, be was of Representative, then Senator for Suffolk County, in the Massachusetts Legislature. I remember his giving a good deal of time during sessions to preparing and writing out his speeches on financial questions. At the age of sixteen, he taught evening school, partly for the training, partly to earn money. His father was only comfortably off, and from the time of his entering a counting-room he supported himself entirely. Soon after becoming settled in Boston, he signed a deed which I have seen and which is, I think, still extant (1887), giving up to his sisters his share of R. Stanton Avery COPY Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 3. the property left by his father. It was not a large amount, but he gave it freely, saying that he was well able to take care of himself. He remained with Parkman and Brigham through the time of his apprenticeship, and about two years longer, so as to accumulate experience and capital for future use. During his last years with them he was very use- ful and their "right-hand man" in contact with their clients, and in this way he made valuable acquaintances among New England business men, forming a good founda- tion for his own career. I have no record of the year when he came to Bos- ton, but I think it was in 1797, when he was twenty- three years old. His capital consisted of $700 which he had saved from his salary. With this, and $600 which he borrowed for a few years from his father, he "set up" for himself. At first he acted as a commission merchant, having orders from country traders whose acquaintance he had made while in West- borough -- people in New Hampshire and Vermont as well as Massachusetts. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic COPY Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 4. The course of trade in Boston was then moving to the waterfront and east, and -- prospering in his affairs -- he soon purchased and occupied the building at No. 30 India Street, where he remained until he retried from business, acquiring later the adjoining building, No. 29. These two buildings, now remodelled into one, still stand in my name as trustee for my sister, Susan Elizabeth Dorr. His constitution was not naturally robust and he suffered until past middle life from nervous headaches which, added to the anxieties of a busi- ness life, taxed his health. About the year 1818, he was threatened with consumption and by the ad- vice of his friends and doctor he retired from busi- ness, with a fortune of $160,000, which in those days seemed a great deal. By prudence and good management, he gradually increased this to $400,000 at the time of his death. At the same time, he was very liberal towards his family and free in giving to all worthy charities. I am still contributing yearly to several which he was interested in. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. ] COPY New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 5. His business, till he retired, was in "West India goods' -- wholesale. Joining with a few other leading merchants of that time, he chartered ships and import- ed goods which found a ready sale among the smaller dealers. I remember two of these old merchants who survived him and who gave me a more intimate account of these importations than he himself had ever done. In 1811 he, with a few others, applied for a charter for the "New England Bank", which was in- corporated in 1813. He was at Director in this Bank from the time of its commencement until the year 1840; and he was its President from 1823 till 1831. He kept a deposit account with the Bank from 1813 to 1844, when he died, and I have had an account there ever since, now 43 years. His business career, successful pecuniarily, was notable in its uprightness and in the honorable name he made for himself and left when he died. He told me that he had never "made a dollar" through "shaving" notes or charging extra interest, but increased his property partly by living well within his means and R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 6. partly by investing only in sound securities and watch- ing them carefully. When a security he held was selling in the market for more than he considered its true value he changed to some other, equally sound but lower priced, thereby, without risk, raising his property. Being an extremely good judge of character, be lost almost nothing by bad debts, and, though obliged to trust many men, he scarce ever made a mistake. I remember one action of his told when I was a boy by a gentleman who took tea with us in our home on Tremont Street. I do not remember his name but only that bis home was in New Hampshire. His story was that on one occasion when my father was president of the New England Bank and a panic was going on in all our money markets, with interest at three or four times the usual rate, he applied to the Bank for a loan of $7,000, which, under the panic conditions of the time, it refused to make. Noticing the man's great disappointment, my father questioned him apart as to his needs and situation, and lent him the money personally, at simple interest. The gentleman told me that this loan made a turning point in his life, and saved a good busi- ness from being broken up. R. Stanton Avery 7 COPY Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 7. Samuel Dorr was married twice, first, on October 13th, 1803, to Lucy Tuttle Fox, second daughter of Joseph and Mary Fox of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, who died on January 4th, 1814; and second, on December 5th, 1815, to Susan Brown, daughter of Joseph Lazinby Brown of Boston. By his first marriage, Samuel Dorr had five sons and one daughter: Samuel Fox Dorr, born August 26, 1804; George Bucknam Dorr, born January 23, 1806; Albert Henry Dorr, born December 6, 1807; Martha Ann Dorr, born December 20, 1309; Francis Fiske Dorr, born March 16, 1811; James Augustus Dorr, born June 8, 1812. The eldest son, Samuel Fox Dorr, did not go to college but entered business early, showing marked ability. He established himself in New York, where the larger opportunity lay, and prospered. Then came one of the sudden panics and financial crashes that marked the period, and swept away all he had, leaving R. Stanton Avery 1 COPY Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 8. him in debt; but his creditors had faith in him and enabled him to continue, which he did to such good result that before his early death, on October 14th, 1844, two months before the death of his father, he had paid back all he owed and had begun to accumulate a second fortune. Samuel Fox Dorr married, on May 26th, 1835, Eliza- beth Chipman Hazen, daughter of Charles Hazen and niece of his father's second wife. They had two sons, Samuel, born June 11th, 1836, and Hazen, born November 30th, 1837. Both went to Harvard, where the elder, Samuel, graduated in 1857. The younger, Hazen, a lad of rare promise, died the night of June 7th, 1856, alone in his room at Cam- bridge, of some sudden seizure that came without warn- ing and whose nature was never clearly understood. I loved him very dearly, and after my marriage had him much with me in my home at Jamaica Plain, teaching him to row and ride and swim. I grieved for him when he died as though he were my own, and to his mother it came as a great blow. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. COPY New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 9. (Note by George B. Dorr, May 28th, 1940: So far, my father's, Charles Hazen Dorr's, account, writ- ten before our last trip together -- he, my mother and I -- to the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth for the famous Parsifal, first given to the public then, and the Nibelungenlied dramas afterward at Dresden, in full series -- a great performance; and afterward to Egypt for a sail on the Nile, skirting down the coast of Asia Minor to Alexandria, and returning in the Spring by Greece, which we none of us had visited before, and spending a few weeks among old friends in England. On our return, picking up old threads and new, our life was full and my father wrote no more on his story of the past, parting from us quietly at mid-winter. There are many details he would have filled in for me had he lived, for he loved to search out and reconstruct the olden times, which really came to life again as he worked over them. But in talk his thoughts never of their own accord turned back to things gone by, but dwelt in the present always, keeping track of all that went on the whole world over as life unfolded itself to his view from day to day. For this, he always subscribed when we were abroad together to the London Times, then R. Stanton Avery COPY Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 To be added to note by C. . B. Dorr, Page 10: of my father's older brothers and sister by his father's first marriage, I know but little save what chanced to come to me from time to time, for, except- ing my own aunt - - my father's sister -- close to me always alike in temperament and sympathy, with them I never grew into intimate relations, and I instinctively recognized, even as a child, that there is much that older folk have lived through to which they do not willingly turn back, and asked no questions. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. Ne: England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 10. the best newspaper published for a broad view of world affairs, whether of exploration, politics or science. When we returned from that last trip, he continued to have his London Times mailed to him in America, and, subscribed to till the following summer, I still have copies, unopened, that came after he passed on, and have kept some thinking to open them some day and so bring back the period.) --- Samuel Dorr's second son by his first marriage, George Bucknam Dorr, for whom I was named named Bucknam for his father's mother, Catherine Bucknam, and his own great-grandfather, the minister at Medway -- was born on January 23rd, 1806, in his father's house in Boston overlooking the harbor, and was duly recorded in the Town Book. Unlike his older brother, Samuel Fox Dorr, he was sent to Harvard, a member of the Class of 1824, entering at fourteen years of age, which was the approximate average at that time. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic COPY Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 11. Sending him to college was a new departure for my grandfather who looked seriously upon life, and owing to a mishap that befell him there, he did not look on it as a success with the result that neither of the two sons that followed went to college. The mishap which parted him from the College was the chance fall of a bootjack from the window of his room in the Yard, open in the pleasant spring- time, when he and a group of his friends members with him, as the tale was told me, of the Forcellian Club in its days of infancy -- chanced to be gathered there when an unpopular instructor happened by below. The College authorities, lacking a sense of humor, felt than an example must be made; the room was his, so his connection with the College ceased. But forty-two years after his class had graduated, in 1866, the degree he would have received had he grad- uated with it was conferred on him by the Corporation, and I remember his coming on from New York to receive it and hearing the story told. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic COPY Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 12. His life at college over, George Dorr's father set him to work to learn the technique of a merchant's trade, exporting and importing in the long-voyaged sailing vessels of the period, with its constant risks and anxious forecasting, till he thought him prepared to walk alone, when, following in the footsteps of his older brother, he betook himself to New York, opening an office at 54 Pine Street, and taking rooms nearby, at 7 Beaver Street, as an old New York Directory, of 1830, which he preserved, remains to tell, upon whose flyleaf he wrote long after: Settled in New York 17th Feb'y, 1827. Left New York at the close of November, 1874. Have kept this to show that I was the only man of the name in New York in 1830. George Dorr married, on December 21st, 1837, Joanna Hone Howland, eldest daughter of Samuel S. Howland, one of the leading merchants in New York, who, with his brother, Gardiner G. Howland, and William H. Aspinwall, formed the importing firm of Howland and Aspinwall. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. COPY New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 13. These two Howland brothers were not only great merchants in their day but men of culture and broad human interests, building vessels to aid the Greeks in their war for independence, as I chanced to know, taking part in public affairs, and creating estates outside New York on whose beauty and high cultivation Philip Hone in his famous Diary waxes eloquent. In that Diary, which is like a window looking out onto the shifting scenes of the social life of New York in that day, a pleasant dinner for men, as was the custom then, which Mr. Hone gave on December 20th, 1837, is recorded, at which Mr. Howland, his father-in-law to be, and George Dorr were present, this being the day before his wedding, on December 21st. His wife, Joanna Hone Howland was but seventeen when she married; George Dorr was thirty-one. But it was a happy marriage. She had unusual grace and charm, the tale of which has come down to me, together with a delightful miniature. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. COPY New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 14. In 1842, when she and her husband were on the point of returning from a trip to England, she was confined prematurely, it being her first child, in the town of Leamington, near Warwick, and died in giving birth to a child who also died. Forty years after, travelling through England with my father and mother, we stopped at Leamington over-night ourselves to visit Warwick Castle. My father registered in the hotel book that evening; when he came down to breakfast in the morning, an elderly waiter came to him and said: "Mr. Dorr, I read your name in the book last night and would like to inquire if you are any relation to a gentleman of your name who stopped here forty years ago with his young wife, who was taken ill and died in this hotel." Mr. Howland, her father, married twice and had children by both marriages. Joanna, my aunt, was the eldest child of the first marriage; the youngest of the second was Catherine who married Pichard Morris Hunt, the famous architect. Her I came to know well when I grew up, and once chanced to travel with her through the Tyrol, when, driving through Berchtesgaden R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street COPY Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 15. on our way to the Konigsee one day, speaking of my aunt, she told me that the baby-clothes the Howland family had got ready for my aunt's expected child were used for her, who was born soon after. We came to have a curiously close relation, Kate Hunt and I, united in the memory of one we neither of us had ever seen and who yet seemed in some strange way so close to both. There was no more romance in my uncle's life. He lived on in New York, taking part in its social life and interests, and continuing in business till he had accumulated a property sufficient to his desire, when he retired, spending his winters in New York; his springs in Paris, attracted by the brilliancy of its social life under the Third Empire -- where he was known, I once was told, among the American colony, because of a certain distinction of bearing that was native to him, as Gentleman Dorr'; and his summers at Lenox, where he, his brother Francis, and their two sisters made, in later life, a joint home on a beautiful hilltop looking north to Greylock up the Berkshire Valley and south across sunlit pasture-lands and orchards to Laurel Lake, and eastward to the deep cut below of the Housatonic River. 1 COPY (Samuel Dorr) 16. The third of Samuel Dorr's children by his first marriage, Albert, was by nature a student and should, by rights, have gone to college and become a teacher or a writer, for he read widely and loved to impart to others the knowledge that he got, but the mis- fortune that befell his older brother, George, at Harvard so prejudiced my grandfather at that time against sending another son there that he was started directly on a business life on leaving school, and en- tered on it presently, like his older brothers, in New York. Of what happened there, I know only what appears in a letter written him by his father in 1834, in which reference is made to a partnership he formed there which had terminated unsuccessfully: Boston, October 14, 1834. Dear Son, I have received two letters from you since your ar- rival in Europe, one dated in Manchester, and the other soon after you got to Paris. I wrote to you soon after your departure, giving some general advice in regard to R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury et 1 COPY Boston, MA 021 6 (Samuel Dorr) 17. your future progress in life and business. When you wrote you supposed that you should spend some time in study in Paris, and some in travelling. I am apprehensive that you are of too anxious make to spend a long time in study, altho' it may be well to add to your stock of knowledge and learning. I believe I advised that should you attempt trade again, it would be of great importance what kind of connexion you formed if you took a new partner. That is, doubtless, a matter of great importance as you have once experienced. The only benefit I can be to you is, at times, to give you advice on such subjects as occur to me which I imagine will be useful to you if put into effect. And to this intent I will name one subject which is of great importance to any man, and is particularly so to a business man. I mean that of cutting out no more than you can see well finished. There is perhaps no greater mistake in any kind of business than either to let your business drive you or to have so much on hand that you cannot see it all completely finished. I had but a few business qualities but one of those was to do no more than I could personally attend to, and when I got hold of any project I always followed it out till I saw the final issue and in this way I lost little and "made every stroke tell". (Samuel Dorr) 18. Your Uncle Hawley and I attended the Worcester Cattle Show last week, and were forcibly struck with the vast improvement there has been in that section of country since our early years. We supposed that the houses and inhabitants had increased four fold, and the wealth and comfort of the people is almost beyond com- parison. And what we beheld at Worcester is, with some variation, true of our whole country. The United States has sundry heavy staples of export which seem to insure all the necessaries of life in return, and also many of its luxuries and elegancies. But where so great bless- ings flow in, it is, I may say, natural for man to be- - come debauched and corrupt. We may hope to escape, but I fear we cannot. There is also one consideration which detracts from the satisfaction of contemplating our national wealth and prosperity. It is that much of our pros- perity and gains come from the labor of the Slave. God in His wisdom has hitherto permitted this evil to exist. How long He will suffer it, no one can say. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 19. I am not without hopes that the present efforts which are making may eventuate in the freedom of the World from bondage; for, as Mr. Jefferson said in his notes on Virginia, there is not one of the attributes of the Deity which can favor the pretentions of the Master over his slave. But when I say this I hope you will not suppose I approve of immediate emancipation -- no, that would add to the calamities of both Master and Slave. When the right time has come, God can find a way for the liberation of this oppressed people. The only present opening for our manumitted slaves seems to be the coast of Africa under our Colonization Society. But we ought not to despair, for other things quite as hopeless once as the emancipation of our slaves have happened for the good of mankind. At the head of these stands the temperance cause which in New England seems to be at least half accomplished. I once thought both the above quite hopeless, -- and having so far got rid of the one, why may we not also hope and expect the other, especially when the greatest nation in the world has declared that it shall be so, at least in her provinces? R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. COPY New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street histor MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 20. When I say the greatest nation, I mean taken in all its various aspects and relations. And if she had been small before, this act alone would in my eye have rendered her great. I wish I had something more interesting to offer you than I shall be able to present at this time, but I can only say that your friends hereabouts are in general good health and that all things look favorably for the nation, excepting our eternal political squabbles, which are getting worse and worse, till finally they may, and probably will, end in much blood letting, and ultimate- ly in the separation of the States. But under these views I will try to comfort myself, as did Hezekiah of old when he said it would be peace in his day. Affectionately yours, Sam'l Dorr. Addressed to Mr. A. H. Dorr aux soins de Messrs. Welles & Co. Paris, France. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic COPY Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 21. Beyond this, I have no knowledge concerning him in his later life save what I have lately come upon in a letter written home from Paris by my grandfather, Thomas Wren Ward, when on a trip abroad in 1853: "Mr. Albert Dorr was in again last evening. He appears to be much at ease in his life here, and, with- out knowing, I should guess him to be employed in EL department of some business where his talents and knowledge of languages are useful, and successful enough to live comfortably. He is as perfect a gentle- man as one could wish." of Samuel Dorr's fourth son by his first marriage, Francis, I have little to tell. He, too, went to New York to live, entering on a business life, and there appears in Philip Hone's Diary as taking part in the social activities of the town, and, among others, in a wonderful Fancy Ball such as New York had never seen before nor would again, given by Mr. and Mrs. Brevoort at their magnificent mension on Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, where Philip Hone himself appeared as Cardinal Woolsey, in a robe of scarlet with cap to match and cape Special Collections Dept. R. Stanton Avery New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 22. of ermine, and Francis Dorr as Don Juan -- all present carrying out their parts with spirit. Francis Dorr was of a naturally gay and social nature, unhampered by inhibitions from a too rigid ancestry. He never married, and left behind him only the pleasant memory I have of him, kept from boyhood visits to the Lenox home, and various deeds he left to lands in the south and west -- the west of that early day -- which had lost what value they might else have had through his failure to maintain his title. In his lator years, he too went out to Paris in the spring-time for the gay Empire scene, a great magnet in those days, with balls at the Tuilleries, races at Longchamps, and the best restaurants and theatres in the world. The youngest child of Samuel Dorr's first marriage was a boy, James Augustus Dorr. He showed an unusual gift for study in his early years and his father sent him to school at Phillips Exeter and to college at Harvard, where he led a class that ranked high in scholarship, graduating first among the ten first-listed scholars. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society A COPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 23. At that time, he planned to become a minister, but after graduating became imbued with the growing skepticism of the period, when new thoughts were stirring and questions being asked, and entered busi- ness for a time; then, his father consenting, went to Europe for further study and to travel, where he re- mained for several years. One act of his during his college life it is pleasant to remember. The father of a friend and classmate, Mr. 0. C. Everett, met with business reverses during his son's third year at College which made necessary his withdrawal at the end of that term with his course unfinished, and losing his degree. In the vacation period the following summer, James Dorr went up into the country and taught school, turning over what he earned to his classmate and so enabling him to complete his course and enter the Divinity School, where he was able to maintain himself and become a minister. I have a nobly printed bible of the period which he presented to my uncle on their graduating, on whose fly-leaf is written this inscription: R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 The Honorable Samuel Dorr, his Home, Lineage and Children of his First Marriage HON. SAMUEL DORR (Son of Hon. Joseph Dorr) Adams - Lazinby - Brown Home of Samuel Dorr, in Boston Children of Samuel Dorr by his First Marriage Susan Darry an daughter by second marriage R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 AdOO THE HOME OF SAMUEL DORR, IN BOSTON. The early home of my grandfather, Samuel Dorr, in Boston, where his children of both marriages were born and the older ones grew up, was by the harbor front, still at that time a much-sought residential section, convenient to the merchants' warehouses and offices and pleasant in outlook. One of my father's earliest recollections was of raising himself up by his hands at the nursery window to look out on the harbor and see the ships come sailing in -- a remark- able instance of early memory, for his father sold that house when he was not quite three years old, removing, for his older children's sake, to Tremont Street, near the foot of Park Street, a growing cen- ter then of social life. But the harbor front with its wharves and shipping and all the movement of a busy port remained a favorite playground of my father and his comrades as he grew up; and he looked back always on its memories with great pleasure. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society Add 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Home of Samuel Dorr) 2. At that time, before the days of steam, Boston was a city of merchants still, whose prosperity was founded on the sea and who, owning or having an interest in vessels, had warehouses and counting houses where the ships came in and business was transacted, on Long and other wharves. An amusing instance of such use of which my father told me was that of a young merchant of the time, then known -- and widely afterwards -- as Long Tom Perkins, who had consigned to him, upon a ship which came in, goods of a character scarce and much sought at the moment. These, he being absent, an older merchant and competitor seized and had carried to his own neighboring warehouse. On this, Long Tom went to a lawyer of his acquaintance and asked him what he could do about it. "Well," said the lawyer, "he's got the goods and he'll sell them! He claims them as his and I don't see what you can do to stop it! But," he added, "if you had the goods, I don't see what he could do!" R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society COPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Home of Samuel Dorr) 3. Perkins, being a man of action, took the hint and at dawn the following morning had a crew of husky long- shoremen on the wharf, broke down his competitor's warehouse door, no one being around at that hour, and when his competitor's warehouse was opened later that morning the goods were safely piled and locked in Perkins' warehouse, the only expense to which he was put being that of the broken warehouse door. The masts and rigging of the ships gave wonderful opportunity for climbing, and the cargoes that they brought from distant ports were full of stimulus to the imagination for the boys who played about as the vessels were unloading. But the Common opposite my grandfather's new home on Tremont Street was a great playground, too, with its broad, shady malls, ideal in spring for marbles and all kinds of running games; its rolling grasslands, its Frog Pond and good winter coasting; its Election Day band concerts and parades; and the broad Back Bay be- yond for skating. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society COPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Home of Samuel Dorr) 4. Snowball fights between bands of boys from the various quarters of the city were a feature of the Common, too, in the days when my father was growing up and afterward, and I remember a story told me by President Eliot of Harvard of his own boyhood when he was one of a group living on the 'Hill' which was being attacked and driven back by another group from the then 'South End , His band, over-powered, fled, that from the South End pursuing. "But," he said, "I somehow did not like to run away and stood my ground alone. The leader of the attackers called out as they rushed past, 'Don't hit Eliot, he's brave. 1 " That had remained in the President's mind for near seventy years at the time he told me of it and I could not help thinking what a factor that word might have been in moulding the character that was so marked in his later life for its independence and his refusal to quit when attacked. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. COPY New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Home of Samuel Dorr) 5. The house on Tremont Street, facing the Common, carried with it a right to pasture, and my father and his sister were brought up in early years on the milk of a COW my grandfather kept for them on the Common. They were among the last, an ordinance passed by the City ending the privilege in practice, though the legal right remained, and still remains, inherent in the property. In 1822, four years after my grandfather had retired from active business and become president of the New England Bank, the Boston Athenaeum with its book and art collections and reading rooms moved from its early home on Tremont Street -- in a house built originally by the loyalist rector of King's Chapel, looking west over its old burial ground -- to a man- sion on Pearl Street, a quiet and pleasant residential section then, beautified by stately houses and shade trees, which was given it by James Perkins, the wealthy merchant, whose home it had been; and new shares were offered by the corporation to meet the expense of moving. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic COPY Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Home of Samuel Dorr) 6. Samuel Dorr purchased one of these, becoming a 'proprietor' and thereafter took an active interest in its affairs, contributing to its purchases of books and works of art, and serving as a trustee in 1826 and 1827. The share he purchased has re- mained in the family continuously since, passing from him to his son Charles Hazen Dorr, and from Charles Hazen Dorr to me, George Bucknam Dorr; and this, at the time I write, I still retain. When the Boston Art Museum was built, in 1870, on Copley Square, the Athenaeum transferred to it the main portion of its art collections, prints apart, and withdrew from the art collecting field, but till then its art gallery and loan exhibitions were not- able features of the city's cultural life and had a far-reaching influence on the younger generation, leading on toward the subsequent great development of art museums and private art collections in America. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic COPY Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Children of Samuel Dorr by his First Marriage CHILDREN OF SAMUEL DORR BY HIS FIRST MARRIAGE 1 The children of my grandfather, Samuel Dorr, by his first marriage, to Lucy Tuttle Fox, have no place in my descent through my father and his people from the early Puritans, ship-builders and farmers, but with all of them except the oldest, Samuel Fox Dorr, who died before I was born, I came in contact at one time or another as I grew up; and even from the first I wondered at the difference between these earlier children and my father and his own sister, Susan Elizabeth Dorr, who had qualities of humor, quick sympathy and warm affection the older children did not share. From ancient usage, going back to times when the father was the husbandman and arms-bearer of the family, we trace descent from him almost exclusively, but it is from the wife and mother fully as much that character is inherited and the ways of life derived, and of these wives little as a rule remains to be told. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic COPY Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 2. My grandfather's earliest child by his first marriage was Samuel Fox Dorr, who established him- self in New York where the larger opportunity lay and did well. Then came one of the sudden panics and financial crashes that marked the period and swept away all he had, leaving him in debt; but his creditors had faith in him and enabled him to con- tinue, which he did to such good result that before his early death, on October 14th, 1844, two months before the death of his father, he had paid back all he owed and had begun to accumulate a second fortune. Samuel Fox Dorr married, on May 26th, 1835, Eliza- beth Chipman Hazen, daughter of Charles Hazen and niece of his father's second wife. They had two sons, Samuel, born June 11th, 1836, and Hazen, born November 30th, 1837. Both went to Harvard, where the elder, Samuel, graduated in 1857. The younger, Hazen, a lad of rare promise, died the night of June 7th, 1856, alone in his room at Cam- bridge, of some sudden seizure that came without warning and whose nature was never clearly understood. of him my father wrote: "I loved him very dearly, and as he grew older had him much with me in our home at Jamaica R. Stanton Avery COPY Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 3. . Plain, teaching him to row and ride and swim. I grieved for him when he died as though he were my own, and to his mother, my favorite cousin, it came as a great blow. . " Samuel Dorr's second son by his first marriage, George Bucknam Dorr, was born on January 23rd, 1806, in his father's house in Boston, the house by the wharves that overlooked the harbor, and his birth stands duly recorded in the Town Book. The name Bucknam is that of his grandmother, Catherine Buck- nam, daughter of Nathan Bucknam, SO long the minister at Medway. As he grew older, his father, now prospering in his affairs, sent him to Harvard, where he entered at the age of fourteen in the class of 1824. But a mis- hap befell him there -- the accidental fall of a boot- jack from the sill of the open window of his room where he and a group of lively young friends chanced to be gathered in the pleasant springtime, which narrowly missed the head of an unpopular instructor passing below. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society ALCOPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 4. This resulted in his separation from the College and SO vexed my grandfather that neither of the next two sons, Albert or Francis, was sent to College. But it is an interesting sequel to the tale that in 1866, forty-two years after his class at Harvard had grad - uated, when friends of his in Boston who recalled the incident were members of the corporation, the degree he would have received had he graduated with his class was conferred on him, upon condition that he be present at Commencement to receive it. And I, a boy of twelve at Mr. Dixwell's famous school in Boston, myself lined up for Harvard, remember well his coming on from New York for the purpose and being told the story, which I have remembered ever since. His life at college over, George Dorr's father set him to work to learn the technique of a merchant's trade, exporting and importing in the long-voyaged sailing vessels of the period, with its constant risks and anxious forecasting, till he thought him prepared to walk alone, when, following in the footsteps of his older brother, he betook himself to New York, opening R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 5. an office at 54 Pine Street, and taking rooms nearby, at 7 Beaver Street, as an old New York Directory, of 1830, which he preserved, remains to tell, upon whose fly-leaf he wrote long after: Settled in New York 17th Feb'y, 1827. Left New York at the close of November, 1874. Have kept this to show that I was the only man of the name in New York in 1830. George Dorr married, on December 21st, 1837, Joanna Hone Howland, eldest daughter of Samuel S. Howland, one of the leading merchants in New York, who, with his brother Gardiner G. Howland and William H. Aspinwall, formed the importing firm of Howland and Aspinwall. These two Howland brothers were not only great merchants in their day but men of culture and broad human interests, building vessels to aid the Greeks in their war for independence, as I chanced to know, taking part in public affairs, and creating estates outside New York on whose beauty and high cultivation Philip Hone in his famous Diary waxes eloquent. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 6. In that Diary, which is like a window looking out onto the shifting scenes of the social life of New York in that day, a pleasant dinner for men, as was the cus- tom then, which Mr. Hone gave on December 20th, 1837, is recorded, at which Mr. Howland, his father-in-law to be, and George Dorr were present, it being the day be - fore his wedding, on December 21st. George Dorr's wife, Joanna Hone Howland, was but seventeen when she married; he was thirty-one. But it was a happy marriage. She had unusual grace and charm, the tale of which, together with a delightful miniature, has come down to me. In 1842, when she and her husband were on the point of returning from a trip to England, she was confined prematurely, it being her first child, in the town of Leamington, near Warwick, and died in giving birth to a child who also died. Forty-odd years after, my father, mother and I, travelling through England, stopped at Leamington over- night to visit Warwick Castle. My father registered in the hotel book that evening; when he came down to break- fast the next morning, an elderly waiter came to him and said: R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 7. "Mr. Dorr, I read your name in the book last night and would like to inquire if you are any relation to a gentleman of your name who stopped here some forty years ago with his young wife, who was taken ill and died in this hotel," Mr. Howland, her father, married twice and had children by both marriages. Joanna, my aunt, was the eldest child of the first marriage; the youngest of the second was Catherine, who married Richard Morris Hunt, the famous architect. I came to know her well when I grew up, and once chanced to travel with her through the Tyrol, when, driving through Berchtesgaden on our way to the Konigsee one day, speaking of my aunt, she told me that the baby-clothes the Howland family had got ready for my aunt's expected child were used for her. We came to have a curiously close rela- - tion, Kate Hunt and I, united in the memory of one we neither of us had ever seen and who yet seemed in some strange way SO close to both. There was no more romance in my uncle's life. He lived on in New York, taking part in its social life and interests, and continuing in business till he had R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic COPY Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 8. accumulated a property sufficient to his desire, when he retired, spending his winters in New York; his springs in Paris, attracted by the brilliancy of its social life under the Third Empire -- where he was known, I once was told, among the American colony, because of a certain distinction of bearing that was native to him, as Gentleman Dorry ;' and his summers at Lenox, where he, his brother Francis, and their two sisters made, in later life, a joint home on a beautiful hilltop looking north to Greylock up the Berkshire Valley, south across sunlit pasture-lands and orchards to Laurel Lake, and eastward to the deep cut below of the Housatonic River. The third of Samuel Dorr's children by his first marriage, Albert, was by nature a student and should, by rights, have gone to college and become a teacher or a writer, for he read widely and loved to impart to others the knowledge that he got, but the misfortune that befell his older brother at Harvard SO prejudiced my grandfather against sending another son there that R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. COPY New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 9. Albert was started directly on a business life on leaving school, and entered on it presently, like his older brothers, in New York. Of what happened there, I know only what appears in a letter written him by his father in 1834, in which reference is made to a partnership he formed there whicn had terminated unsuccessfully: Boston, October 14, 1834. Dear Son, I have received two letters from you since your arrival in Europe, one dated in Manchester, and the other soon after you got to Paris. I wrote to you soon after your departure, giving some general advice in regard to your future progress in life and business. When you wrote you supposed that you should spend some time in study in Paris, and some in travelling. I am apprehensive that you are of too anxious make to spend a long time in study, altho' it may be well to add to your stock of knowledge and learning. I believe I advised that should you attempt trade again, it would R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 10. be of great importance what kind of connexion you form- ed if you took a new partner. That is, doubtless, a matter of great importance as you have once experienced. The only benefit I can be to you is, at times, to give you advice on such subjects as occur to me which I imagine will be useful to you if put into effect. And to this intent I will name one subject which is of great importance to any man, and is particularly so to a business man. I mean that of cutting out no more than you can see well finished. There is perhaps no greater mistake in any kind of business than either to let your business drive you or to have so much on hand that you cannot see it all completely finished. I had but a few business qualities but one of those was to do no more than I could personally attend to, and when I got hold of any project I always followed it out till I saw the final issue -- and in this way I lost little and "made every stroke tell. Your Uncle Hawley and I attended the Worcester Cattle Show last week, and were forcibly struck with the vast improvement there has been in that section of country since our early years. It seemed to us that the R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society COPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 11. houses and inhabitants had increased four fold, and the wealth and comfort of the people is almost beyond comparison. And what we beheld at Worcester is, with some variation, true of our whole country. The United States has sundry heavy staples of export which seem to insure all the necessaries of life in return, and also many of its luxuries and elegancies. But where so great blessings flow in, it is, I may say, natural for man to become debauched and corrupt. We may hope to escape, but I fear we cannot. There is also one consideration which detracts from the satisfaction of contemplating our national wealth and prosperity. It is that much of our pros- perity and gains come from the labor of the Slave. God in His wisdom has hitherto permitted this evil to exist. How long He will suffer it, no one can say. I am not without hopes that the present efforts which are making may eventuate in the freedom of the World from bondage; for, as Mr. Jefferson said in his notes on Virginia, there is not one of the attributes of the Deity which can favor the pretentions of the master over his slave. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 12. But when I say this I hope you will not suppose I approve of immediate emancipation no, that would add to the calamities of both master and slave! When the right time has come, God can find a way for the liberation of this oppressed people. The only present opening for our manumitted slaves seems to be the coast of Africa under our Colonization Society. But we ought not to despair, for other things quite as hopeless once as the emancipation of our slaves have happened for the good of mankind. At the head of these stands the temperance cause which in New England seems to be at least half accomplished. I once thought both the above quite hopeless, and having so far got rid of the one, why may we not also hope, and expect, to do the same with the other, especially when the greatest nation in the world has declared that it shall be so at least in her provinces? When I say the greatest nation, I mean taken in all its various aspects and relations. And if she had been small before, this act alone would in my eyes have rendered her great. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society wbury Street MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 13. I wish I had something more interesting to offer you than I am able to present at this time, but I can only say that your friends hereabouts are in general good health and that all things look favorably for the nation, excepting our eternal political squabbles, which are getting worse and worse till finally they may, and probably will, end in much blood letting, and ultimately in the separation of the States. But under these views I will try to comfort myself, as did Hezekiah of old when he said it would be peace in his day. Affectionately yours, Sam'l Dorr. Addressed to: Mr. A. H. Dorr aux soins de Messrs. Welles & Co. Paris, France. Beyond this, I have no knowledge concerning him in his later life save what I have lately come upon in a letter written home from Paris by my grandfather, Thomas Wren Ward, when on a trip abroad in 1853: R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 14. "Mr. Albert Dorr was in again last evening. He appears to be much at ease in his life here, and, with- out knowing, I should guess him to be employed in a department of some business where his talents and knowledge of languages are useful, and successful enough to live comfortably. He is as perfect a gentleman as one could wish." --- Of Samuel Dorr's fourth son by his first marriage, Francis, I have little to tell. He, too, went to New York to live, entering on a business life, and there appears in Philip Hone's Diary as taking part in the social activities of the town, and, among others, in a wonderful Fancy Ball such as New York had never seen before nor would again, given by Mr. and Mrs. Brevoort at their magnificent mansion on Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, where Philip Hone himself appeared as Cardinal Wolsey, in a robe of scarlet with cap to match and cape of ermine, and Francis Dorr as Don Juan -- all present carrying out their parts with spirit. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 15. Francis Dorr was of a naturally gay and social nature, unhampered by inhibitions from a too rigid ancestry. He never married, and left behind him only the pleasant memory I have of him, kept from boyhood visits to the Lenox home, and various deeds he left to lands in the south and west -- the west of that early day -- which had lost what value they might else have had through his failure to maintain his title. In his later years, he too went out to Paris in the spring-time for the gay Empire scene, a great mag - net in those days, with balls at the Tuilleries Palace, races at Longchamps, and the best restaurants and theatres in the world. The youngest child of Samuel Dorr's first mar- riage was a boy, James Augustus Dorr. He showed an unusual gift for study in his early years and his father sent him to school at Phillips Exeter and to college at Harvard, where he led a class that ranked high in scholarship, graduating first among its ten first-listed scholars. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Children of Samuel Dorr) 16. At that time, he planned to become a minister, but after graduating became imbued with the growing skepticism of the period, when new thoughts were stirring and questions being asked, and entered busi- ness for a time; then, his father consenting, went to Europe, for further study and to travel, where he re- mained for several years. One act of his during his college life it is pleasant to remember. The father of a friend and classmate, Mr. O. C. Everett, met with business reverses during his son's third year at College which made necessary his withdrawal at the end of that term with his course unfinished, and losing his degree. In the vacation period the following summer, James Dorr went up into the country and taught school, turning over what he earned to his classmate and so enabling him to complete his course and enter the Divinity School, where he was able to maintain himself and become a minister. I have a nobly printed Bible of the period which he presented to my uncle on their graduating, on whose fly-leaf is written this inscription: R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Children of the Hon. Samuel Dorr by has First Marriage. By C.B.Dorr (1938). R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. 69. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Children of the Hon. Samuel Dorr by his First Marriage By George B. Dorr 1938. The Hon. Samuel Dorr had by his first marriage five sons and one daughter: Samuel Fox Dorr, born August 26, 1804. George Bucknam Dorr, born January 23, 1806. Albert Henry Dorr, born December 8, 1807. Martha Ann Dorr, born December 20, 1809. Francis Fiske Dorr, born March 16, 1811. These five older children are recorded, June, 1811, in the Boston 'Town Book,' Volume 3, Page 103. The fifth son, James Augustus Dorr, was born on June 8th, 1812. The eldest son, Samuel Fox Dorr, entered business early, showing marked ability. He established himself in New York, where the larger opportunity was, and pros- pered. 7 COPY 70. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston MA 02116 Then came one of the sudden panics and financial crashes that marked the period, and swept away all he had, leaving him in debt; but his creditors had faith in him and enabled him to continue, which he did to such good result that before his early death, October 14th, 1844, two months before the death of his father, he had paid back all he owed and had begun to accumulate a second fortune. Samuel Fox Dorr married, on May 26th, 1835, Elizabeth Chipman Hazen, daughter of Charles Hazen and niece of his father's second wife. Though no relation to her husband, she was my father's -- Charles Hazen Dorr's -- first cousin, for whom he had a great regard. They had two sons, Samuel, born June 11th, 1836, and Hazen, born November 30th, 1837. Both went to Harvard, where the elder, Samuel, graduated in 1857. The younger, Hazen, a lad of rare promise, died while yet an undergraduate, June 7th, 1856. It was a great blow to his mother and grief to my father, who was devoted to him and used to have him out to stay at his and my mother's home by Jamaica Pond, where he taught him to row and ride and swim. COPY 71. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 His mother -- my aunt -- Elizabeth Dorr, I just re- call when, as a young child, I was taken to see her to say good-bye at her home in Boston, before her sailing for Europe with her elder son, where she died soon after. Samuel Dorr's second son, George Bucknam Dorr, for whom I am named, was born January 23rd, 1806, in his father's home in Boston overlooking the harbor, as duly recorded in the Town Book. Educated, like his brothers, in the Boston schools, he entered Harvard at the age of fourteen in the class of 1824, the first of his father's sons to be sent to college. Of a gay and lively disposition and a member of the Porcellian Club in its early days, he was separated from the college before taking his degree because of the acci- dental fall of a bootjack from the open window of his room looking out upon the Yard when he was in it with a group of friends and an unpopular instructor happened by. The College authorities, lacking a sense of humor, felt that an example must be made; evidence was lack- ing as to how the accident happened, but the room was his and his connection with the College ceased. COPY 72. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Forty-two - years after his class had graduated, in 1866, the degree he failed to take was given him by the Harvard Corporation, on whose board old friends were sitting. After this mishap his father set him to work to gain experience for a business life. At the age of 21, following in the footsteps of his older brother, he betook himself to New York, opening an office at 54 Pine Street and taking rooms at 7 Beaver Street, nearby, as an old New York Directory, of 1830, which he preserved, remains to tell, on whose flyleaf he wrote long after, when he had returned to Boston: Settled in New York 17th Feb'y, 1827. Left New York at the close of November, 1874. Have kept this to show that I was the only man of the name in New York in 1830. George Bucknam Dorr married, on December 21st, 1837, Joanna Hone Howland, eldest daughter of Samuel S. Howland, a leading merchant of New York, who with his brother, Gardiner G. Howland, and William H. Aspin- wall, constituted the large importing firm of Howland and Aspinwall. COPY 73. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society mbury Street The two Howland brothers were not only great mer- chants in their day but men of broad human interests, as is shown among other things by their building vessels, at their own expense, to aid the Greeks in their war for independence. Joanna Hone Howland's mother was a daughter of Philip Hone, the famous diarist. George B. Dorr and Mr. Howland, his father-in-law-to-be, appear in the Diary as dining with Mr. Hone the day before the mar- riage, the other guests upon the occasion being: James W. Otis, J. G. Pearson, Robert Ray, John C. Delprat, Peter G. Stuyvesant, Charles A. Heckscher, Peter Scher- merhorn, Samuel Welles of Paris, and William H. Aspin- wall -- a representative list of old New York society. Joanna Hone Howland was but seventeen when she married; George Dorr was thirty-one. But it was a happy marriage. She had unusual grace and charm, the tale of which has come down to me, together with a delightful miniature. COPY Avery 74. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 In 1842, when she and her husband, returning from a trip to England, were on the point of sailing for home on an early steamer of the Cunard Line, she was confined prematurely in the town of Leamington, near Warwick, and died in giving birth to her first child, who also died. Forty years after, travelling through England with my mother and father, we stopped at Leamington over-night to visit Warwick Castle. My father registered in the hotel book that evening; when he came down to breakfast in the morning, an elderly waiter came to him and said: "Mr. Dorr, I read your name in the book last night and would like to ask if you are any relation of a gentleman of your name who stopped here forty years ago with his young wife, who was taken ill and died in this hotel. 11 Mr. Howland, her father, married twice and had children by both marriages. Joanna was the eldest child of the first marriage; the youngest of the second was Catherine, who married Richard Hunt, the famous arch- itect. Her I came to know well in later years and once chancing to travel with her through the Tyrol, and driv- ing from Ischl to Berchtesgaden and the Konigssee, speak- ing of my aunt, she told me that the baby clothes the COPY R. Stanton Avery 75. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston MA 02116 Howland family had prepared for my aunt's expected child were used for her, born soon after. We came to have a curiously close relation, Kate Hunt and I, united in the memory of one we neither of us had ever seen and who yet seemed in some strange way SO close to both. My uncle never married afterward but lived on in New York, ultimately retiring from business, spending his summers at Lenox, where he, his brother Francis, and their two sisters made, from 1850 on, a joint home on a beautiful hilltop looking north to Greylock up the Berk- shire Valley and south across sunlit pasture-lands and orchards to Laurel Lake and down the Housatonic Valley, with its fringing mountains. --- Samuel Dorr's third son, Albert, was by nature a student and should have gone to college but the memory of his experience with the older son whom he had sent there was too fresh in my grandfather's mind and neither he nor the next younger son, Francis, were sent. COPY R. Stanton Avery 76. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 After he left the Boston Latin School, of his studies at which annotated copies of the Latin classics remain to tell, I know practically nothing of Albert Dorr's life beyond what a single letter from my grandfather, addressed to him in Paris, remains to tell, until he appears, long after, in a letter of my Grandfather Ward's as showing courtesy to him in Paris. Years later I recall him myself staying with us at our country home at Canton, and his great interest in China, its people, its literature and ancient civi- lization, which leads me to think he must at some time have gone there, sent out perhaps upon some business or diplomatic mission. The letter from my grandfather, Samuel Dorr, I quote, not SO much for what it tells of my uncle but for the revelation which it makes of my grandfather's philosophy of life and outlook upon the America of his day: ATCOPY 82. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street P Of Samuel Dorr's fourth son, Francis Fiske, I know yet less, save that he followed his elder brothers to New York, which was his home thereafter, with occasional trips abroad, or to the south where he made investments in wild lands but failed to maintain the title to them, as we found when he died. My only remembrance of him, and it is a very pleasant one, is when I saw him at Lenox during occasion- al visits that I made to Highlawn, the family estate, as a child where I recall him -- a kindly old gentleman, he then seemed to me -- pruning the trees that bordered on the beautiful great lawn, while I stood beside him; or of his taking me to his chamber after the mid-day dinner where he would show me his wonderful cuckoo clock, brought back from Paris, and give me a tiny sip of the famous green Chartreuse. His middle name, Fiske, came to him from his great grandmother, the wife of the Rev'd Nathan Bucknam who established such a record for longevity in his pastorate at Medway on the Charles. R. Stanton Avery 83. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston MA 02116 My grandfather's youngest son by his first marriage, James Augustus Dorr, showed uncommon ability as a student in his early years and his father sent him to Phillips Exeter, the famous old school in New Hampshire founded by John Phillips in 1781, and then to Harvard, where he led an unusually brilliant class at graduation. A kindly act of his during his college life comes back to me with pleasure. A friend and classmate, Dr. O. C. Everett, studying for the ministry, was suddenly faced, through business losses of his father, with loss of opportunity to continue on at Harvard and take his degree. My Uncle James went up into the coun- try during the long summer vacation and taught school, turning over what he earned to his classmate who was thus enabled to complete his college course and enter the Divinity School, where he graduated with honors. I have a fine Bible which he presented to my uncle on their graduation, on whose fly-leaf is written this inscription: ALCOPY 89. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston MA 02116 He stayed for some years abroad, visiting the Near East and Turkey and preserving voluminous notes and sketches of his travels, of the native people and their costumes, which I inherited. He then went into business with Charles Goodyear in the promotion of the rubber industry, then in its first difficult stages, but failed to keep his hold on it when the company was forced to reorganize and after various vicissitudes, a scholar always, he died at my father's house in the country in 1869, my father tending him with infinite kindness. --- Between these older and younger sons of Samuel Dorr by his first marriage, there came a single daughter, Martha Ann Dorr, who was married when not yet nineteen years of age to Henry Edwards of Northampton, Massachu- setts, but resident in Boston, a direct descendant of Jonathan Edwards, America's most famous theologian. Older than she, he was looked upon by her father as a suitable and safe match, but he had not the qualities to make their marriage happy. They went abroad soon COPY R. Stanton Avery 90. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston. MA 02116 after their marriage and lived in Paris during several years -- why I do not know, but doubtless for some reason connected with the importing business in which Mr. Ed- wards was engaged. There several children were born to them, of whom only two survived to return to America, a son and a daughter, who also died just as they were reaching maturity. They were both by all accounts -- for they died before my time -- full of promise and of devotion to their mother, and their death, one following the other in quick succession, cast a deep shadow over her whole later life. This was the period when, during the middle years of the Nineteenth Century, faith as 1 the evidence of things unseen, 1 on which rested the whole Puritan tra- dition, had ceased to satisfy the world of science, and, seeking firm ground to stand on, Mrs. Edwards took up with intensity the new 'Religion of Humanity, 1 with Comte, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill as inter- pretors and guides. COPY 91. COPY She and my father's sister, Susan Dorr her half-sister -- who after the death of Mrs. Edwards' children made their home together, financed a trip which John Fiske, a rising young exponent of the new philosophy, made to England for the purpose of meeting its leaders. He wrote them from England long and in- teresting letters, describing the people he had come to see, and did not hesitate to criticize them. These letters were read to me at the time they came and I recall them clearly. Many years afterward, when John Fiske had died and his executors were seeking to gather in for publication all his writings, they wrote not once but repeatedly to ask me if I could not put my hand upon these letters, of whose existence they knew. Mrs. Ed- wards had destroyed them because, no doubt, of the criticism they contained. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Hon. Samuel Dorr, Second Son of Hon. Joseph Dorr From Charles Hazen Dorr Memorandiem. 1887. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. 61. Ne. England Historic Genealogical Somiety 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Hon. Samuel Dorr, Second Son of Hon. Joseph Dorr From Memorandum Written by Charles Hazen Dorr Son of Samuel Dorr in 1887. Samuel Dorr was born the 23rd of June, 1774, in Mendon, Massachusetts, in the house built by his grand- father, the Rev'd Joseph Dorr, in which his father, the Hon. Joseph Dorr, had been born. There he lived until he was twelve years old, when his father moved to Ward, now Auburn. At sixteen years of age he entered the store of Parkman & Brigham, in Westborough, Massachusetts, about twenty miles from Boston along the line of the present Boston & Albany Railroad. Parkman & Brigham were among the leading merchants of New England in that day, large importers and distrib- utors of goods from the West Indies and elsewhere, with a good New England clientele. COPY R. Stanton Avery 62. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Samuel Dorr did not go to college, but had an excellent. English education. He had a great love for books, and all his life was a constant and careful reader. He never read but two novels in his life -- one of which was Scott's "Ivanhoe" -- his choice leading him to such works as Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Milton, Dr. Johnson, Pope, the Sermons of Archbishop Tillotson, Young's Night Thoughts, and many more I do not now recall. He also read regularly the English and Scotch Quarterlies of the day. Before Boston was made a city (March, 1822) Samuel Dorr was for a time chairman of its Board of Selectmen. Later, he was a Representative, then Senator for Suffolk County, in the Massachusetts Legislature. I remember his giving a good deal of time during sessions to preparing and writing out his speeches on financial questions. At the age of sixteen, he taught evening school, partly for the training, partly to earn money. His father was but comfortably off, and from the time of his entering a counting-room he supported himself entirely. 1 COPY 63. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. COPY New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Soon after becoming settled in Boston he signed a deed which I remember to have seen, giving up to his sisters his share of the property left by his father. It was not a large amount, but he gave it freely, say- ing that he was well able to take care of himself. Samuel Dorr remained with Parkman & Brigham through the time of his apprenticeship, and about two years longer SO as to accumulate experience and capital for future use. During his last years with them he was very useful and their 'right-hand man' in contact with their clients, and in this way he made valuable ac- quaintances among New England business men, forming a good foundation for his own career. I have no record of the year when he came to Bos- ton, but I think it was in 1797, when he was twenty three years old. His capital consisted of $700 which he had saved from his salary. With this and $600 which he borrowed for a few years from his father, he "set up" for himself. At first he acted as a commission merchant, having orders from country traders whose acquaintance he had made while in Westborough -- people in New Hampshire and Vermont as well as Massachusetts. 64. The course of trade was then moving to the water- front and east, and -- prospering in his affairs he soon purchased and occupied in his business the building at No. 30 India Street, where he remained, acquiring later the adjoining building, No. 29, until he retired from business. These two buildings, now remodelled into one, still stand in my name as trustee for my sister, Susan Elizabeth Dorr. His constitution was not naturally robust and he suffered until past middle life from nervous headaches which, added to the anxieties of a business life, taxed his health. About the year 1818, he was threatened with consumption and by the advice of his friends and physician he retired from business, with a fortune of $160,000, which in those days seemed a great deal. By prudence and good management he gradually in- creased this to $400,000, at the time of his death. At the same time, he was very liberal towards his family and free in giving to all worthy charities. I am still contributing yearly to several which he was interested in. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society COPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 021 6 R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic 65. Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 His business, till he retired, was in "West India goods " wholesale. Joining with a few other leading merchants of that time, he chartered ships and imported goods which found a ready sale among the smaller dealers. I remember two of these old merchants who survived him and who gave me a more intimate account of these im- portations than he himself had ever done. In 1811, he, with a few others, applied for a charter for the "New England Bank," which was incor- porated in 1813. He was a Director in this Bank from the time of its commencement until the year 1840; and he was its President from 1823 till 1831. He kept a deposit account with the Bank from 1813 to 1844, when he died, and I have had an account there ever since, now 43 years. His business career, successful pecuniarily, was notable in its uprightness and in the honorable name he made for himself and left when he died. He told me that he had never "made a dollar" through "shaving notes" or charging extra interest, but increased his property partly by living well within his means and partly by in- vesting only in sound securities and watching them carefully. COPY 66. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 When a security he held was selling in the market for more than he considered its true value he changed to some other, equally sound but lower priced, thereby, without risk, raising his property. Being an extremely good judge of character, he lost almost nothing by bad debts and, though obliged to trust many men, he almost never made a mistake. I remember one action of his told when I was a boy by a gentleman who took supper with us in our home on Tremont Street. I do not remember his name but only that his home was in New Hampshire. His story was that on one occasion when my father was president of the New England Bank and a panic was going on in all our money markets, with interest at three or four times the usual rate, he applied to the Bank for a loan of $7,000 which, under the panic conditions of the time, it refused to make. Noticing the man's great disappointment, my father questioned him apart as to his needs and situation and lent him the money personally, at simple interest. The gentleman told me that this loan made a turning point in his life, and saved a good business from being broken up. COPY 67. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Samuel Dorr was elected a Selectman of the Town of Boston at the Annual March Meeting of 1817, and sworn in at the meeting of the Board of Selectmen on March 10th, Charles Bulfinch, the architect of the State House, being chairman. He remained on the Board, taking active part on its committees, as the Town records show, till October, 1821, this being the last year of town government, Boston being then incorporated as a city. Thereafter the name of Samuel Dorr does not appear, but that of his older brother, Joseph Hawley Dorr, appears in the list of Aldermen in 1823 and 1824, Josiah Quincy being Mayor. Samuel Dorr first served in the Massachusetts Legis- lature in 1819, as a member of the House. Thereafter his name does not appear until 1834, when he again served in the House of Representatives as a member for the County of Suffolk, serving then, being President of the New England Bank, on the joint committee of House and Senate of Banks and Banking. COPY 68. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 In 1835 he was again a member of the House of Repre- sentatives, serving on the same committee. In 1837 he was a member of the Senate, representing Suffolk County, serving on the Committee on Banks; and in 1838 he again appears as a member of the Senate. Samuel Dorr was married twice, first, on October 13th, 1803, to Lucy Tuttle Fox, daughter of Joseph and Mary Fox of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, who died January 4th, 1814; and second, on December 5th, 1815, to Susan Brown, daughter of Joseph Lazinby Brown of Boston, who died February 25th, 1841. Samuel Dorr died on December 18th, 1844. 1 COPY James A. Dorr. A 1835 Letter from Samuel Dorr and An 1869 Testimonial from Otis Everett Reinterpreted by George B. Dorr (Samuel Dorr) 24. JAMES A. DORR A token of gratitude and esteem from his friend O. C. Everett July 17, 1832. [G.B.D] SIC. James Forr died of cancer at my father's house in Boston in the summer of 1869, where I remember Mr. Everett coming to visit him in his illness and speak- ing of this incident with much feeling. In Europe his travels took him, after a stay in Paris for study, to Constantinople, Palestine and Syria, where he made copious notes and sketches, planning to write a book, suggested no doubt by Lemartine's Voyage en Orient, which had recently been published and was widely read. But, the materials at hand, the book remained unwritten. While he was still studying in Paris, word came to my grandfather that he had become 'an infidel', an unbeliever in the accepted New England faith, and he wrote him the following letter: R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 22 COPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 25. Boston, April 7, 1835. My dear Son, I wrote you a few days ago; I now write you upon a particular and very important subject, and hope soon after the receipt of this you will write me a catagor- ical answer in reply -- that I may be relieved from any and all uncertainty. It has lately been said to me that you had changed your religious views; and, in fact, that you had become infidel in principle. You may readily suppose this was extremely unpleasant in- formation to one who had expected so much from your moral and religious life. I am, in fact, not disposed to believe the story; but hope you will write me a true and unvarnished account of your feeling and views in regard to this most important of all subjects. But in order to satisfy me, I hope and trust that you will not write anything but your real views. I should be glad to have that letter written so disconnected with other matter as that I might, if needful, show it to anyone whom I wished to inform. I am aware that it is a dangerous thing for a young man who is not well rooted R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 26. in moral and religious principles to travel and be amongst immoral and bad characters. But as all your elder brothers have gone through the same ordeal "un- fettered" so far as I am informed, I have had great hopes that you would also pass the fiery trial in the same, if not improved, state of moral feeling. You are aware that I did not, and I may say now that I do not, approve of too sanguine or ardent professions nor of uncharitable and denounciatory condemnations of others for mere belief. But I think it highly proper that everyone should let it be known what are his views and what his hopes. We have in this land of freedom an immense amount of infidelity and crime -- for they go together -- and we have also a spirit of insubordination to the laws and a disposition to licentiousness. Witness the frequent riots and mobs which have visited Philadelphia, New York and the neighborhood of Boston this year. And witness the great pains taken to introduce infidel principles into our society. There has been really as much pains taken in this city to inculcate wicked and erroneous views into the ignorant part of our population as would R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston. MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 27. have wrought a great and good work had they been well directed. But what can be done? "The poor ye shall always have", and the wicked we shall also have to the time of the milenium -- and perhaps even in that great and good time prophesied, there may be evil extant, al- though in very small degree and proportion. Our faith is very important to our lives; "As a man thinketh so is he." In a man's opinions are the issues of life. Without good principles and fixed resolutions we are subject to be driven about as a ship without a rudder. But I did not sit down to write my opinions, but to elicit yours. You know my ideas too well to need any new evidence of them. We are perhaps too apt to form opinions from the people we are amongst. Insensibly we imbibe good and also evil habits and modes of thinking and acting; there- fore it is dangerous (as I have already said) to go abroad without fixed and determinate views. There is one thing more to which I would call your attention -- and that is that it is dangerous to be too strongly set for or against any proposition, R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 28. too sanguine and too assured in our opinions for or against any proposition. There are few things com- paratively that we know -- there are many that we fully believe; that which we know, we may assert with confidence. I once heard a Universalist preacher say he had been of six or seven different persuasions, and he thought he was right in the whole at the time he had them; but now, said he, I know I am right. There is a great deal of what is called knowledge in the world of this kind. They who are wise will avoid great know- ledge, but will study well into probabilities -- and when they gain a little real knowledge, they will hold it dear, and make much of it. But knowledge is all vain without wisdom and virtue. Let us hold fast the faith once delivered to the Saints; the few important and soul-delivering points which make us wise to salvation. I am, very affectionately, Your parent, Samuel Dorr. Addressed to Mr. James Augustus Dorr Rue Bergere No 7 (2 bis) Paris Care of Messrs. . Welles & Green Havre, France. (Samuel Dorr) 29. On his return to America he became associated with Charles Goodyear, inventor of the process by which rubber was vulcanized and made useful, a great industrial discovery which should have led on to large rewards but Goodyear became involved in law- suits over patents and others reaped where he had sown. James Dorr, like his brothers George and Francis, spent a good deal of time in Paris during the Third Empire period, when they all, including their sister Mrs. Edwards, became, like many Americans who visited Paris in those days, ardent admirers of the Napoleonic dynasty, the First and Third Emperors -- the Third then seeming a great figure, too, with the prestige of the First Napoleon behind him, a well-equipped army at his call, and the most brilliant city in the world his capital; and James Dorr translated and published, at his own expense, a little book printed originally in 1839 at Brussels by Prince Napoleon-Louis Bonaparte -- the Third Napoleon, but in exile then -- entitled "Idees Napoleoniennes", Napoleonic Ideas. I have a handsomely R. Stanton Avery Special Collection IS Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 30. bound copy of it which he presented to my mother with an inscription in his hand: MARY G. DORR with the affectionate regards of James A. Dorr July 4, 1868. In his early days as boy and college student, James Dorr seems to have had an extraordinary power of concentration and will-control, in illustration of which I remember from my own boyhood a tale told of him, how when he first came to Exeter he went out with other boys on their way to swim. This he had not learned to do, but watching the others plunging off the wharf, and seeing how they swam, be made up his mind that what they did he too could do, and taking off his clothes, plunged in after them and swam. The tale seems scarce credible, but it came to me on good authority. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 31. Between these older and younger sons of Samuel Dorr by his first marriage there came a single daughter, Martha Ann Dorr, who was married when not yet nineteen years of age to Henry Edwards of Northampton, Massachu- setts, but then resident in Boston, a direct descendant of Jonathan Edwards, America's most famous theologian. He was older than she and seemed to her father, no doubt, a suitable and safe match, but he had not the qualities to make the marriage happy. Children were born to them, of whom two among several, a daughter and a son, Emily and Henry, grew up to entrance on womanhood and manhood only to die as they approached maturity. They were both, by all accounts -- for they died before my time -- full of promise and of devotion to their mother, and their death, one following the other in quick succession, cast a shadow over her whole later life. This was the period when faith as the evidence of things unseen, on which rested the whole Puritan tradi- tion, had ceased to satisfy in the presence of the times R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 32. new thought and speculation and she in her need took up with intensity the Comtist 'Religion of Humanity', with Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill as oracles. She and my father's sister, Susan Dorr -- her half-sister - who made for many years their home together, financed the trip that John Fiske, then a rising young exponent of the Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill philosophy, made to England for the purpose of meeting them and others of that group; and he wrote them back long, interesting letters des- cribing what he found, which I remember having read to me by them as a boy and concerning which John Fiske's executors, long afterward, wrote me in anxious search, to find and print. But my aunts had destroyed them, on account, no doubt, of certain caustic criticisms they contained on the people he went out to meet -- Spencer especially. Special New Stanton Collect 101 NA 02116 Since Society Vegical Historic Dept. Hon. Samuel Dorr Marriage to Susan Brown and Susan Brown Testimonials (Samuel Dorr) 33. Susan Brown, my grandfather's second wife and my father's mother, was the daughter of Joseph Lazinby Brown, of Boston in his earlier life, of Concord later, a delight- ful old country town at that time where my grandmother and her sisters lived a free and pleasant life, of which I have a picture, come down from some old family friend, of my grandmother as a girl going out into the pasture, catching the horse left grazing there and riding him, bareback, around it. Concord, settled in 1635, is the oldest interior town in Massachusetts, and as early as the time of the Revolution had come to be one of the great centres not only of intellectual life but also of political influ- ence and power. The town lies twenty miles northwest from Boston on the Concord River, and is famous in these later days as having been the home of Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, 'the poet', and others. Joseph Lazinby Brown's first ancestor in America was William Brown of Boston, of whom we know only the first name of his wife, Anne, and that they had, among Special New R. Stanton Collections Avery Dept. COPY England Historic 101 Society Boston, MA 02116 Street (Samuel Dorr) 34. other children, a son Benjamin, born July 2nd, 1803, who became a ship-joiner and is recorded as building himself, with his own hands, circa 1750, a home on the corner of Prince Street and Thatcher Street which, under the name of the Badger House because of its pur- chase half a century later by one Thomas Badger, still remained in sound structural condition in 1887, a tribute to the sound material and good construction put into it by its builder. The land on which this house was built was bought from Joshua Gee, a famous ship-builder of the time whose ship-yard, at the North End, bordered the Mill Pond alongside of Charlestown Ferry. The Mill Pond, which furnished early Boston with a tidal power, was orig- inally a saltmarsh bordering Charles River near its entrance but was connected also directly with Boston Harbor through Mill Creek, which joined with the marsh to make the North End virtually an island, with Copp's Hill, one of the original three hills of Boston, rising from it and dominating the entrance to Charles River. R. Stanton Avery A COPY Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 35. From the Mill Creek to Joshua Gee's ship-yard, the entire shore was taken up at an early date with wharves, warehouses and boat-yards. Ships were then Boston's chief source of wealth and means of trade, and in the construction of vessels lay one of its principal industries. A second son, Ebenezer Brown, born in 1718, is recorded as married by the Rev'd Andrew Eliot, in 1748, to Elizabeth Lazinby, daughter of Joseph Lazinby, another master ship-builder of the period. They had one son, an only child apparently, Joseph Lazinby Brown, who married Susannah Adams, and whose eldest daughter married Samuel Dorr. To follow back the Lazinby descent, the earliest of that line recorded is one Thomas Lazinby, of Boston, who married 'Mercy' in the latter part of the 17th cen- tury, and had, among other sons and daughters, Joseph, born in 1694, who was married by Dr. Cotton Mather in 1718 to Mary Proctor and had, other children apart, a daughter Elizabeth, born June 3rd, 1727, who was married by the Rev'd Andrew Eliot in 1748 to Ebenezer Brown. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic ALCOPY Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Brown) 36. Joseph Lazinby, the father of Elizabeth, was a noted builder of vessels who prospered in his trade and at his death left to Elizabeth, his youngest daughter, an estate on Middle Street, near the old North Church, which had been purchased by him in 1724 from the estate of Hannah Green and which was Elizabeth's and her husband's home thereafter until he died, when it became that of their son, Joseph Lazinby Brown, until he moved to Concord. That Joseph Lazinby Brown inherited a fair prop- erty from his father, Ebonezer Brown, seems evident from his purchase, at an early period, of the estate on Middle Street in which he had been born and brought up from his mother and her second husband, Benjamin Eustis, the father by an earlier marriage of William Eustis, Secretary of War under Madison, and Governor of Massachusetts. Joseph Lazinby Brown was by trade a goldsmith, as perhaps his father Ebenezer, of whom we know little beyond the records of his birth and marriage, was before him. There was a strong mechanical bent in the family, R. Stanton Avery COPY Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 37. coming from both sides and showing itself later in his grandson, Charles Hazen Dorr, who had a rare gift with his hands and loved to work with them. The work of the Boston gold and silver smiths in the latter part of the 18th century was famous. Paul Revere, who also lived at the North End, was a master craftsman but one only in 2 group whose work was widely sought. His father, a Huguenot refugee, had settled in Boston, at the North End, on coming to America and opened a workshop there on Prince Street, near the Old North Church, as silversmith, continued by his son, whose pieces are now so widely sought for museums and private collections. Joseph Lazinby Brown and Susannah Adams, his wife, had children: Susan, born on August 16th, 1779, in her father's house on Middle Street, who married Samuel Dorr, on December 5th, 1815, and was the mother of Susan Eliza- beth and Charles Hazen Dorr; Elizabeth, born in Boston, who married Charles Hazen, for whom Charles Hazen Dorr was named; COPY R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 38. Nancy, born in Boston, who later married Charles Hazen, her sister having died; Mary, born in Concord, Massachusetts, who married George Gore, a ship captain; Joseph Lazinby Brown, the only son, born in Con- cord, who went on a voyage to Rio de Janeiro, married there and remained. Tracing back in turn the Adams family, from which the wife of Joseph Lazinby Brown came: There were three brothers, an old account tells, John, Hugh and Matthew Adams, "men of distinction". Hugh Adams, (great grandfather of Samuel Dorr's second wife) brought up in Boston, was graduated at Harvard College in 1697 and became at minister. Settled first at Braintree and afterwards in Chatham on Cape Cod, at Arrowsick in Maine, and elsewhere, he removed in 1717 to Durham, New Hampshire, where, making an arrangement with the town, he was settled as pastor on March 26th, 1718, his active ministry there continuing, the record shows, till 1739. COPY Special New England Collections Dept. R. Stanton Avery Genealogical 101 Society Historic Boston MA 02116 Newbury Street (Samuel Dorr) 39. Hugh Adams married Susanna Winburn, and had, among other children, a son John, born on January 13th, 1717-18, who became a merchant in Boston and, thriving in business, married Susannah Parker, whose father lived in the house on Bowdoin Square afterwards replaced by the Boott resi- dence and subsequently by the Revere House, still, in my own early days, one of the leading hotels in Boston. Here John Adams and Susannah Parker Adams made their home and their children, Nancy and Susannah, were born, Susannah marrying Joseph Lazinby Brown. Samuel Dorr's children by his second marriage were: Susan Elizabeth Dorr, born March 11, 1819; Charles Hazen Dorr, born August 27, 1821. My father's own sister, Susan Elizabeth Dorr -- named for her mother, Susan Brown, and her mother's younger sister Elizabeth, Charles Hazen's first wife -- whom I came to know intimately as I grew up and who had a warm affection for me always, was a woman of rare nobility and purity of character. She never married, but devoted herself and such limited resources as she had to R. Stanton Avery COPY Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society Newbury Street Fuston MA 02116 (Samuel Dorr) 40. the care of the poor and those in need, living gracious- ly and doing acts of courtesy and kindness to her many friends. A letter that cane to my father from Col. Henry Lee after her death gives so pleasant a word about her and of the impression that she made on others that I cannot forbear to quote it: My dear Charles, As one of the few who remember your sister Susan and you from school-days, I am moved to write a word of sympathy with you and your wife in your sore bereavement. Confined by distance from town and by my wife's invalidism to my immediate family and our near neighbors, we were shocked by seeing your sister's death announced before we had heard of her illness. Her name called up gracious memories; my wife remem- bered her first at Mr. Clarke's bible class, while I could not remember when I first knew her - always it seemed to me. We both recalled her kind participation in our plays here, her beauty of form and face, her graceful manner, her dramatic interest, and her kind consideration for others which distinguished her under all relations. (Samuel Dorr) 41. Most of us in our course through life make friends and foes, but I will venture to say that your sweet sis- ter Susan inspired regard and affection in all with whom she ever held intercourse, however casual. This passing year or two years have robbed me of so many of my friends and kin that I have got to be nervously sensitive. Your sister Susan's image, though I have so seldom seen her for several years, has haunted me ever since I read of her death lest I might have omit- ted some occasion to acknowledge her uniform kindness, and I have thus ventured to assure you how I, among her many friends, and my wife also, appreciated her lovely character and your desolation. Yours truly, Henry Lee. Brookline, Mass., December 10, 1889. Colonel Lee, a gallant soldier of the Civil War and founder of Boston's leading banking firm in my younger years, Lee, Higginson & Company, held a position of high distinction in the city, and my father deeply valued this word of remembrance and recognition from him. 1 COPY Stanton Avery Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 7 COPY 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 REV. NATHAN BUCKNAM. For a more extended account, see Boston Public Library, History of the First Church of Medway, Mass., shelf 3543 - No. 59. Also "Biographies" (E. 0. Jameson) a short account, and copy of the will of Mr Bucknam. Shelf 4450 A - No. 68. The first minister of the first church in Medway, Mass., was the Rev. Daniel Deming, who was ordained November 20th, 1715. "His ministry was short and unhappy both for himself and his congregation. Dr Bucknam was unanimously called .Tune 11th, 1724; or- dained December 23rd, 1724, with a salary of 180 a year, with 6100 given him as an encouragement to come. He was born in Malden, Mass., November 2nd., 1703. He graduated at Harvard College in 1721, and very early received offers of settlement but declined to be settled until older. At the age of twenty he was a "candidate", and at twenty-one was settled over the church in Medway. "He remained unmarried four or five years, and then brought home a wife, Margaret Fiske, "a lady two years younger than himself, 11 described as "a bright lady of culture and refinement." Dr Bucknam "was of a slender constitution, though he lived to a great age. or the 25th of April 1787, he relinquished his salary and took an annuity of 615. and on the 25th of June, 1788, the 2 REV. NATHAN BUCKNAM. Rev. Benjamin Green was ordained as his Colleague. A sermon preached on some anniversary occasion says that "out of 171 years, Dr Bucknam was settled nearly 71 years, while "eight other ministers occupied the remaining 100 years." He "served the pulpit" from the day of his instalment, De- cember 23rd, 1724, till the day of his death, February 6th, 1795. His widow died May 1st, 1796, AE 91, having survived him a little more than a year. They had 67 years of married life. For the benefit of those parishioners who came from a dis- tance, he had a "noon-house" erected near the church, 15 feet square, open to the south, and covered in on the other three sides. Pine benches were around the sides, and a flat stone in the centre, for a fire. The "house" was standing in 1816, and a "Parish-House" was built on its site in 1822. Their children were: Ann Dr Bucknam's will was Nathaniel signed October 6th, 1789, Margaret and final codicil added in Mary 1793; and Joseph Dorr was Samuel Executor. Elizabeth Catherine married Hon. Joseph Dorr. Sarah Lucy 3 REV. NATHAN BUCKNAM. CONTINUED. The two sons died comparatively young, but each if them left children. The daughter Catherine married Hon. Joseph Dorr, her dower being 153. 13/4. Dr Bucknam's will mentions only four daughters Margaret, Elizabeth, Catherine and Lucy, and the children of his two sons. His will was signed October 6th, 1789 and a final codicil was added in 1793. Joseph Dorr was his Ececutor. The town was originally a part of Dedham which extended out to "West Dedham. " At first, the adjoining territory was described as "the vast, unknown and unbroken wilderness spreading towards the set- ting sun across the Charles River." "In 1650, January 1st, the Indian settlement "Boggastow" was embraced within the town of Medfield. In 1659, the settlement pushed further west over another Indian territory called "Mucksquirt;" then"New Grant; ; " and then "West Medway." The savage Indians were a dreadful scourge, and "King Philip's War" broke out February 21st, 1676; 27 years before Dr Bucknam was born. Reve Nathan Brucknam For a more extended account, ser Boston Public Library, History of the that Church of Medway Mass, shelf 3543 - N 59. also Biographics (20, Jameson a short account and copy of the will, of In Bucknam. shelf 4450 a. No 68, in medway mes The first minister of the first Church was the Reve Daniel Denning who was ordamed Nov 20- 1715. "this ministry was short and unhappy both for himself and his congregation". Dr Bucknam was unanamously called June 11th 1724; ordaned December 23-1724, with a Salary of t 80. a year - with £ 100 given him as an encouragement to come He was born in malden mass November 2-s 1703. He graduated at Harvard College in 1721, and very Early, received offers of settlement but declmed to be settled until older at the age of 20 he was a "candidate", and at 21 was settled over the church in medway "Heremanded unmarried four or five "years, and then brought home a wife margaret Thiske, a lady two years younger than himself" described as a bright lady of culture "and retirement." Dr Bucknam was of a slender constitution, "though he lived to a great age. on the 25th of april 1787. he sdinguished his salary and took an annuity of £15.- and on the 25-" of June 1788, the Read Aenjamm Green was ordanned as his Colleague a sermon preached on some anniversary occasion says that "out of 171 years, & Bucknam was "sittled nearly 71 years, which Eight other minister "occupied the semaining 100 years." He "served the pulput "from the day of his metalment December 23-1724, till the day of his death. February 6th 1795. His widow died may 121796 AE 91, having survived him a little more than a year. They had by years of married life her the benefit of those panchioners who came from a distance, he had a "noon-house" Erected near the Church, 15feet square, open to the South and covered in on the other three sides. Pine benches were around the sides, and a flat stone in the centre for a fine This "house" was standing in 1816, and a "Panish- "House" was built on its site, in 1822. / Then children were Ann. 4 DrPrucknomis will was signed Nathaniel Oct 6-1789, final Codical margaret added in 1792;and Joseph many Don who Executor. Samuel Elizabeth Cathami m Hon Joseph Don. Sarah Lucy The two sons died comparatively young but Each of them left children. The daughter Catherine mamed the Honth Joseph Dom her dower being £ 53. 13/4 Qr Bucknam's will mentions only four daughter margarit, Elizabeth Cathamine and Lucy and the children of his two sons. His will who signed October 6t11889 and a find codicil was added in 1793. Joseph Dorr was his Executor. The torm was originally a part of Dedham which extended out to "West Dedham at first the adjoining territory was described as "the vast, unknown, and unbroken " Milderness spreading towards the setting Sum across Charlis River. In 1650 January 1st the Indian settlement "Boggaston was embraced within the town of medfield In 1659. the settlement pushed further mest over another Indian temtory called mucksgurt then New Grant? and then thest medinary The savage Indians were a dreadful scourge and "King Philip's war broke out hebruary 214 16yb 27 years before Q Bucknam was born. Hon. JojephDorr, son of Rev'd Joseph Dorr. 12. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Hon. Joseph Dorr, son of Rev'd Joseph Dorr The Hon. Joseph Dorr, son of the Rev'd Joseph Dorr, was born at Mendon, Massachusetts, May 24th, 1730, and died in Brookfield, Massachusetts, October 25th, 1808. He graduated from Harvard College in 1752, receiving in course the degree of Master of Arts. He studied Divinity, and was 'approbated' to preach the Gospel by the Mendon Association, August 11th, 1756. He officiated there occasionally for several years, but was never ordained. He early devoted himself to public affairs, and took an active and patriotic part in the struggle for in- dependence. He was an earnest, uncompromising and vigorous worker from its first commencement on in the movement for the Revolution, devoting, it was said, three hundred days annually for several years during the struggle to the public service, without compensation. He was one of the Commissioners chosen by the people to wait on the Mandamus Councillors and demand the surrender of their commissions. COPY R. Stanton Avery 13. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 While residing in Mendon, he was a magistrate, a member of the Committee on Safety and a member of the State Legislature. He was Judge of the Court of Common Pleas for twenty-five years, from 1776 to 1801, and Judge of Probate for Worcester County for eighteen years, from 1782 to 1800. He was a member of the Convention which met September 1st, 1779 to form a Constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and was one of the Committee of twenty-six appointed to draft that in- strument. He was chosen Senator for Worcester County to the State Assembly on the first election after the adoption of the Constitution, in 1780, and was re- turned to the same office in 1781 and 1782. He was also for some time a member of the Governor's Council. He lived in Mendon until 1786, occupying the house built and dwelt in by his father, the Rev'd Joseph Dorr. He then resided for a time in Ward, now Auburn, Massachusetts, and afterward in Leicester, removing to Brookfield, on the old stage route from Boston to Albany, in 1802. R. Stanton Avery 14. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Roston, MA 02116 The Hon. Emory Washburn, in his History of Leicester, says: "The offices which Judge Dorr was called to fill, and the general respect in which he was held, furnish the strongest evidence of his abil- ities and character as a citizen, and as a man of intelligence, energy and integrity." On December 24th, 1767, the Hon Joseph Dorr married Catherine, daughter of the Rev'd Nathan Bucknam, minister for seventy years at Medway-on the-Charles, who survived him twenty years, dying July 18th, 1828, aged 84. The Rev'd Nathan Bucknam was born in Malden, Massachusetts, November 2nd, 1703, and graduated from Harvard in 1721. While yet a student he received an offer of settlement from the Medway congregation, hav- ing preached there acceptably, the pulpit being vacant, but declined it, believing himself too young to assume SO great a responsibility. Three years after graduation he was called again by the Medway congregation and ac- cepted, July 11th, 1724. He was ordained December 23rd, 1724, receiving a salary of E80 a year, with 6100 given him as an encouragement to come. He was then twenty- one years of age. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. 15. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street sion MA 021 16 For four or five years he remained unmarried, then brought home a wife, Margaret Fiske, a lady two years younger than himself, described as : a bright lady of culture and refinement. Dr. Bucknam was of a slender constitution, though he lived to a great age. He 'served the pulpit' from the day of his installment till the day of his death, February 6th, 1795. His widow died May 1st, 1796, at the age of 91, having survived him a little more than a year. They had 67 years of married life. For the benefit of those parishoners who came from a distance, he had a 'noon-house' erected near the church, 15 feet square, open to the south. Pine benches extended around the covered sides, and a flat stone in the centre gave opportunity for a fire. This shelter house was standing in 1816; in 1822 a 'Parish House' was built on its site. The Rev'd Nathan Bucknam and his wife had six children, two sons and four daughters, of whom one, Catherine, became the wife of the Hon. Joseph Dorr, her dower being 153.13/4. 16. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Dr. Bucknam's will, mentioning his children, was signed October 6th, 1789, a final codicil being added in 1793. The Hon. Joseph Dorr, his son-in-law, was his Executor. The town of Medway was originally a part of Med- field, at which time it was described as 'the vast, unknown, and broken wilderness spreading towards the setting sun across the Charles River.' The Hon. Joseph Dorr and Catherine Bucknam had four sons and several daughters, the sons being: Joseph Hawley Dorr, born July 20th, 1772, who married Lucy Penniman of New Braintree, and was a merchant in Boston, dying March 9th, 1852, leaving a large family and a considerable estate. Samuel Dorr, born June 23rd, 1774, who mar- ried, 1st, Lucy Tuttle Fox, daughter of Joseph Fox of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, who died Jan- uary 4th, 1814; 2d, Susan Brown, daughter of Joseph Lazinby Brown of Boston, who died Feb- ruary 25th, 1841. Samuel Dorr died December 18th, 1844. R. Stanton Avery 17. Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Thomas Shepard Dorr, born November 11th, 1778, of whom no record remains beyond the fact that he married, and that he died in the month of October, 1816. Edward Dorr, born October 20th, 1786, who went south, settled first in Louisiana, then purchased an island at the mouth of Trinity River, Texas, called thereafter Dorr's Island, where he engaged extensively in the breeding of horses and cattle, and died in April, 1847. The only letters that have come down to me from the Hon. Joseph Dorr, who must in his day have written many, are two to his son, Samuel, my grandfather, the one revealing a homely, fireside-loving character, borne out be family tradition, in which he reminds his son that he has forgotten to send him the tobacco he re- quested - tobacco for his pipe; the other, written to my grandfather at Boston soon after his first marriage is especially interesting today for what is said in it concerning the planned invasion of England by Napoleon and my great-grandfather's feeling concerning him, which it would not be difficult to duplicate today in regard to what is taking place no longer now in France but elsewhere on the Continent. The letters follow: Hon. Joseph DORR, son of Rev. Joseph DURR. [Handlontten] Nonth Joseph Dor, son of Rever Joseph Dorn Joseph Dorr Int, was born in mendon mass, may 24 1730: and died in Brookfield mass, Oct 11th 1808. He graduated at Harvard College 1752 and was advanced to the degree of A.M. He studied Denmity, and was approbated to preach the hospel by the mendon association, august 11th 1456 He officiated occasionally for several years, but was never ordamed He Early devoted himself to public affairs, and took an active part in the struggle for om national independence. He was an Earnest uncom- promising and argorous co-worker with the Earliest patiots of the Revolution. He gave his best efforts to hasten it on and direct its course It is said that he devoted three hundred days annually for several years during the struggle to the public serve without compensation. He was one of the Commissioners chosen by the people to wait on the mandamus Councillons and demand the surrender of then commissions. While residing m in mendon he was a Magistrate a member of the Committee of safety and of the Legislature He was judge of the Count of Common Pleas for twenty-five years from 1776 to 1801, R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 and judge of Probate for Morester County for Eighteen years from 1782 to 1800. He was a member of the Convention which met September 14 1779, to form a Constitution for the Commonwealth of massachusetts and was one of the Committee of twenty six appointed to draft that instrument He was also some time a member of the Governor's Council. He was chosen a Senator for Worcester County on the first election after the adoption of the Constitution in 1780, and was returned for the same office in 1781 And 1782. He resided some time in Ward (now autom and afterward in Leicestor, remang to Smokefield in 1802 The Honth Emony Washburn in his history of Leicester says "The offices which guage Dorn "was called to fill, and the general respect in "which he who held, furnish the strongest evidence of his character and abilities as a citizen, and as a man of intelligence energy "and integrity: Mr Dor married Catharine, daughter of the Reader Nathan Bucknam, - December 24th 176% Mr Buchnam was born in malden, mass graduated at Narvard College 1721, ordamed December 29th1724, and died February 6th 1795, having been the minister of medway seventy years. The children of Joseph and Catharine were; 1 d Joseph b march 10-1769 died march 25- 1769 2n Catherine, b august 14-1770 did young. 3th Joseph Hawley, f July 20th 1772, married Incy Penniman of New Brantree and was a merchant in Auston died about 1852. 4th Samuel, b June 23-1774, died December 18 1844. married -1st Lucy Tuttle daughter of Joseph hay, of Pitchburg mass; 2- Susan Brown daughter of Joseph Lazinly Aroun of Boston 5th Sarah b august 10-1776: died 1823: married Jonas Newell of of North Braintree Mass. 6= Thomas Shepard, f Nor 11-1448; mamen - Parsons, died October 1816. y many b June you 1784. dies ; mamed Oliver They of hitchburg. 8th Edward f October 20th 1786, died in april 184% He went South in 1815, seller in Nova Ibena Louisiana. He possessed an Island at the mouth of Trinity River Texas, called Don's Island, where he was extensively engaged in the breeding of horses and cattle. judge Dorr lived in mendon until 1786, when he removed to the town of Ward, /now mass. In mendon he resided in the house prenomely owned and occupied S his father the Rever Joseph Dor. The location of this house is described in the paper going an account of the Reva Joseph Don. I do not find precisely when he removed from Ward to Leicaster but he is on record as being there in the years 1797 & 98, and also, as having preached there occasion "ally for several years, although he was never settled " there as Immitter". In Lacester, he lived in the house built by guage Steele at the foot of "meeting Nouse Hill.' He probably removed from Leicestor to transfree in 1802, and died there in 1808 Rev'd Joseph DORR, Third son of Edward DORR R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. 8. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Rev'd Joseph Dorr, third son of Edward Dorr Joseph Dorr was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1690; graduated from Harvard College in 1711, re- ceiving the degree of Master of Arts in course. He was ordained Minister of the First Church in Mendon, Massachusetts, on the 25th of January, 1717, and SO continued until his death, the 9th of March, 1768, in the 79th year of his age, having been in charge of his Parish more than fifty years. He was the first Modera- tor of the Mendon Association, formed in 1751, which for the first five years held its meetings at his house, and continued its standing Moderator until he died. He supported the views of Jonathan Edwards and signed a testimonial in favor of the 'Revival of 1740. ! The estimate placed upon his character by his parish- oners is shown by the epitaph inscribed by their direction on his gravestone: COPY 9. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 "This stone is sacred to the memory of the Rev'd Joseph Dorr, late pastor of ye First Church of Christ in Mendon. He died March 9th, 1768, in the 79th year of his age and the 52nd of his ministry. He was indued with good sense. His temper was mild and placid. He excelled in ye virtues of meekness and patience, of temperance, gravity, benevolence and charity. He was a good Scholar, a learned Divine and exem- plary Christian." The Rev'd Joseph Dorr married, on April 9th, 1724, Mary Rawson, daughter of his predecessor in the Church at Mendon, the Rev'd Grindal Rawson, son of Edward Raw- son, Secretary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for many years; and great-granddaughter of John Wilson, the first Minister of Boston. They had one son, Joseph, and three daughters. COPY 10. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 Dr. John G. Metcalf, resident physician in the town, in his History of Mendon, published in 1873, says: "The sites of both the house occupied by the Rev'd Grindal Rawson and that occupied by the Rev'd Joseph Dorr are known. Rev'd Mr. Rawson's house was about a quarter of a mile west of the Post Office. About the site are many trees but none SO old as the time of Mr. Rawson. "The site of Mr. Dorr's house lies three quar- ters of a mile north of the Post Office. When I came to Mendon, in 1825, the house was gone but there was an ancient elm that had grown beside it, and the old well, exceptionally deep and pure, is still in con- stant use. "Mr. Dorr's house lay quite outside the village and its site still has the most commanding view of any in the town. From it may be seen two or three neigh- boring villages, Medway, Milford, and others more distant, and the Blue Hills of Milton far in the east Neither of these houses, that of the Rev'd Grindal Rawson nor of the Rev'd Joseph Dorr, belonged to the parish of the church they served, but were the property of the ministers, occupied by their families after their decease. These houses and the land on which they set, while no record of it has remained, must have been, as had been their education for the ministry at Harvard College, the gift of their fathers to them, both being men of property, active in affairs, and both deeply interested, as the records show, in church affairs and the Puritan faith. 11. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 "Two upright headstones of dark slate, in good preservation, marked, in 1874, the Dorr burial place, their lettering, wrought with unusual skill, still clear and distinct. Over Mr. Dorr's grave was grow- ing a large apple tree which must at that time have been 80 or 90 years old. 11 It was here that the Hon. Joseph Dorr was born and lived till middle life, when he removed to Ward, now Auburn; and it was here also that his son, Samuel Dorr, was born and lived till he was 12 years old. COPY Rev'd Joseph DORR. Third son of Elward DORR [Handwritten] Reve Joseph Dors Third son of Edward Dorn Joseph Dorr was born in Roybury, mass 1690; graduated at Harvard College in 1711 mad took the degree of master of arts in course; was ordamed in change of the thist Church in mendon mass, on the 25 of February 1716 and so continued until his death which occured on the 9th of march 1708 in the 79 th year of his age, having been in the ministenal change of this Panish more than 52 years. He was the first moderator of the mendon Associa- tion formed in 1751, which for the first five years held its meetings at his house He continued to be its standing moderator until his death He favored the news news of Johathan Edwards and signed a Festimonial in favor of the revival of "1740. The following epitaph upon his grave- store in mendon, indicates the estimate placed upon his character, by his servining panshioners This stone is sacred to the memory of the Reva "Joseph Don, late Pastor of ye First Church of Christ, in mendon. He died march 9th the 1708, in the 79 th year of his age, and 52ml of his ministry "He was mader with good sense. His temper was "mild and placia He excelled in ye vitnes of "meekness, patience, temperance sobriety, gravity, 4 benevolence and Charity, - was a good Scholar 4 a learned Dinne and templary Christian." The following inscription is on the gravestone of his wife: - "In memory of Mrs many Dorn Relief of Reve Joseph Dor, who died april ye 9th 1776, in the 77th year of her age. Dust than art and ' to dust than shalt return." Their children were; 1st many, b June b=1725, diet Janrie- 179b; momen the Reve moses Taft, august 15 1753. 2- Joseph, b may 24 1730; died October 31-1808; married Catherine Bucknam December 6- 1768. 3- Catherine f march 8-1432; married the Rever Ezekiel Emerson march 24-1760. He was bm in Mybridge, February 14th 1435; graduated Processing 4th Susannah, b September 4 1734; diet game 21- 1783, married the Reva amanah Frost, who was from in dramingham, Oct 4-1420; graduated at Hanvarx College 1440; minister of the 2 Church in mendon/now milford): died March 14-1792, leaving two Children. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street minion MA 02116 Edward Dorr, born 1649; died 1734; AE 85 years Real Joseph born 1690; died 1768 A 78 years. Honth Joseph. from 1730; did 1808. AE 78 years Houbh Samuel, born 1774; diet 1844. AE yo grows april 9 Reve Joseph goor married 1724, many Rawson daughter of Read himdall Rawson the was born June 22- april g In 1699, & dued in 1776 Rever Gomdal Rawson was settled in mendor and Joseph Don "succeeded & his pulput on the next page I have copied a rough plan of a section of mendon m D given us by the MAAC r John G, metealf A in 1873. He says that the sites are both known of the houses receipied by the Reva Grindal Rawson and the Reve Joseph Dorr. In Rawson's house was near the house now owned by Hiram P. Butter about 1/4 of a mile west of the Post office. about this site there are many trees, but none so old as the time of mr Rawson, having been see meat sheet off Don R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dent New England Histo Genealogical So 101 Newbury S Boston, MA 02 Plan of a section of Mendon in 1875. sent to SB Dor by John G metcalf. The houses of Rawson t Dorrare not now standing. see mr metcalf's letter, on file. N T. Northbridge Jos'Dorr's W. E now Whitney S J G Meicalf' s/ns.) To milford House. Sr 0 Methodist Church THE Post office. Ishabridge Maple Sq. , G Rawson's New Town Hall. House. ow-HPButler. R. Stanto Special Coll New Eng COPY Geneal 101 Ne Bosto Continued Rev Joseph Dorn planted not for from the year 1813. & metealf says "When I came to mendon in 1826, In Don's house "was gone, and the present house near its site, was "not built for some years afterward There was an "ancient Elm growing there and still showing few "signs of decay, but the man (NO. steward who "built the house now owned by Mr Whitney, cut "it down leaving one of much younger age; so young "as not likely to 4tend back to the times of m "Dorr" "The distoner of the Don site is a with short " of 3/4 of a mile north of the Post office. "There are no landmarks about either place that go "back to the days of Mr Rawson or In Dorr. "Forty years ago about 1883/ there were the remains of a cellar at Mr Dorr's, but when Steward built his house befilled it up." In 1874, Run in Slafter visited mendon, for the purpose of investigation and went over the ground with Dr metcalf. He reports the town to be rather poor, with about 1300 inhabitants occupying territionally, only a fraction of the amerent town. It is now pinely an agricultural town mentionsing and with with public spent. Q Metcalf had been R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. 100 England Historic Genedicgical Society 101 Newbury Street IC Boston, MA 02116 the only physician for forty years, and made a very small income. The old Parish is now Unitarian and the minister has a salary of 600. a year. There is also a methodist church there. "The site of the Red In Dorr's house is quit upon the outskints of the village and has the most "Commanding new of any part of the town. " room it, may be seen two or three neighboring ' villages,' such as " Bellongham medway, milford "and others more distant, and the Blue Hills of "milton for in the East." "The site of the Rear Joseph Dorr's house is pointed "out new a nice, tidy-looking farm-house. "The old well is still extent and in constant use" "a large flat stone, say 4 feet, is seen "on an Embanhment wall near the present house, and is supposed to be the door-stone of the "ancient house." "The old meeting house is entirely gon. It was near probably adjoining the old "The final ground is in a sad state of neglect by a disapidated wall, and overgrown by apple trees, bushes and brians. Everything about it is rusty with years of neglest." "The Rawson tomb consists of an oblong price of "mason-work, about there feet high with a slab of slater on the top. on the end, is R stone with an insentition: "The Dorr formal-place is marked by two upright "Hian & hoot "stones of dark slate, with similar "stones, near by for Mrs Dorr They are in good preservation the lettering on all being clear and "intelligible and wrought with unusual skill". "over the centre of m Don's grave, is growing a large apple-tree perhaps a foot in diameter, which must be 80 or go years old. I have quoted these attracts because my father Damnel Dorr lived in the old house until he was twicher years old in 1786, when his father and family removed to the town of Ward, from Autom another the old site as being near "the present house of James I Nutter, nearly opposite "the road to Northbridge: Edward DORR. Foreword by C.B. DORR. EDWARD DORR (1649-1734) (With Foreword by George B. Dorr) complete predominance of the Puritan faith in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay and its surroundings, emphasized in my father's genea- logy, there was a strong element, adventurous and prac- tical, in the migration that peopled the Colony and New England at large which was brought out to America by the opportunities offered by the new country and lands to be had for the taking. With this the Dorr contribu- tion to my father's inheritance is clearly to be identi- fied, as shown also by the choice of the lands around Casco Bay for the first settlement of Edward Dorr and his associates. Some of the first settlements along the coast of North America had been made as early as 1607 about Casco Bay. The region had splendid water powers and as yet unbroken forests, a rich source of lumber for manufacture and shipment; but the Indians who inhab- ited it were friendly to the French and took their part R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society n 101 Newbury Street 3 COPY Boston, MA 02116 (Edward Dorr) 2. against the English settlers, leading to the abandon- ment of the region at that time. Practically the same condition still existed when Edward Dorr, who was born in the west of England in 1649, and his associates attempted settlement there near seventy years later, July 22, 1674, and led, as before, to its abandonment. (1677-90) Edward Dorr then sailed down to Boston, where he remained for the next thirteen years. In 1677 he pur- chased a lot "near the old church in the north part," close to the Winnisimmet Ferry -- near the foot of the present Hanover Street. He married, at twenty-nine, (1678) when he had been in Boston a year, Elizabeth Hawley, (1656-1719) the mother of all his children. She was the daughter of Thomas Hawley, who was slain by the Indians at Sub- bury on April 21st, 1676, during King Philip's War. Thomas Hawley left, besides his widow and the daughter who married Edward Dorr, a son, Joseph Hawley, whose name appears as a graduate of Harvard College, in the Class of 1674, two years prior to his father's death. Elizabeth Hawley Dorr was born in 1656, being seven years younger than her husband. She died in 1719. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. COPY New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 (Edward Dorr) 3. In 1683, Edward Dorr bought the old Hagborne estate in Roxbury, one of the best in the town, which was his home henceforth, and whereon he established a tan-yard, a principal industry then among the settlers, who kept great store of cattle. Edward Dorr was prominent, the town records show, in the civil and ecclesiastical affairs of Roxbury. He was one of the selectmen of the Town and held other offices of importance and trust to the end of his life. In 1734 he died, leaving a good estate. He was interred in the present Eustis Street Burial Ground in Roxbury, and his tombstone and that of his wife, Elizabeth Hawley Dorr, were in perfect preservation in 1874, the inscrip- tions on them reading as follows: Here lies buried ye body of Mr. Edward Dorr. He died February 9th, 1733-4, in ye 86th year of his age. Here lies ye body of Elizabeth Dorr, wife to Edward Dorr, aged 63 years. Deceased December ye 7th, 1719. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. COPY New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston MA 02116