BECOMING ACADIA NATIONAL PARK: A Biography of George Bucknam Dorr Part One Origins of the Coastal Maine Park Concept Rough Draft & Revisions November 20, 2008 Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. 47 Pond View Drive Merrimack, NH 03054 603-424-6149 Eppster2@verizon.net GEORGE BUCKNAM DORR Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D Part IA1A: 1674-1830 (December1, 2007) 1674 GBD believes that "All in America who bear the name I believe to be descended from Englishman Edward Dorr The progenitor is reputed to hail from Dorsetshire England (Dorr Collection, NEHGS, Box 6) , Edward (1649-1734) represented the "strong [Puritan] element, adventurous and practical" by the choice of lands around Casco Bay for the first settlement of Dorr and his associates. Originally settled in 1607, the region was abandoned when he attempted settlement there July 22, 1674. It too was abandoned when Edward Dorr sailed for Boston in 1677 where he remained for the next 13 years, purchasing a lot near the present foot of Hanover Street where he married Elizabeth Hawley (1656- 1719). In 1683 he purchased an estate in Roxbury where he established a tan-yard. Prominent in Town he was a selectman and is interred in the Eustis Street Burial Ground. GBD says that in 1874 his tombstone and that of his wife were well preserved. (Dorr Collection NEHGS, Harvard Class Book of 1874, p. 229. See also the extensive genealogical files originating with Edward Dorr compiled by his living Floridian descendent, Andy Dorr, adorr@comcast.net) In The Dorr Papers George B. Dorr characterizes ten days before his 85th birthday (12.19.38) the changes in the intensity of the religious spirit of the early Puritan days when "God's presence seemed SO near and his ordering SO direct." Since then rapid change has been characteristic and "two lives as long as mine is now would span the change [to the scientific era of the late 19th-century], with its opening of the new universe of which we know rather what is not than we do what is.' (Dorr Papers, B2,f3) On GBD's maternal side, Miles Ward was the founder of the Ward family in New England, having emigrated "from the town of Erith in the county of Kent, England, and had two grants of land in Salem in 1640." GBD was the ninth in descent. According to Samuel Gray Ward (Ward Family, xi) certain family characteristics-which appear to have been hereditary in the family--were exemplified in the three generations prior to GBD: " " an equally strong tendency, alternately, towards a contemplative and towards an active and even adventurous life; great promptness in action ( a Ward is always in a hurry, is a family proverb) when a course of action is decided on; an absence of any marked trading or accumulating faculty, but a practical ability to bring about results." 1711 One of the younger children of Edward and Elizabeth (Hawley) Dorr of Roxbury-from whom George Bucknam Dorr is descended-received his degree from Harvard in 1711. Joseph (1690-1768) was ordained in 1716 and accepted an invitation to preach at the First Church in Mendon where he continued to serve until his death at age 79. (John Langdon Sibley. Sibley's Harvard Graduates. 5 [1701-1712] 574-578) Reverend Dorr was "an exemplary Christian," fathering four children with Mary Rawson (1699-1776), daughter of his predecessor in the Mendon Church, Rev. Grindal Rawson, son of Edward Rawson, Secretary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and GGD of John Wilson, first Minister of Boston (Extant are Timeline_George Dorr Page 1 of 19 several handwritten pages-and an abridged version in typescript--o: biographical material on this cleric by great grandson Charles H. Dorr. (DorrMs NEHGS) 1730 Joseph e.c. The only son of Rev. Dorr and Mary Rawson Dorr was born this year (1730-1808) and like his father attended Harvard where he held Hollis, Hopkinton, and Stoughton scholarships prior to his graduation in 1752. He too studied divinity, preached in Provincetown, and officiated at churches but was never ordained returning to Mendon when his father's health began to fail. There he managed several town offices as clerk, treasurer and selectman prior to service in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1764. Controversy attended to some of his political decisions yet "he redeemed himself" when in March 1773, he reported for a town of Mendon committee a long list of resolutions which "have a remarkable resemblance to the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. (John Langdon Sibley. Sibley's Harvard Graduates. 18 [1751-1755] 225-227) Grandson Charles Hazen Dorr states that Joseph took an "active part" in the Revolutionary War, a "co-worker with the earliest Patriots of the Revolution," devoting during the struggle with England 300 days annually to uncompensated public service. DorrMs. NEHGS) He lived in Mendon until 1786 when he relocated to Ward (now Auburn), later to Leicester, and finally to Brookfield where he died. His public service also includes Judge of the Court of Appeals (1776-1801), Worcester County Judge of Probate (1782-1800), Senator from Worcester County (1780-82), Massachusetts Commonwealth Constitutional Convention member. None of his eight children had a Harvard College connection. 1750 Birth of the great Salem ship owner, William Gray (tertius), son of Abraham Gray (1714-1791) who had married (in 1742) Lydia Calley (1723- 1788), daughter of Francis Calley of Marblehead) Of their eleven children, William ( or "Billy") was one of the earliest to seek the trade of Canton and by the end of the 18th century was rated the wealthiest man of Salem, one of the largest ship owners in New England. A representative to the General Court, State senator (1809), and elected Lt. Governor in 1810 & 1811 following his move to Boston (Edward Gray, William Gray of Lynn, 7) See 1782 below. 1764 Joseph Dorr marries (12.24) Catherine Bucknam, daughter of Rev. Nathan Bucknam (1703-1828), a Harvard College graduate (1721), ordained in 1724, and Minister of Medway from 1724-1795. In about 1729 Nathan married Margaret Fiske (1705-91), described as "a bright lady of culture and refinement." They had six children in their 67 years of marriage, one being Catherine. In the next generation, Joseph and Catherine had eight children, Samuel being the fourth born. GBD notes that the only letters from the Hon. Joseph Dorr that have survived are two to his son, Samuel; one reveals a "homely, fireside-loving character" [who reminds] his son that he has forgotten to send him tobacco whereas the other to Samuel offers interesting remarks regarding the planned Napoleonic invasion of England. 1770 "The speaking club of Harvard College [The Institute of 1770] was founded Sept. 6, 1770, for improvement in elocution." Originally a secret society over time it evolved and became a purely sophomore society with members elected from that class; in 1924 it would be Timeline_George Dorr Page 2 of 19 "amalgamated with the Hasty Pudding Club." (First Catalogue of The Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770) . 1774 Samuel Dorr's birthdate (6.23) Dorr Ms. This is GBD's paternal GF. In Mendon house built by his grandfather, Rev. Joseph Dorr in which his father, The Hon. Joseph Dorr, had been born. [CHD wrote version 1 ms. in 1887; the 32-page second CHD greatly expanded version can be dated to 1891-92 and contains explanatory paragraphs by GBD]. 1779 GBD's paternal grandmother, Susan Brown, the second wife of Samuel Dorr, was born 8/16/1779 in their home on Middle Street, now Hanover Street, near the North End, daughter of Joseph Lazinby Brown (17??-1804) and Susannah Adams. (See G. Reynolds "Memoir of Joseph Lazinby Brown, "). Origins also traced in The DorrMs emphasizing the ship trades and the "strong mechanical bent" of Lazinby family members. Detail here shows GBD's interest in ancestry. This vocational information (including that Susan's father was a goldsmith) GBD mentions to support the claim that Joseph Lazinby's grandson (CHD) "had a rare gift with his hands and loved to work with them." Susan was one of five children; her sister Elizabeth married Charles Hazen for whom CHD is named; Charles Hazen was "a near relative of General Hazen, the distinguished Revolutionary officer" (see Reynolds) Her sister Nancy who later married Charles Hazen following her sisters death (for more on Brown family, see 1804) Last two children born in Concord where the family resided. The Brown family resided in Concord from 1785 to 1795 (when he then returned to Boston) where according to Reynolds "we have constant evidence of his presence in Concord" where "he held a good position in society" and was a friend of Samuel Bartlett and Emerson Cogswell, one of a small group that started to renew the Social Circle in Concord (Memoirs of the Members of the Social Circle in Concord, Second Series) GBD also traces ancestry of Adams family (his paternal GGM) and the graduation of the Rev. Hugh Adams from Harvard in 1697 where he "settled as pastor" in Durham NH in 1718. 1782 "Billy" Gray marries Elizabeth Chipman (1756-1823) of Marblehead and of their ten children, Francis Calley Gray (1790-1856) and John Chipman Gray (1793-1881). William Gray's brother Samuel Gray (1760-1816) was twice married, first (1787) to Anna Orne (b. 1767) who died at Salem in 1797 after delivering six children, the first born being Lydia (1788- Oct. 9, 1874), who married Thomas Wren Ward. See 1810 (Edward Gray, William Gray of Lynn, p. 9; see also John B. Derby. The Reminiscences of Salem, Massachusetts, 1847 for background. 1786 Nov. 20th Thomas Wren Ward's birthdate (TWWPapers), GBD's maternal GF. Born in Salem to William Ward (1761-1827) and Martha Procter Ward (1762- 1788) ; note, following Martha's death two years after TWW's birth, his father married Joanna 'Nancy' Chipman; they had two children, William and 'Aunt Lucy. About William, Samuel Gray Ward refers to him as "William, the inexact," whose constant debts caused parental concern, but in later life he moved to Washington, D.C. as a private secretary who died in middle life. Whereas "Aunt Lucy" was "as good as gold, and always a sure friend" who married Salem notable Charles Lawrence and passed her life happily on a farm in Danvers which "was always delightful for us children to visit." (Ward Family, 77). Timeline_George Dorr Page 3 of 19 No one better characterizes the Salem of Thomas Wren Ward's youth than Samuel Eliot Morison: "A Salem boy in those days was born to the music of the windless chanty and caulker's maul; he drew in a taste for the sea with his mother's milk; wharves and shipyards were his playground; he shipped as a boy on a coaster in his early teens, saw Demerara and St. Petersburg before he set foot in Boston, and if he had the right stuff in him, commanded an East-Indiaman before he was twenty-five.' (The Maritime History of Massachusetts: 1783-1860. ch. VII, pg. 80) Birth of Joseph Green Cogswell (d. 1871), Harvard graduate (1806) and later student of the mercantile shipping trades due to the patronage of his friend William Gray, prior to his involvement in Northampton's Round Hill School which Samuel Gray Ward would attend. He later would associate with Mr. & Mrs. Astor in their zeal to have him assemble a library of more than 25,000 volumes (which would open in early January 1854) until he would confess in 1852 that he "sick of the very sight of books" since they cut him off from every other pleasure in life (Life of Joseph Green Cogswell, 1874) In 1861 he resigned the office of Superintendent of the Astor Library. Hon. Joseph Dorr moves his family to Ward (now Auburn). 1788 Birth of Lydia Gray (7.30), GBD's maternal GM, who would marry TWW 1.13.1810. "The struggle for independence created openings for men from humble local elites in New England family fortunes were made in trade, piracy, and speculation during the Revolution, and in pioneering postwar commerce with China, India, and the South Sea islands. [and] many self- made men reached the top in the late eighteenth century. The fathers of William Sturgis, William Gray, and Samuel Eliot, founders of great overseas trading houses, were respectively a sea captain, a master shoemaker, and an impecunious printer and bookseller." (F.C. Jaher The Urban Establishment, 21). 1790 Samuel Dorr enters the store of Parkman & English in Westborough, one of the leading New England merchants, large importers and distributors of West Indies goods. He also taught evening school at this age and had a "great love for books, and all his life was a constant and careful reader." Here his role appears to be as an apprentice accountant, since he soon entered a counting-room where he "supported himself entirely" even though his father was "comfortably off." SD was the P & E 'right- hand man' and dealt with clients making "valuable acquaintances among New England business men, forming a foundation for his own career." Birth of Francis Calley Gray (Salem 9.19), son of William Gray and Elizabeth Chipman and grandson of Abraham and Lydia Calley. William Gray was later Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts, "the leading merchant of the time, with between thirty and forty ships sailing the oceans of the globe in pursuit of cargoes." (Charles Knowles Bolton. Francis Calley Gray. Boston: MHS, 1914, p. 3) 1791 Establishment of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 1792 T.W. Ward's youth in Salem involved much time spent at the wharf, "the playground of all Salem boys," which alarmed his father (since TWW was left in care of relatives following his mother's death and father's Timeline_George Dorr Page 4 of 19 absences) TWW was brought to Andover and placed in Master Foster's school, a positive experience on indefinite duration (Ward Papers, 79; however, no record of his residency at the Phillips Exeter Academy survives in school records, Phillips Academy Archive) David Anthony Morrison ("Salem as Citizen of the World") offers the following characterizations of the environment of young Mr. Ward: "More sophisticated, more cosmopolitan, more worldly and experienced, Salem of the China Trade stood out as a 'city upon a hill' quite different from Puritan expectations, one that contributed to the nation's economic might, material cultural, and literary imagination.' (pg. 109) Like their merchant counterparts, Captains Bowditch and Ward on their return to Salem were "swept up as premier lecturers in the storied halls of the East India Marine Society, at the porcelain-laden dining tables of prosperous merchant families, in the spice-laden coffeehouses of overseas traders," for they had useful knowledge of foreign markets vital to Salem's future. (Pg. 114) 1796 Elite Boston was essentially "an entrepreneurial entity. Boston's first families generally owed their position to maritime success. Attachment to the commercial life required character traits necessary for economic success and SO Boston Brahmin virtues were "diligence, energy, order, thrift, prudence, personal restraint, and self-improvement. Brahmins begin to develop Beacon Hill as an exclusive neighborhood and the Boston gentry were no exception to the behavior of other ethnic and social enclaves in seeking their own turf. The Brahmin ascendancy "encompassed the prestigious professions as well as politics and business. Men prominent in the legal, medical, religious and educational elites, the enclave commanded skills that extended its power and wealth, celebrated its position through manipulation of ritual and symbol, affirmed its leadership by shaping community values and initiating civic welfare and cultural projects, and perpetuated itself by recruiting new blood and developing young talent. T.W. Ward will later articulate this ethos and formularize it in the advice offered repeatedly to his sons to 'attend to your business. (F. Jaher. The Urban Establishment, 29, 37). 1797 Likely date when Samuel Dorr came to Boston with $700 in capital and $600 borrowed from father to set himself up as 'a commission merchant." Prospering he soon purchased and occupied #30 India Street (later adding #29) where he remained until he retired. These buildings were still in Charles Dorr's name as Trustee for "my sister, Susan Elizabeth Dorr" at the unstated date that this essay was written. CHD says that his father believed that his property increased "by living well within his means" and by "investing only in sound securities and watching them carefully." He lost almost nothing through bad debts-see example of business acumen (p. 66) Over the years his health was taxed since "his constitution was not naturally robust." 1798 Henry Higgens purchases extensive MDI property from Mme. de Gregoires (granddaughter of Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. Much earlier MDI was "thrice conveyed in gift": once by Quebec to Antoine de Mothe Cadillac' second, after fall of French dominion to Sir Francis Bernard; finally, by the State of Mass. To the heirs of the two former grantees: eastern to de Gregoire's western half to John Bernard. The eastern half included "the present Oldfarm and its continuation southward up the steep-forested side of Champlain Mountain. {see Timeline, 1874-77 on history of land titles & Dorr Papers 1,14). De Gregoires built Hulls Cove home but one of first tracts sold was to Henry Higgins (date here Timeline_George Dorr Page 5 of 19 is 1792?) . John Cousins had settled on this land without title and SO land became known as "Cousins lot." Following Higgens death it went to his successors until 1868 when "the [100 acre] eastern portion of the Henry Higgens lot was purchased by my father and his friend, Thornton K. Lothrop; Western portion purchased by Professor Mahan. In 1875 Dorr bought Lothrop share. Frenchmans Bay and MDI topography described by GBD (see 1859-63 chrono file], including Compass Harbor where GBD would keep safely keep his boat for 18 years, The Wren, built by Edward Burgess, former Epes Dixwell School classmate and renown "early cup defenders." Describes Bald Porcupine and OldFarm origins [see 1868 & 1878]. 1799 TWW at thirteen years of age taken from school and placed with Captain Darling to learn the sailor trade; Darling had been William Ward's first officer. TWW showed great talent to the point that at 16 years of age he brought back from Calcutta a ship bereft of customary officers; he would be in full command by 1806. Given a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica by Darling showing "the class of men" who plied the seas. (Ward Papers, 80) . 1803 Marriage of Samuel Dorr to Lucy Tuttle Fox, daughter of Joseph and Mary Fox of Fitchburg (10.13) Six children came of this marriage (1804-12), five males and one born January 23, 1806 was named George Bucknam Dorr (1806-76) after whom GBD would be named in 1853: Samuel Fox (1804-44) who married Elizabeth Chipman Hazen, Charles Hazen Dorr's first cousin, GBD; Albert Henry (1807- ) ; Martha Ann (1809- ) ; Francis Fiske (1811-1870) ; and James Augustus (1812-69) (Dorr Ms. "Children of Samuel Dorr" by GBD, 1938) In a similar version of this essay GBD makes the point that these children "have no place in my descent" but affirms that with the exception of Samuel Fox Dorr "I came into contact at one time or another as I grew up.' He says at early age he wondered at "the difference between these earlier children and my father and his own sister, Susan Elizabeth Dorr (1819- , who [both] had qualities of humor, quick sympathy and warm affection the older children did not share.' (Dorr Ms. NEHGS, 'Children Vers. 2) Samuel Dorr purchases from Mr. Gray for $4,500 a piece of Boston land (10.20). [ANPA] 1804 Immediately South of the State House a stretch of imported elm trees had been planted on the Common pasture land along Sentry Street which climbed from Tremont to the State House. Exactly one-half century later this location would prove highly formative to George Bucknam Dorr, but first some words about the significance of the future home of his grandparents. In 1801 the almshouse on Sentry was removed and the adjacent granary was dismantled offering an opportunity for development that was not ignored by Boston's signature architect, Charles Bulfinch. He and his associates were intent on "transforming the outskirts of the Common into the finest residential section of Boston." (Harold & James Kirker. Bulfinch's Boston 1787-1817. New York: Oxford, 1974, p. 166) In short order a handsome avenue of related four-story townhouses named Park Place (later Street) was laid out and became popularly known as 'Bulfinch Row.' Each lot was approximately forty feet in width which permitted more liberal floor arrangements than we usually associate with so-called row houses. That the rear of each backed onto the Granary Burying Ground in no way detracted from their immediate acceptance as Timeline_George Dorr Page 6 of 19 the most fashionable addresses. (B.G. Farrell. Elite Families, p. 23). Distinguished members of Boston's Amory and Warren families were among the first generation to occupy these homes Death of GBD's paternal GGF, Joseph Lazinby Brown (see 1779) whose mother was the second wife of Benjamin Eustis, a wealthy housewright, and father of Governor Eustis. Grindell Reynolds "Memoir" refers to the Brown home as one of "real dignity and attractiveness which drew the best people to it.' 1806 Birth of George Bucknam Dorr (1806-76[?]) and the name Bucknam is that of his grandmother, Catherine Bucknam, daughter of Nathan Bucknam, Medway minister. Mary Gray Ward Dorr's second son, born in 1853, will be named after him. He will attend Harvard and become a member of the prestigious Porcellian Club (1824) Thomas Wren Ward resigned his membership in the Salem East India Marine Society for reasons unknown. (Walter Muir Whitehill. The East India Marine Society and the Peabody Museum of Salem: A Sesquicentennial History. Salem: Peabody Museum, 1949, p. 162). 1807 Establishment of the Boston Athenaeum. 1808 Samuel Eliot Morison details the diverse economic, social, political factors that spirited the "passing of Salem" during the early decades of the nineteenth century. From 1807 to 1815 Salem's overseas trading fleet was reduced by nearly seventy percent. Mr. Dorr's grandfather Gray was precient enough to see the writing on the wall. "William Gray's departure to Boston in 1808 began a process that did not stop." (The Maritime History of Massachusetts. P. 217). 1809 The Gray family moves to Summer Street and is integrated into Boston society. Francis Calley Gray receives his Harvard College degree; he then joins John Quincy Adams as an unpaid secretary on his trip to Russia. Five years later Gray was admitted to the Bar, and in 1841 Harvard would make him a Doctor of Laws since "never was a honor more properly bestowed, for Mr. Gray had that rare combination-a memory for the accurate details of history and a mind alive to the laws of nations and the significance of great events" (C.K Bolton, Francis Calley Gray, 5). Thomas W. Ward is master of the Salem ship Minerva docked at Canton. His negotiating strategies and characterizations of Chinese merchants in Canton are documented in a manuscript notebook of some sixty pages contained within surviving commercial papers of Captain Benjamin Sheeve at the Peabody Museum. (Walter Muir Whitehill. "Remarks on the Canton Trade and the Manner of Transacting Business," Essex Institute Historical Collections LXXIII (1937) : 303-310) The 1660 Granary Burying-Ground was originally part of the Common but in 1662 public buildings were erected on its southwest corner (now Park Street. Later beside the Granary Burying-Ground, Park Street Church was erected on what Brimstone Corner, at a time when "No curbstones separated the streets from the sidewalks. The COWS still browsed on the Common [until 1830], and the Town Crier made his proclamations." Timeline_George Dorr Page 7 of 19 (Lawrence, Old Park Street, p. 119) . The Church was erected to revive Trinitarianism and combat the spread of Unitarianism which had overwhelmed all the orthodox churches in Boston save the Old South. 1810 Marriage of T.W. Ward to Lydia Gray, daughter of Samuel Gray and Anna Orne (on November 15th as recorded in The Vital records of Medford, Massachusetts to the Year 1850. Boston: NEHGS, 1907, p. 317) The Wards set up housekeeping in Pearl Street, in one of the best residences in Boston. However, in those Embargo days it was a hard time for merchants and the Ward's moved (date uncertain) to New York, where he " established, with his cousin, Jonathan Goodhue, the house of Goodhue and Ward, afterwards Goodhue and Company." In this account Samuel Gray Ward recounts that his father (TWW) must have done well enough for in 1817 he was able to purchase one of the best situated houses in Boston. Eight children were born of this union between 1811 and 1833, Mary being the fifth-born (1816) and at the time of GBD's birth in 1853 he had 3 Ward Family uncles, 2 aunts, and 6 cousins; also 12 Great Aunts and Uncles (Edward Gray. William Gray of Lynn, p. 10 and the TWWPapers) Note: Mary's father Samuel Gray's second marriage yielded seven more children, including Henrietta (1811-1891) who married Ignatius Sargent (1835) who gave birth in 1841 to Arnold Arboretum Director Charles Sprague Sargent (b. 1841), son of Mary's step sister Henrietta, step cousin to GBD. Mary's brothers Samuel and George Cabot were Harvard graduates. Seven of eight children survived into adulthood. (The MHS has one of the few remaining copies of the Ward Family Papers (1900) by Samuel Gray Ward which contains narrative and chronological information on the Wards; the Ward-Perkins Papers at the University of California at Santa Barbara contains related manuscripts) During this decade Salem port duties began to fall signaling its decline as the center of the East India trade. The decline was due to the fact that "the harbor was not ideal for commerce since vessels drawing over twelve feet had to be unloaded at a considerable distance from the wharves. Slowly but inevitably ships transferred to other ports, particularly nearby Boston." (E.H. Miller. Salem is My Dwelling Place, p. 12). We can't say whether TWW was prescient on this matter though the family relocation to Boston where according to his obituary he became one of the "most enterprising and successful merchants of that time." (TWWPapers 8.4) Birth of Sarah Margaret Fuller (Ossoli) leader of an intellectual movement that introduced Boston to German literature and philosophy, edited The Dial, promoted feminist themes in her "conversations," and encouraged the friendship of Sam G. Ward with Ralph Waldo Emerson prior to her death in a 1850 shipwreck (see E.D. Cheney, "The Women of Boston, in Justin Winsor's Memorial History of Boston). 1811 Samuel Dorr and others apply for charter for "New England Bank" which was incorporated in 1813. Dorr is a Director until 1840, President from 1823-31. As President on at least one occasion he personally lent funds to a NH merchant when the bank rejected loan application, saving a good business from dissolution. (DorrMs NEHGS Samuel ver. 2) 1812 First born Martha Ann Ward (6/3), named after T.W. Ward's mother, Martha. On her death (11.2.1853) she will be the first (of 17) Ward Timeline_George Dorr Page 8 of 19 family members to be interred in the property purchased in 1835 by her father, Mount Auburn Cemetery Lot # 235. Julia Cutler marries Sam Ward (10.12), son of a respected Rhode Island family that had emigrated to America during the Restoration. This is not the ancestry line of the Massachusetts Ward family. These Wards would reside in New York City and Sam would become a partner in the banking firm of Prime & Ward. Of their children Sam (1.28.14) was first born and a second boy Henry arrived in 1818; on the death of three year old Julia from whopping cough in 1819 another girl (later Julia Ward Howe) was born (5.27.19) and given that name. James Augustus Dorr born (June 8th) in Boston. He and Charles Hazen Dorr would share a common father but different mothers. James would attend Harvard and deliver the 1832 commencement oration on "The Progress of Man." (Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, Series II, 5, p. 209) he died in Boston February 18, 1869 immediately prior to the beginning of another Harvard experience fort his kinsman, George B. Dorr. 1814 Jan. 4 : Death of Samuel Dorr's first wife, Lucy. While Brahmin involvement n cotton manufacturing started with the Cabot mills in 1787, the shift to textiles began in Waltham when Patrick T. Jackson and his brother-in-law Francis Cabot Lowell, founded the Boston Manufacturing Company, the original modern factory and arguably the first industrial corporation in America. Boston capitalists encouraged by its profits built other factories that kept mill dividends at 11.4 percent until 1836 and at nearly 10 percent for the next decade. (F. Jaher, The Urban Establishment, 51). 1815 Second marriage of Samuel Dorr to Susan Brown, daughter of Joseph Lazinby Brown and Susannah Adams of Boston (12.5) The individual who would later educate three children of the Ward family of New York, Joseph Green Cogswell (1786-1871) at this time represented Salem merchant William Gray, Dorr's maternal great grandfather. In conducting a law suit before the French courts prior to his studies at Gottingen, Cogswell followed in the footsteps of his two intimate friends, George Ticknor and Edward Everett; Cogswell later received a Ph.D. from that institution. Upon his return to the United States he was enticed by Harvard faculty friends Ticknor and Everett to assume multiple roles as a professor of mineralogy and chemistry, not to mention his appointment as college librarian. By 1823 he and George Bancroft would establish the Round Hill School in Northampton where they were not constrained by college administrators, having a free hand to apply their own educational principles. Nine years later debt forced the closure of Round Hill and Cogswell was offered a position by Samuel Ward but instead coming full circle accepted the invitation to William Gray's son, Francis C. Gray, to be his companion in Europe for a year. The Ward family association was renewed on his return and following introductions to John Jacob Astor, Cogswell entered into an agreement and spent many years traveling abroad, selecting appropriate books for the planned Astor Library, a "great library [and] the first to be established in America. it furnished scholars with the means of carrying on their studies, encouraged young students to make researches in many fields of knowledge, and opened the way for a great multitude of children and youths into the realm of books." (Thomas Franklin Waters. Augustus Timeline_George Dorr Page 9 of 19 Heard and his Friends. Ipswich: Ipswich Historical Society, 1916, pp. ch. 3) During the decade ending in 1825 the growth of Unitarianism was conspicuous. At the end of this ten year period the number of new Unitarian churches in Boston exceeded that of any other denomination. "They attracted the most cultivated people, as well as the most active and prominent members of the various professions." Arthur B. Ellis. History of the First Church in Boston, 1630-1880. Boston: Hall and Whiting, 1881, p. 271) 1816 Second born, Mary Gray Ward (6.3) in Medford on September 8th; died in infancy (Feb. 6, 1819) . Business at Ropes & Ward was sufficiently robust to enable the Ward's to relocate to a recently developed neighborhood at the foot of the Massachusetts State House. At this time, Park Street was still one of three of Boston's most fashionable addresses following the Charles Bulfinch design and construction of these homes a decade earlier. In the interim he had brought an unprecedented elegance to residences and public buildings, most notably the Massachusetts State House at the highpoint of Park Street on the northeastern boundary of the Boston Common. Overlooking the maturing elms lining the Common, the property title for #3 Park Street was transferred on October 3rd to Lydia Ward from attorney Richard Sullivan, Esq. (1779-1861), Harvard Class of 1798, who had purchased the five year old structure in 1809. The prestigious three story townhouse was on the flank of Beacon Hill was originally built in 1804. (R.M. Lawrence, Old Park Street, 58-61; for more on the geography of Brahmin Boston, see Betty G. Farrell. Elite Families, pp. 22-30) No inventory of the four story townhouse survives. However, the Salem roots of the occupants might permit us to suppose the presence of cultural artifacts similar to those that Gladys Brooks attributes to her Salem in-laws of a later era: "cornice moldings in gold leaf, fine porcelain, chairs of teakwood, sewing tables of gilt-inlaid papier- mache, ornaments of ivory, elephant tusks, covered Buddhas from Java, Chemise fire screens camphor, dates, ginger in green Canton jars, cheroots, and the rockets and sparklers that streaked the night sky." (Boston and Return. New York: Atheneum, 1962, p.223) Number 3 Park Street would pass out of the Ward's hands on March 12, 1863 following Lydia's relocation to a new Commonwealth Avenue townhouse. (Lawrence, op. cit., pp. 58-61) Number 3 was conveyed to the well known Ipswich merchant, Augustine Heard. Ward neighbors included: #1 Calcutta trade merchant Thomas Wigglesworth (1826-58) ; #2 John C. Warren, M.D ; #4 Samuel Ridgeway Miller (1821-40) preceded the family of the Mayor of Boston, the Honorable Josiah Quincy (1840-58) #5 John Gore (1802-26, one of the incorporators of the New England National Bank with TWW) and then to Francis Calley Gray who relocated from his home since 1834 on Beacon Street (1843-54, though C. Bolton dates the move to 1845), then Josiah Quincy, Sr. (1772-1864), Congressman (1805-13) then Mayor of Boston (1823-29), and Harvard College President (1829-45) ; #6 John Gore & Frances Calley Gray (1843-44) & Dr. John C. Warren Sr. built home for son (1845-57) when they relocated to #2 (see below) ; #7 it is a curious historical fact that Thomas Wren Ward's great-granddaughter Elizabeth Howard Ward in 1896 would marry the nephew (Charles Callahan Perkins) of the son of the first owner of #7, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, later founder of the Perkins Institution, though the property was occupied by the prominent jurist Timeline_George Dorr Page 10 of 19 Artemis Ward, Esq. (1762-1847) from 1811-48 before its conveyance to Henry Joseph Gardner, Esq. (1819-92), member of the Constitutional Convention of 1853 and Governor of Massachusetts (1855-57) #8 was occupied by Jonathan Amory, Jr. (1811-1828) until 1836 it passed onto Hon. Abbott Lawrence (1828-55) and to his wife (thru 1863) when the estate leased property to the Union Club. (See Bliss Perry's Park-Street Papers [1908] for insight into Houghton Mifflin & Company use of #4 Park Street in the last two decades of the 19th century). Finally, #9, at the head of Park Street was the fashionable Amory- Ticknor House where Thomas Amory built a large Georgian style Georgian style mansion. It was first occupied in 1804 by Hon. Samuel Dexter, President Adams Sec. of the Treasury, and sold by his widow in 1831 to Richard Cobb who sold it to Matthias Plant Sawyer of Portland (ME0 in 1836 who lived there nine years and bequeathed the house to an adopted daughter who married Curtis B. Raymond who resided there until the Ward's moved to Commonwealth Avenue. However, the other portion of the estate was owned by Andrew Richie, then Hon. Harrison Gray Otis, and finally in July 1830 the eminent publisher George Ticknor who lived there for 41 years. "In Reminiscences of Park Street," John Collins Warren M.D. writes that when he was 3 years of age (1845) they moved to a home "situated in sheltered spot under the brow of Beacon Hill," #6 Park St., where illuminating gas was introduced into all the rooms, the first instance of gas being used in a Boston private dwelling occurring about the same time that fixed basins were installed in every bedroom, an advance over the washstand. With the death of his same named grandfather in 1856, the Warrens moved into # 2, next door to the Ward family, "one of a block of four brick houses, four stories in height, with low attic roofs. An iron balcony on the parlor floor relieved the simplicity of the front elevation. A broad arched doorway gave cover to a flight of two steps [and] each lot represented a frontage of about forty feet, which gave ample space for a passage to the right of the main entrance into the back yard" which abutted directly on the Granary Burying-Ground; the latter served as a playground for children and Park Street family members can still tell of "picnics and other festivals held upon the quaint old table-like structures covering the graves of families with historic names." (Lawrence, op. cit., p. 82) Dr. Warren died in 1856, two years before the death of TWW. It is not difficult to imagine youthful George Bucknam Dorr seated on his grandfather's knee on a picnic in the Granary Burying Ground surrounded by the monuments of those who had been SO prominent in the shaping of what is still at mid-century a new country. 1817 The Medford home of the former Salem resident William Ward (1761-1827) is described by Samuel G. Ward as a "charming house in the midst of what seemed to me a vast [ one acre] garden.' This garden was laid out by an old Scotch gardener who was employed afterwards at the Harvard College Botanic Garden; and next to it "was the still finer garden of the Honourable Timothy Bigelow with its glorious greenhouse. (Ward Family, 77) William married Martha Ann Proctor with whom he had one son, T.W. Ward, prior to her death; William remarried, joining with Joanna Chipman of Marblehead, sister of Mrs. William Gray. Both William Ward and Samuel Gray (see below) built houses nearly opposite each other in Medford, where they went to Boston daily for their business (William was president of the State Bank in Boston) but Samuel Gray Ward recalls "a large part of my childhood in summer was passed in Medford" where one may suppose that his sister Mary Gray Ward (see below) also spent some of her childhood (Ward Family, 74) Timeline_George Dorr Page 11 of 19 TWW becomes partner in Ropes & Ward in 1817 and continues his labors within this enterprise until 1829-30 when he is appointed American agent for Baring Brothers & Co. Boston financier Joshua Bates (1788-1864) set himself up in business with John Baring (1801-88), the third of the four exceptional sons of Sir Thomas Baring (John Orbell's Baring Brothers & Co. Limited, 29) . Bates and Baring would be merged into the Barings firm. Birth ( 10.3) of Samuel Gray Ward (1817-1907) at #3 Park Street, son of Thomas Wren Ward (1786-1858), brother of Mary Gray Ward, and uncle of GBD. Their maternal grandfather was Samuel Gray who married for his first wife Anne Orne, with whom he had several children-including Samuel and Mary's mother. William Gray, the brother of GBD's Great Grandfather, was well known as a merchant and shipowner who was closely allied with China, India, and East Indies sea merchant Joseph Peabody (1757-1844) (Dorothy Schurman Hawes. To the Farthest Reaches. Ipswich: Ipswich Press, 1990, p. 49) Following graduation from Harvard, Samuel G. Ward married Anna Hazard Barker (10.3.1840), daughter of Jacob Barker and Elizabeth Hazard. .G. Ward is eighth in line of descent. He and Samuel Ward of New York's Bond Street would over the next half century be confused with one another--and still are to this day. Admittedly, both would become schoolmates at Round Hill but over time "with respect to temperament, taste, and experience, the Boston and New York Sam Wards were antitheses, differentiated by their friends as 'the good Sam Ward (Boston) and 'the gay Sam Ward (New York) ." (Lately Thomas. Sam Ward 'King of the Lobby. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1965. Pg. 93) Samuel Dorr elected Town of Boston Selectman, when Charles Bulfinch was Chairman; another version refers to Samuel as Selectman Chairman. Remained on Board until 1821 when Boston incorporated as a city. Samuel Dorr purchases shares of Boston's Central Wharf and Wet Dock Corporation for a store lot. [ANPA] 1818 [Samuel V. Dorr was "threatened with consumption" and on the advice of his physician and friends he retires (age 31??) from business with a fortune of $160,000, yet by "prudence and good management" his fortune increased to $400,000 at time of his death (1804-1844) He chartered ships to deliver imported West India goods desired by smaller dealers and priced wholesale. (Dorr Ms. NEHGS) Recheck ! ! ]. Despite these health concerns, that Samuel Dorr would retire at such an early age was not uncommon at this time. "Since men often entered trade very young and acquired fortunes before they reached thirty, it was possible at an early age to retire from the marketplace and cultivate another world." (Paul Goodmman. "Ethics and Enterprise: The Values of a Boston Elite, 1800-1860," American Quarterly 18 [1966] p. 439) Some prosperous sons of the next generation-and their children--will reverse this process. Nonetheless, at this time Samuel Dorr was clearly the head of one of the prominent Boston families that had accumulated commercial wealth through personal achievement, not hereditary privilege. According to Paul Goodman these merchant princes "utilized an elaborate web of kinship ties which made the family a potent institution...t perpetuate their power, prominence, and way of life." (op. cit. p. 437) Establishment of the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company. By the 1830's it would become the largest single institutional source of capital in New England, despite the fact that Boston banks were models of stability. Timeline_George Dorr Page 12 of 19 1819 Samuel Dorr begins service in the Massachusetts legislature, Member of the House. Another term in 1834-35 and then in 1837 he is Suffolk County member of the Senate, serving on Comm. On Banks. Birth of Susan Elizabeth Dorr (3.11), sister of CHD, daughter of Samuel Dorr and his second wife, Susan Brown. GBD says that he came to know his aunt "intimately as I grew up and who had a warm affection for me always, was a woman of rare nobility and purity of character. Never married she directed her energies to the care of the poor and those in need. GBD includes December 10, 1889 letter that CHD received from Col. Henry Lee after Susan's death (same year, likely) which describes in detail her character. Lee was a gallant Civil War soldier and founder of Boston's leading banking firm (lee, Higginson & Co. GBD also says that he knows little of his father's brothers and sister by his father's first marriage though Susan was "close to me always alike in temperament and sympathy.' As a child he says, he instinctively recognized "that there is much that older folk have lived through to which they do not willingly turn back"-and SO he asked no questions. (DorrMs NEHGS Sam ver2) Birth of William Ward (2.6) who died in childhood (6.24.1830) 1820 Birth of Mary Gray Ward (9.29) who later would marry Charles Hazen Dorr (6.4. 1850), son of Samuel Dorr and Susan Brown Dorr. Samuel Dorr's second son, George Bucknam Dorr (1806-72) enters Harvard in the class of 1824. Member of the Porcellian Club he did not graduate because of an accident -a bootjack falling from the sill of his room- narrowly missed the head of an unpopular instructor passing below, resulting in his separation from the College which "vexed" his father. Sam Dorr's dissatisfaction with Harvard College's handling of this incident kept him from sending Albert or Francis. George learned the export-import trade from his father before following his brother (1827) to New York, marrying Joanna Hone Howland (12.21.37), eldest daughter of Samuel S. Howland who was part of the importing firm of Aspinwall and Howland. Joanna's mother was a daughter of a "methodical, shrewd, energetic businessman" named Philip Hone, who would retire this year from his commission business having "realized that he had a generous competence; that life was too rich and interesting to be spent within the four walls of a commission warehouse; and that approaching forty, he must begin at once if he would enjoy himself and complete his education." (The Diary of Philip Hone. Vol. 1. Ed. Allan Nevins. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1927. ix) Samuel Dorr's motive for retirement two years earlier was not all that dissimilar. 1821 August 27th, Birth in Boston of Charles Hazen Dorr (1821-1893), youngest son of the Hon. Samuel Dorr and Susan Brown (1779- ) of Boston; born in his father's Congress Street house overlooking the harbor. Named for his uncle by marriage (Charles Hazen), husband of his mother's younger sister, Elizabeth Brown. The biographical information on Charles is incidental at best. The Dorr Collection fortunately contains two overlapping biographies of Dorr's father. One twelve-page account is non-attributed; the other sixteen- page 1938 version is by his surviving son. In a dictaphone transcript from four years before Dorr's death, Dorr reports that he has found it Timeline_George Dorr Page 13 of 19 most difficult to reconstruct the Boston of his parents since "the presence of the great growth & changes that have been so steadily in the making." (Dorr Collection. NEHGS) Nonetheless, considerable insight into the context of his-and Mary Gray d's--Boston childhood can be gained by scrutinizing the "Autobiographical Sketch" written by James Elliot Cabot, who was born two months earlier than Charles and considered those who lived on Park Street his neighbors. Of course, Cabot is best known as Ralph Waldo Emerson's literary executor and his two-volume biography, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Nancy Craig Simmons. "The Autobiographical Sketch' of James Elliot Cabot," Harvard Library Bulletin 30 [1982] 117-152) Charles recalled looking out the nursery window to "see the ships sailing in and out of the harbor" prior to their move "when he was not quite three years old." (Dorr Coll., NEHGS), purchasing "for his older children's sake" a home on Tremont St. opposite the Common and not far from foot of Park St., , his home until he died in 1844. [See Dorr Ms. For additional details about education and wharf environment] CHD looked upon the harbor front as his "favorite playground" and he looked back always on "its memories with great pleasure." Dorr's kept a COW on Commons since they had a right to pasture. The Common was "a great playground" for games, concerts, skating, and parades. (DorrMs 'Home of Sam Dorr', Ver. Dorr recalls story "told me by President Eliot of Harvard of his own boyhood when he was one of a group livng 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 his Eliot, he's brave.' 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 molding the character that was SO marked in his later life for its independence and his refusal to quit when attacked." (DorrMs, NEHGS, 'Hon. .Samuel Dorr' CHD went to the Boston public schools and playing with his comrades on the Common "or in long-vanished, friendly gardens, or-best of all-round the wharves [where] there were sailors to talk with and glorious opportunity for climbing up the masts and rigging." 1822 Birth of John Garrison Ward (9.12), died 1.5.1856. Boston Athenaeum moves from its early home on Tremont St. to a mansion given by James Perkins on Pearl Street. Francis Calley Gray becomes a proprietor as did Samuel Dorr, who would serve as a Trustee in 1826-27. Thomas Wren Ward was also a proprietor who took a very active interest in Athenaeum affairs. This common involvement in the development of the Athenaeum appears to be the first documented significant interaction between the maternal and paternal grandfathers of George B. Dorr. (See The Influence and History of the Boston Athenaeum. Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1907) From 1828 to 1836 Thomas Wren Ward served as the fourth Treasurer of the Boston Athenaeum, preceded by Nathan Appleton and succeeded by Josiah Quincy, Jr. He also subscribed with 45 others to procure a portrait of their benefactor, James Perkins. In subsequent years he would contribute to the erection of a lecture building to furnish literary and scientific instruction (1824), to procure a bust of Washington (1825) and in 1826 to purchase the scientific transactions of foreign societies as well as partnering with Nathaniel Bowditch and Timeline_George Dorr Page 14 of 19 George Ticknor to raise funds for a scientific library. Following his death in 1858, the Athenaeum would receive a $5,000. bequest from his estate to establish an endowment with the annual income generated used to expand library holdings. Ward's son Samuel Gray Ward served as a Trustee (1853 to 1855). Son-in-law Charles Hazen Dorr and grandson George Bucknam Dorr retain the 1822 certificate share #179 of Samuel Dorr (DorrrMs, "Home of Sam Dorr,' Ver. 2). Similarly another family member, Francis Calley Gray, became a proprietor of the Boston Athenaeum-later a Trustee and President of the Board of Trustees--and was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature and later to the State senate where he served for nearly two decades with special competency in prison reform, treatment of the insane, and legislation affecting property and personal rights. Like GBD, Mr. Gray never married "but the social side of his nature led him into close relations with the chief men of his day. (C.K. Bolton, Francis Calley Gray, 7) The Athenaeum also attracted speculative writers like Bronson Alcott, William Ellery Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Gray Ward and other Transcendentalists 1823 Samuel Gray Ward (Ward Family Papers, 88) recalls that from his childhood he had a passion "for nature and landscape and art, SO that our changes of surroundings each summer were great events to me" (GBD will later echo this conviction). Sam describes visits to Swampscott where Sam made his first acquaintance with the ocean and where they lived a half mile from the sea, "a paradise for idle boys and philosophical fathers." Both the Grays and Wards were Unitarians and attended Dr. Osgood's Medford congregation. 1824 One of the "greatest friends" of TWW was Nathaniel Bowditch, the most distinguished man of science in the country at this time (Ward Family Papers, 168-69) . TWW brought his son Ingersoll to Boston to be trained in his counting house and "to live in our family He be came my lifelong friend and after my father's death in 1858 co-executor with me of his estate." Chapter XXIII of The Ward Family Papers discusses the "clans and families" with whom the Wards associated. George Bucknam Dorr, namesake of Acadia's Founder, is a member of Harvard's Porcellian Club (Porcellian Club Centennial 1791-1891. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1891) Birth of George Cabot Ward (11.4) in Salem. He graduated from Harvard (Class of '45?) and went to Heidelberg to study. He circled the globe in a sailing ship-an exceptional experience at that time-- before coming to New York to establish the banking house of Ward, Campbell & Co., which enjoyed a relationship with the Baring family. (NYT May 5, 1887 obit) He married Mary Ann Southwick, daughter of John Alley Southwick and Elizabeth Kinsman. They had two children, S.G. Ward Jr. of Kidder, Peabody & Co., and Mrs. A.A. Low. The New York Ward family is plunged into grief in early November when Mrs. Ward succumbed to puerperal fever three days after the birth of her eighth child, Annie Ward (D.B. Clifford, Mine Eyes have Seen the Glory, 14) 1825 Timeline_George Dorr Page 15 of 19 "Bates sought to renew Barings' powerful position in the American trade which had been reinforced by the business transferred from Bates and Baring" (Orbell, Baring Brothers & Co. 30). Harvard Medical School professor Jacob Bigelow calls together a group of Boston Brahmins to consider the possibility of setting up a cemetery in the country outside Boston. Their efforts to find an appropriate site were realized later when George W. Brimmer bought land known to Harvard students as "Sweet Auburn." (See B. Rotundo, "Mount Auburn Cemetery: A Proper Boston Institution," Harvard Library Bulletin 22 (1974) : 268-279) 1826 Jean Holloway's biography, Edward Everett Hall, describes the Boston of 1826 (Hale's birthdate) as "a settlement two centuries old, a smug blue- blooded dowager of a town, holding her skirts from the encroaching manufacturing interests of her own Massachusetts, flipping a scornful lorgnette at the Western territories clamoring for admission to the Union. Her pride in heritage was not unfounded [and] in its sober regard for wealth, decorum, and learning, [Boston] stood aristocratically aloof from the tumultuous excitements of an expanding nation. The Boston society in which the Hales and Websters moved was conservative and substantial; at its core were the merchants, bankers, and professional men who offices clustered about State Street It was a close-knit and homogenous community life, with all of its members intimately acquainted, knowing each other's family backgrounds, habits of life, and patterns of thought-a highly provincial yet highly cultivated society." (pp. 3, 7) Dorr's parents spent their childhood in such a mileau and appear to have acclimated to its expectations. Martha Ann Dorr marries importer Henry Edwards of Northampton, a direct descendant of Jonathan Edwards. Lived abroad, several children, two surviving to return to America but succumbing as they were reaching maturity. They had four children: Henry Dorr Edwards (1830- ), Henry Augustine Edwards (1832- ), Lucy Edwards ( 1834- ), and Emily Elizabeth Edwards (1835- ) Martha took up the new "Religion of Humanity" with Comte, Spencer, and Mill as interpreters and guides. She and her half-sister-Susan Dorr-made their home together [in Lenox at Highlawn with George B. Dorr and Francis (, their brothers] and financed a trip in mid-century to England by John Fiske. He wrote them long and interesting letters which were read to young GBD which he recalls clearly. (Dorr Ms. 'Children of..' and Vers. 2) Here GBD says that these four Dorr's "in later life, [made] 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." In a letter to JDRJr. (3.5.23), GBD defends his claim that "open grassy spaces like wild sheep pastures, are often better in contrast to continuous woods. I used to be familiar with them, wandering over the Berkshire country when I was a boy." (RAC III.2.I.B83f827). Francis Calley Gray elected a fellow of Harvard at a time when receipts were not meeting expenditures. Gray devoted himself to remedying the situation and when he retired in 1836 "radical retrenchments and reforms had freed the college from financial embarrassment" (DAB) His relatives William Gray and John Chipman Gray were also (see 1856) college benefactors and the family name was perpetuated in Gray's Hall, a Harvard dormitory built in 1863. 1828 Timeline_George Dorr Page 16 of 19 The Boston State House area during the 1820's is described by GBD (DorrMs) where the area north of the State House had been "a choice site for the homes and gardens of leading citizens." In the early 1890's these houses were torn down to make space for the State House and as CHD walked these Streets "freed from buildings that had hidden { the gardens] for 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 a vision." Recounted to GBD as he "tried to reconstruct the Boston of my father's and my mother's early days since they have gone but find it [because of the great changes] .most difficult. GBD reflects here on gains and loses concluding that "never has my life been SO full of unanswerable questions as it is today." The mechanisms of Barings Brothers & Company trade with America needed overhauling. For nearly three decades the Barings had developed interests in Canada and America, centered on Alexander Baring who had become the proprietor of vast territories in uninhabited parts of Maine and Pennsylvania (he had married Anna Bingham and inherited $900,00 in 1804 upon the death of his father-in-law (Roy A. Foulke, The Sinews of American Commerce, 329). His nephew, Thomas, later would be the senior Barings partner and in 1828 he sailed for America to investigate opportunities. Samuel Gray Ward writes 12.23.1893) to sister Mary about letters she sent him about events in this year when "old Tom Baring (then young Tom) came along in those days when father was laid up in Park Street (he was near a year getting over the accident) to arrange about the Agency.' Reference is to Thomas Baring (1799-1873), second son of Sir Thomas Baring. S.G. Ward says that his father "thought he had retired from business to devote himself to his books and public objects" before "nature and habit, and his own restless activity were too much for him - and he went back to work.' (MHS, T. Ward Papers, B3. f28). Possible date when Samuel Gray Ward enters the Round Hill School in Northampton, an experimental school founded in 1823 by Joseph Green Cogswell and George Bancroft who had both studied in Gottingen, imparting to Ward a taste for German and Italian literature. At this time there were few preparatory schools and both Cogswell and Bancroft had experience as Harvard tutors well aware of the academic merits and failings of a undergraduate education, especially since Harvard was still geared toward preparation for the clergy rather than a life of scholarship (John S. Bassett "The Round Hill School, 26) Samuel Ward III of New York and Thomas Gold Appleton were pupils and their written impressions survive. The School closed in 1834: the Round Hill education (p.61) "was about as good as a college education SO nearly were they equal that it was not to be expected that both could thrive in the same country." 1829 T.W. Ward typescript letter (9.27) to son George wherein he hands over stocks or cash amounting to $20,400, stressing that this capital should generate an income of $1,500 annually. The Park Street Ward family welcomes a new neighbor. The scholar George Ticknor and his family move into Nine Park Street opposite the State House. The entrance "was a fine curved staircase with wrought iron railings; a small tree on the right of the door and thick wisteria vines climbing on the left blended with the soft patina of the bricks. The large door, flanked by sidelights and a fanlight, opened into a marble hall and a broad staircase which led to an inner sanctum, the library on the second floor, where eventually over 14,000 books would be Timeline_George Dorr Page 17 of 19 housed. (For additional details on the Ticknor home, see David B. Tyack. George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. Pp. 159 f. Professor Ticknor was a [the?] central figure in shaping that exclusive social group , the Brahmin caste of New England. Oliver Wendell Holmes applied this term to those whose conversations turn on intellectual matters, not those commercial and financial discussions that vulgarize many gatherings. In the mid-1830's the Ticknors would journey to Europe for an extended stay and the first born son of neighbor Thomas Wren Ward, Samuel Gray Ward, would accompany them. In early fall, TWW became the Barings Brothers special resident representative in the U.S. This would prove to be the family firm for three generations. "Ward was a protégé of [Joshua] Bates, and the acquisition of an independent source of commercial intelligence and a man-on-the-spot to issue credits must have filled a yawning gap in the houses's management" (Orbell, Baring Brothers & Co., 30). This position TWW will hold until 1853. (R.W. Hidy's The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance covers the 1828-42 timeframe "when American trade, shipping, and finance were the 'dominant interest' of Barings and carries the story forward to 1861 when American business declined proportionate to other global markets") The greater portion of the Baring's business consisted in the granting of credit to finance American commerce, the merchant shipping trade predominating. Nearly all of this American business passed through Ward's hands in staggering lounts--$50,000,000 in Ward's first three years. TWW selected correspondents, granted credits, arranged for the transfer of shipping documents, collected debt, negotiated loans, and "reported upon prevailing economic conditions, the financial market, and the political outlook." Hidy affirms that the greatest single asset of the Barings was their ability to judge "the advent of periods of stringency and crisis" (e.g., the panics of 1837 & 1857). Ward traveled extensively, drafted clear, frank, and concise letters to London but in a banking system that lacked checks and balances, the London office relied exclusively on Ward's presentation and interpretation of the collected credit information. Responsible over time for thousands of clients, TWW invented a comprehensive credit rating method that antedated John M. Bradstreet's first rating book and was a wholly American innovation (Foulke, 377) . Moreover, Ward enlisted Daniel Webster as the firm's legal council. During the period 1828-42 American trade, shipping, and finance were the dominant interest of Baring's as opposed to their interests in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Canada. ( See R.W. Hidy, The House of Baring) . Recognizing the new enthusiasm for horticulture, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (MHS) is established, the fifth American society of this kind. In a bold move two years later, the MHS initiated a national landscape movement by establishing the first garden cemetery in the English-speaking world, Mount Auburn Cemetery. "The integration of landscaping into its initial planning gives Mount Auburn its claim to an undisputed first." (B. Rotundo, "Mount Auburn Cemetery: A proper Boston Institution, Harvard Library Bulletin 22 (1974), p. 269; see also Tamara P. Thornton's Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1785-1860. New Haven: Yale U.P., 1989. Pp. 159 ff.) Thomas Wren Ward would be one of the founding proprietors and many Ward and Dorr family members would be interred here. This connection of these families to this institution should not be taken casually. The Ward family Park Avenue property abutted the Granary Burying-Ground, daily impressing on the Wards the universal fate of every man regardless of his or her station. Yet the family patriarch was drawn to this Timeline_George Dorr Page 18 of 19 somewhat distant rural setting in Cambridge where the "insignificance and evanescence of this world's rewards" would be sited in a setting of incomparable and lasting beauty. Thornton (op. cit. , p. 167) further argues that the horticulture movement would also spawn America's first park advocates-Downing, Vaux, and Olmsted-intent upon uplifting not only the rich but the masses as well to the beauties of a world increasingly threatened by the forces of materialism. John Muir, Charles Eliot, and George B. Dorr would be the second generation of park advocates. As we shall see, Dorr was first a horticulturist and then a park advocate and administrator who repeatedly would remind everyone that Acadia National Park's origins were to be found in his parents Old Farm garden on Mount Desert Island and in the Ward family gardens in Medford. In 1830 Thomas Wren Ward is selected for a position of great responsibility that will occupy his attention for the next twelve years. Although not a Harvard graduate, he is elected to the Corporation and as Treasurer of Harvard College manages the finances of the institution; his entrepreneurial savvy had been recognized two years earlier with his appointment as Treasurer of the Boston Athenaeum; his son Samuel Gray Ward and grandson namesake Thomas Wren Ward will serve the Athenaeum as donors and officers. Thomas Wren Ward senior will retain the Harvard position until 1840. Ward's accounting methods will serve as a reference point for Samuel Atkins Eliot (1798-1862, Harvard '17), the father of Charles William Eliot, who became Harvard Treasurer (1842 to 1853) . Timeline_George Dorr Page 19 of 19 GEORGE BUCKNAM DORR Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D Part IA1B: 1831-1852 (November 26, 2007) Joseph Edgar Chamberlin's history of the highly influential Boston Transcript newspaper characterizes this decade as "the riotous thirties," a period when Boston "seethed with the spirit of change. (The Boston Transcript, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930, ch. 4) It was the dawn of that spectacular period of American literature reflected in the writings of Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne. Over the next thirty years, the abolition of human slavery was the persistent theme in this community. There were other currents of change, however, for the "pulpits were filled with saintly reformers. Anti-Slavery, temperance, social reconstruction, popular education, 'women's rights, the amelioration of the lot of the workers, a score of betterment agitations, were at their beginning. The leaven of change ran through the whole life of New England, as well as the nation." (op. cit. pp. 36-37) 1831 Birth of Thomas William Ward (9.3) eighth and last child of T.W. Ward and the uncle of George B. Dorr, who died when he was a youngster (12.3.59) 1832 Thomas Wren Ward gave Harvard College "an interesting collection of casts, and drawings which had belonged to the late Dr. Casper Spurzheim.' (Samuel A. Eliot. A Sketch of the History of Harvard College: And its Present State.) 1833 In March the Massachusetts Historical Society purchased for its own use the second story of the Provident Institution for Savings. Samuel A. Dorr was one of the subscribers that funded this purchase. The underrepresented sightless citizens of Boston find a staunch advocate in Samuel Gridley Howe, recently returned from Europe. Howe was able to secure support from the legislature to underwrite the education of twenty blind students; additional funds from the general public were needed. The keystone gift was the "munificent donation" of the 22 Pearl Street home of wealthy businessman T.H. Perkins (1765-1854), contingent on the novel requirement that the institution had to raise an endowment of $50,000 within a month. Women's groups persuaded shopkeepers to donate merchandise that was then offered for sale at public fairs. Thomas Wren Ward's daughter Martha wrote to her father about the accuracy of a pamphlet ("Scenes at the Fair") which satirized those attending this financially successful May 1st event at Faneuil Hall. (Carl Seaburg & Stanley Paterson. Merchant Prince of Boston. Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1971. Pp. 378-82) The Perkins and Ward family would be joined in the last decade of the century when the granddaughter of Samuel Gray Ward (Elizabeth Howard Ward) married Charles Bruen Perkins. James Augustus Dorr graduated from Harvard, first among its ten first- listed finalists." His intent was the ministry but he became "embued" with the growing skepticism of the era and entered business and then relocated to Europe for study and travel. GBD cites Albert's act of Timeline_George Dorr Page 1 of 28 generosity in teaching for a Harvard chum and turning over his earnings SO that he could complete his degree. (DorrMs. Ver.2). He also recounts James' "extraordinary power of concentration and self-control" illustrated by his Exeter experience at a swimming hole. Unable to swim he watched his chums and made up his mind to succeed which in turn he did. Samuel Gray Ward enters Harvard as a sophomore shortly before his 16th b-day. He lives at the home of Harvard mathematics Professor John Farrar whose second wife Eliza had a cousin who will, figure prominently in the Ward family history. In 1840, Mrs. Farrar, her cousin Anna Hazard Barker of Newport, and Mary Ward would participate in Margaret Fuller's Boston Conversations at a new foreign language bookstore at 13 West Street that would become well renowned for the exchange of transcendental ideas. 1834 The DorrMs ("Children Ver 2) contains what is likely the sole surviving Samuel Dorr letter (10.14) of some three pages in length to Albert Dorr (who was in Paris) responding to Albert's letters from Europe. It shows considerable fatherly concern, especially regarding "cutting out no more than you can see well finished." Samuel urges Albert to apply this principle to matters of business as well, underscoring the point with the belief that what detracts from "our national wealth and prosperity. is that much of our prosperity and gains come from the labor of the Slave." While he does not approve of "immediate emancipation" he is uncertain about how this "liberation of the oppressed people" will come about. Birth of future Harvard President Charles William Eliot, March 20th in Boston Massachusetts. Following his graduation from the Boston Public Latin School in 1849, he will enter Harvard and graduate in June 1853, third in his class. Francis Calley Gray relocates to Beacon Street where he lived until 1845 when he relocated to Park Street near the Wards and Ticknors. June 6: The birth of Annie Adams (later Fields) Later after her marriage to James Fields, their residence (148 Charles Street) may well have been the first American literary salon (See Barbara Ruth Rotundo, "Mrs. James T. Fields, Hostess and Biographer," Ph.D. dissertation [pp. 14 ff.) as well as Annie Fields unpublished journals, 1863-1876 (see Rotundo, ch. 2) TWW is persuaded by Edward Everett to solicit a fund of $100,000 raised from subscribers who wanted to keep Daniel Webster actively involved politically. (Maurice G. Barker, One and Inseparable: Daniel Webster and the Union [Cambridge: Harvard, 1984], 285). 1835 Marriage of Samuel Fox Dorr and Elizabeth Chipman Hazen, daughter of Charles Hazen. For the Brahmin society during this era "business as a vocation, stability as a social condition, hierarchy as a principle, culture as an emblem, and self- and civic-improvement as an aspiration endured as the prime values of the patriciate. Moreover this "multifaceted upper class controlled a significant share of [Boston] public offices and was extensively bonded by birth, marriage, and continuity. In 1835 its predominance and cohesion were impregnable; by 1860 some slippage had occurred in its position." (Jaher. The Urban Establishment, p. 75-76). Timeline_George Dorr Page 2 of 28 Samuel G. Ward first meets Margaret Fuller, eight years his senior on an delightful excursion with the Farrars up the North River. He shared her enthusiasm for nature and art. On his return from Italy they fell into "an exuberant intimacy" wherein she called him "Raffaello" and he, seven years her junior, called her "Mother" (B. Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth, 108) . Ralph Waldo Emerson settles permanently on the Cambridge Turnpike in Concord. T.W. Ward is one of the first proprietors of the newly opened Mount Auburn Cemetery. He purchases (on 9.4) a 300 sq. ft. perpetual care lot on Walnut Avenue far removed from the cemetery entrance. Martha Ann Ward will be the first Ward interred here on November 4, 1853 but over the next eight decades sixteen other Ward family members will be interred here, the last being Thomas Wren Ward (7.20.1940) . (Mount Auburn Cemetery Historical Collections, #235). In September, Ralph Waldo Emerson settles down in his Concord ancestral home, temporarily residing in the Old Manse, built by his grandfather, Rev. William Emerson, and now owned by the current Concord pastor, Ezra Ripley. (On the contrast between the pull of cosmopolitan Boston and Emerson's attraction to pastoral Concord, see Robert A. Gross. "Transcendentalism and Urbanism: Concord, Boston, and the Wider World," Journal of American Studies 18 (1984) : 361-381) 1836 Birth of Samuel Fox Dorr's eldest son, Samuel (1836- ) who would graduate from Harvard in 1857. His younger brother Hazen (1837-56) taught CHD how to row and ride and swim at Jamaica Pond, causing much grief for CHD when he died while a Harvard UG. Their mother Elizabeth which GBD recalls seeing before she sailed for Europe with son Samuel where she died. One of many remarks about Mary Gray Ward's irresponsibility as a correspondent, when elder brother Samuel Ward chides her (3.6) since "I should think you might have acknowledged receipt of your steed" that he apparently purchased for her. (TWWPapers B3f22) . Julia Ward's first expression of scholarship, an anonymous review (in Literary and Theological Review) of Lamartine's Jocelyn (1836) appears, eliciting comment from those who knew her work since it was not the kind of thing a young woman was expected to produce (G. Williams, Hungry Heart, pp. 16-17). A second essay would appear in 1839, "remarkable not just for the authority and range of the evaluative voice but for Julia Ward's determination to publish them striking for someone of her age, class, and marital status." " Sam G. Ward (a few months before his Harvard graduation) unknowingly provides the rationale for a biography of his nephew (GBD) when he states (3.16) in a letter to an unnamed family member that "It is a pity that in the lives of great men, SO meager an account is usually given of their youth and education. We like to know how they grew up-to what influence they were exposed-at any rate, it must be curious to see the cultivation of this or that trait in a child that may have influenced the fate of a nation.' (TWWpapers B3,f3) S.G. Ward handwritten undated letter to Mary apologizing for not being with her at commencement since Timeline_George Dorr Page 3 of 28 he is about to leave for two weeks to tour the White Mts. then the Green Mts. and on to the Connecticut River Valley. (TWWPapers B3, f22). Following his Sam G. Ward's Harvard graduation (like James A. Dorr he too was a member of the Porcellian Club), he begins a "Wanderjahr" abroad, voyaging with the Farrar's. Margaret Fuller was asked by Mrs. Farrar to accompany her as a companion--but she withdrew. Sam writes to Mary from London (11.8) hoping that his letters and sketches have safely arrived back home. Now traveling with the Ticknors on the continent, he recalls in The Ward Family Papers his delight with his traveling companions: "All day we could be poets and artists, and aristocrats all night." He encourages Mary to show his letters to "my friend Miss Fuller, apparently unaware of Fuller's incipient romantic feelings for him; he strongly encourages Mary to take the opportunity to be with Fuller her and attend her "lessons in the languages" for "she not only has read more than any woman of my acquaintance but understands more thoroughly the spirit of the German and Italian literatures than any one I know [above all] make her if you can your friend." (TWWPapers B3 f23) Carlos Baker recently concluded that Ward's "purpose in traveling was to collect reproductions of famous pictures, especially those of Raphael, and to take lessons in drawing and painting in some atelier of Rome or Florence." (C. Baker, Emerson among the Eccentrics, 66). The inspiration for the Transcendental Club had its beginnings in June when Bangor Unitarian minister Frederick Henry Hedge sent letters to Ralph Waldo Emerson and a few other clerics to form a 'symposium' to discuss the mood of the times. In early September following the Harvard Bicentennial Celebration, Emerson, George Ripley, and George Putnam Harvard Bicentennial Celebration met "to discuss 'the state of current opinion in theology and philosophy,' and to ask what could be done `in the way of protest [against Unitarianism] and instruction of deeper and broader views. 1" (Joel Myerson," Frederick Henry Hedge and the Failure of Transcendentalism," Harvard Library Bulletin 23, #2 (1975) 401) Sometimes called Hedge's Club, the Transcendental Club gathered in at private homes in Concord, Boston, and Medford around topics like theology, metaphysics, scholarship, poetry, etc. During the next four years the Club met nearly thirty times; following the relaxing of membership requirements that permitted the involvement of layman, Samuel Gray Ward may have attended a meeting on December 5, 18939 at Rev. Ripley's home. ( J. Myerson. A Calendar of Transcendental Club Meetings," American Literature 44 (1972) : 197-207) Following the anonymous publication of Nature, the recently formed "Transcendental Club" meets in October at Emerson's Concord home where a large number of area luminaries attended, including Brownson, Parker, Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, and Margaret Fuller (G.W. Cooke, An Historical and Biographical Introduction to Accompany The Dial, v.1, 50- 55) . For a dozen years the club was "the visible expression of one of the most important mental movements this country has known. Its chief value was its effects on our literature. [for its fostered] bold initiative, daring innovation, and courage to look at life as it is." As important t was the fact that the first independent and original journal published in this country originated within the assembled participants. During the four years of its existence Samuel Gray Ward would contribute ten pieces including several poems, a Dante translation, and varied critiques of art and architecture. 1837 First bridge erected connecting MDI to the mainland. Timeline_George Dorr Page 4 of 28 S.G. Ward writes to Mary from Paris (1.10) that "The American ladies have been presented at Court this week and among them some of your acquaintance: The Miss Appleton's, the Walshes, the Searses and Mrs. Brooks. Brother Sam describes the event and offers advice on what Mary should be reading (Homer's Odyssey), emphasizing poets like Virgil and Horace, regarding "books [as] your best friends." Asks Mary if she has heard of "the science of animal magnetism" and affirms that several gentleman (including a Mr. Dorr) have engaged a professor to give us lessons in order "to see what Yankee ingenuity can do toward finding the truth of the matter." He's sent sketches to Mary and encourages her drawing. (TWWPapers B3f.23). A source of confusion occurs when we now must speak of the interactions between two unrelated families both named Ward. The New York Wards were derived from an old and respected Rhode Island from England during the Restoration. Colonel Samuel Ward had fought in the Revolution under General Washington and finding his future prospects in Newport unsatisfactory he became a New York merchant. (Deborah P. Clifford. Mine Eyes have Seen the Glory. Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1978, ch. 1) His granddaughter Julia Ward [Howe] and met Mary Gray Ward in Newport, the granddaughter of Salem merchant William Ward. These two would have a most interesting relationship that would span both their lives and prove decisive more than sixty years later for George Bucknam Dorr. Julia and Mary "remained close friends for the next several years {as} Julia's father had purchased a farm there earlier in the decade in order to escape the epidemics of cholera then plaguing New York." Mary's family found in Newport a "quiet refuge from Boston's summer heat" and "both girls were very happy there... [They] were accustomed to solitude. Both loved literature, and both felt different from other young women by virtue of their intellectual leanings. Each rejoiced to discover a soul mate. Over the next six years, they exchanged visits and steady correspondence." (Mary H. Grant. Private Woman, Public Person. pp. 43- 44) Mary was "an important influence" on Julia, since the two also shared a common interest in books and ideas, pursuits not shared by Julia's younger sisters. "Trips to Dorchester to visit Mary became a regular part of Julia's life, and Mary grew to be not only her most important confident during this time, but another means by which Julia ward's intellectual range expanded." (G. Williams, Hungry Heart, p. 18). From June 1837 until December 1838 Margaret Fuller taught in Providence at the Green Street School, practicing on her school girls here "a progressive style of teaching that she would later (through 1844) apply to the prominent women of Boston [including Mary Gray Ward] during the celebrated and highly successful Conversations" (See L.R. Fergeson, "Margaret Fuller in the Classroom, p. 131) Reared in New York, Julia Ward "had not enjoyed the chance Mary [Ward] had to work with other young women under the guidance of someone like Margaret Fuller. Visiting Mary meant gradual exposure to Unitarian and Transcendental thinking, a wide-spreading intellectual terrain at once frightening and enticing." (G. Williams, Hungry Heart, p. 19). S.G. Ward in Rome traveling with the Ticknor's (Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1876. 2 Vols.) before moving on with Cogswell to Heidelberg then Munich; as a conscientious neighbor and friend, Ticknor sent reports beck to Ward's father (7.20) ; in August Sam reaches Interlaken and reunion with the Timeline_George Dorr Page 5 of 28 Farrar's whose young companion would make a lasting impression on young Sam. Anna was part of a New England Quaker family headed by Nantucket's émigré Jacob Barker and his Newport wife. All nine surviving children were born in New York City where the family lived until they relocated in 1834 to New Orleans. Unlike Sam's father "who sought no publicity by word or deed, flamboyant resiliant and pugnacious" Barker acquired and lost fortunes, and was an enthusiastic democrat who defended free blacks abused by the police and challenged the limits placed on the rights of the foreign born. (E. Tilton, "The True Romance of Anna Hazard Barker & Samuel Gray Ward," Studies in the American Renaissance, 1987. p. 55) Throughout September and the first half of October the companions of the Farrars traveled together until Sam departs for Dresden to study German throughout the winter, returning to American in the Spring. Anna's "upbringing and education were at the least the equal of Ward's, being several years older and having traveled more and having had the opportunity to cultivate more friends than he, she brought high expectations into the relationship, and furthermore, Ward had not settled on any career and had no specific training for one." (Donald Fitch, "The Ward-Perkins Papers," Soundings XVI (1985), p. 35) Francis Calley Gray travels abroad with Joseph G. Cogswell, teacher at Round Hill, scholar, and librarian of the Astor Library. They journeyed northward together through Italy and Switzerland. Gray spent his later years at his Park Street home where he entertained his friends of the Wednesday Evening Club and the Friday Evening Club. S.G. Ward writes to Mary from Dresden (11.1) thanking her for her 9.28 letter which was a source of "great relief" though anxiety persists in apparent reference to Martha's condition. Mary had written about "leaving school" which Sam endorses "if you employ your time better at home [where] you may study more." He encourages her to develop a method, to be disciplined, to keep a daily journal, to write to him weekly, and to further develop her drawing skills for "if we are not amused or interested in this world the fault lies not in objects around us, but in ourselves." (TWWPapers B3f.23). 1838 Hudson and Berkshire Railroad opens for travel to West Stockbridge; in 1841 to Pittsfield easing travel from Boston. In 1841 the first train went through Pittsfield from Albany to Boston. Prior to that time it was 31 hours to Boston. As Treasurer of Harvard College, Thomas Wren Ward offers his letter of resignation on January 16th, citing his responsibilities to Barings. President Josiah Quincy refused to accept it. One reason may have been his service with President Quincy on a revamped committee to construct a new library. On 25 April the Gore Hall cornerstone is laid. Three years would pass before the structure was completed and books were relocated to it from Harvard Hall. Torn down in 1913 to permit the massive Widener Library to be built, in its day the structure was SO highly valued by Cambridge that when the city incorporated in 1846 Gore Hall was adopted as the center of the community's new official seal. It is unclear when Ward accepts the position but we know that Samuel A. Eliot ('17) assumed the position in 1842 and held it until 1853. His son, Samuel, returns to America early this year. Following a reunion with his family he begins working in the New York office of Jonathan Goodhue, a choice that surprised his father (see Sam's letters to TWW regarding Martha's illness, 6.15 & 6.17 in TWWPapers B3 f4). He takes time from his labors for a summer excursion with his mother and sister Martha to the Berkshires. Timeline_George Dorr Page 6 of 28 Julia Ward [later Howe] writes to brother Henry (no specific date) about "a clandestine correspondence" apparently with Mary Gray Ward. Julia continues that these "things do come to light prematurely, somehow or other. Dear Mary speaks of you SO confidently in her letters. If I thought you capable of disappointing her, I would shoot you, with very little hesitation. She is too pure, too lovely to belong to any man, and I don't know what you have done to deserve her." Other undated from the same timeframe address her as "Dearest Molly" and are signed "Jules." One letter from Julia to Mary refers to Boston as "an oasis in the desert, a place where the larger proportion of people are loving, rational, and happy. I long for greener pastures and still waters, its pure intellectual atmosphere and its sunlight of kindness and truth..." (Yellow House Papers, The Laura E. Richards Collection, Gardiner Library Association and the Maine Historical Society, Coll. 2085, RG18, f7) R.W. Emerson completes an address for the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity School. This was not only the most memorable event in the early years of this School but also a "masterpiece of revolutionary rhetoric" that has spirited the interest of Emersonians to this day. Samuel Eliot Morison. Three Centuries of Harvard 1636-1936. p. 243) Young Emerson argued that this School trained ministers for a dead church, a point of view that Emerson later would describe as producing "an outcry in all our leading local newspapers against my 'infidelity,' 'pantheism,' & 'atheism. (The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of RWE, V. 7, xi) During the fall and into the next year these attacks persisted. The assessment of historian Morison is that "the unforgivable sin of the University was her failure to find Emerson the chair of Rhetoric that he craved, or to provide something to keep him in Cambridge, even if he did nothing more than play Socrates for half a morning hour at the Yard pump." (Morison, op. cit., p. 244) It was at this time-and perhaps in response to his unpopularity-tha Emerson in the next few years consolidated his thinking ands was highly productive in his addresses, orations, and lectures; he also made important new friendships that "come to me unsought": Jones Very, William Ellery Channing II, Caroline Sturgis, H.D. Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar, and Samuel G. Ward formed a youthful coterie seeking new cultural directions (J.B. McNulty, "Emerson's Friends and the Essay on Friendship," NEQ, 390 and The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. A.W. Plumstead & H. Hayford. Vol. VII. P. xiii). August 17: Margaret Fuller speaks to R.W. Emerson with enthusiasm about Sam G. Ward who she endorsed as good company and praised as sophisticated about European art. Emerson records in his Journal that "Miss Fuller brought with her a portfolio of S[amuel] Ward" containing pictures that he "looked at with leisure & with profit" (Journals, V. 7, 46) According to Emerson editor Tilton, being "extremely reticent by nature," Ward did not respond to Emerson's initial invitations to meet. According to Sam (Ward Family Papers, 164) he had become "so fascinated by hearing several of his lectures [that summer] that I was made very happy by receiving. Through Margaret Fuller, an invitation to pass a night with him at Concord" for ..while you listened to him you were living in the keen air of a mountain top in which you felt he dwelt continuously, but which you could only bear while magnetized by him, too thin for you to breathe in common life." Here Sam fails to acknowledge his avoidance of Emerson's initial invitations but we sense Ward's inhibitory appreciation for Emerson's stature. Timeline_George Dorr Page 7 of 28 Fall: Samuel G. Ward and Emerson meet for the first time. Invited to Concord, Ward lends Emerson a portfolio of copy sketches he had gathered in Europe. Emerson would hold onto these sketches for many months even though he admits in a letter (10.27.39) that "Ten men can awaken me by words, to new hope & fruitful musing, for one that can achieve the miracle by forms. Besides I think the pleasure of the poem lasts me longer." (Tilton, Letters of RWE, V. 7) The friendship blossomed in the 1840's even though they met infrequently. Later Ward would gravitate back to his mercantile family, moving "away from Emerson's contemplative approach to living" (D. Baldwin, p. 299). Nonetheless, Ward emphasizes in his letters to his grandchildren "how close our relation became, and though I saw him rarely after I removed to New York, how the friendship lasted as long as he lived, and you know how it continues in the second and third generation" (Ward Family Papers, 165). S.G. Ward consulted Amos Lawrence on travel options to western Pennsylvania and then south to New Orleans where he arrives (10.17) and is much impressed by the liveliness of the city. He is there to learn the business of a cotton broker and to find the occupation best suited for his character. Impressed by the vitality he finds he writes enthusiastically to his father about the locale and the Barker's, whose daughter Anna Hazard Barker had met Ward in Europe two years earlier when she vacationed there with the Farrars. 1839 S.G. Ward from New Orleans (1.6) to Mary who was glad to receive her two letters. He is "glad that you go on with your studies and find that books that were tasks to the girl become the friends of the woman, and better friends than these silent ones that give SO much and require SO little you will not often find." He urges her to write and reiterates the need for "more particulars. Tell me of where you were yesterday, who was there, who charmed or displeased you. Your observations on everything that you read, say or hear." (TWWPapers B3 f25). S.G. Ward from Mobile (2.22) to Mary describing the environment. Hopes to be back with the family by June. He remarks that Mary is "just at the right age now for the mind to embrace whatever it takes hold of with the greatest vigor. Again emphasizes his desire that she "write always with the most perfect freedom.' (TWWPapers B3 f25) Sam continues to write to Mary throughout the winter months encouraging her reading and painting. According to Eleanor Tilton Ward would paint and sketch his entire life, suggest designs for his homes, and try his hand at landscape gardening- but he did not think of himself as an artist ("True Romance," 62-63) He writes to TWW (3.4) from New Orleans-in a express letter marked 'Private' regarding "a lady to whom I have been for some time been strongly attached." Implied suggestion that he wants to propose to Anna Barker. (TWWPapers B3, f. 7) In Havana on 12 April he receives his father's reply of 3.18 and states that that his father is "a friend toward which I need have no reserve. (Tilton, "True Romance," 64) Samuel G. Ward writes an account of a half-hour interaction in his Boston business office with poet and fellow Harvard classmate Jones Very (1813-1880), an encounter that the commentator describes as an "interview between the mystic and the banker.' (L.H. Butterfield, "Come with me to the Feast; or, Transcendentalism in Action," M.H.S. Miscellany #6 (1960) : 1-3) Both Very and Ward also shared an acquaintance with R.W. Emerson to whom Elizabeth Peabody had introduced Very the year earlier. However, within a few months Very would be dismissed from his Harvard position, and persuaded by his family to enter the McLean Asylum where he would be released a month later. His Timeline_George Dorr Page 8 of 28 visit to Ward reveals Very convinced that nothing should stand in the way of his former classmate to "come to the feast" and abandon the "husks" of commercialism and conventionality. Ward remains unconvinced by the suggestion of a coming apocalypse and we remain unsure whether Very's incoherence is a warning regarding the excesses of transcendental explorations. This account comes into the possession of the Society on or about 1960 and Butterworth's commentary stresses that "it would be hard to imagine two men more different than Ward and Very, which is one of the reasons why their interview is memorable." " In April Sam G. Ward relocates to New York-awaiting Anna's visit to the North which is delayed until October--where he is in contact with the New York Wards, sending two letters to Mary (4/7 and 7.27) referring to her "Newport friends." "The friendship with the Wards of New York had grown with the engagement of Mary Ward to Henry Ward of New York. Mary Ward is spending a good deal of the summer in Newport where her brother visits to go boating and riding with his prospective in-laws." In May and June Elizabeth Peabody was writing articles in the unpopular cause of defending Emerson's address to the Harvard Divinity School and analyzing for the Salem Gazette the important Boston exhibit of Washington Allston's paintings. This artistic event comes to the attention of banker Sam Ward in New York who sends Julia, Louisa, and their tutor to Boston SO that they might experience the fifty Allston paintings in Harding's portrait gallery (See Megan Marshall. The Peabody Sisters, p. 382) Meanwhile Margaret Fuller charges Sam with neglecting her and even though "Ward had never regarded her as anything but an older woman, " Fuller is distraught at news of an apparent Ward-Barker alliance and mails him a highly emotional letter tantamount to the charge of betrayal of their love for one another (Tilton, "True Romance," p. 64) Sam sends to Mary his horse (Squirrel) while she is there. (TWWPapers B3 f26). In an undated letter to Mary, Sam notes that she has not written to acknowledge receipt of your steed that Sam apparently sent her. One of many instances where Marty is chided for not writing, though Sam's magnanimity shines through since "when people don't write I am sure they are enjoying themselves." (TWWPapers B3f22) Mary Ward may have been distracted from her correspondence by the force of the movement that Ralph Waldo Emerson SO aptly describes: "The summer of 1839 saw the full dawn of the Transcendental movement in New England...an assertion of the inalienable integrity of man, of the immanence of Divinity in instinct. In part, it was a reaction against Puritan Orthodoxy; in part, an effect of renewed study of the ancients. {and] in part, the natural product of the culture of the place and time" (R.W. Emerson et al., Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, V. 2, 12) Mary Ward will be drawn within its influence and is characterized by her contemporaries as one of the first transcendentalists. T. W. Ward supports Daniel Webster's funding request from Baring Brothers despite his "recklessness in pecuniary matters" since Webster "can bring more power of mind in an argument on great questions than any man now living" even if we have to write off his debt. Later Webster would offer Barings legal advice. In 1846 TWW would collaborate with Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Co. to establish through subscription a fund that would yield $1,000 annually for Webster. (quoted in R. V. Remini, Daniel Webster [NY: W.W. Norton, 19971, p. 486-87, 601.) Timeline_George Dorr Page 9 of 28 Charles Hazen Dorr brought up by Samuel Dorr "to be from the start a business man and as he grew up found himself well satisfied, making him in his will trustee of his sister Susan Dorr's estate a trust which he fulfilled faithfully and well for over forty years. " (DorrMs NEHGS, CHD Ver. Photography in its practical applications began in 1839 with J.M. Daguerre's process (Daguerreotype) and H.F. Talbot's published account in London of The Art of Photogenic Drawing which reached the eastern U.S. By the end of 1841 "Boston had become a center for high-quality daguerreotype likenesses" (F. Rinhart and Marion Rinhart. The American Daguerreotype, p. 63). First Emerson meeting with Samuel G. Ward (7.1) and their paths intersect in the White Mountains in late August although it was not until after Anna Barker (Ward's future wife) arrived in New England that the correspondence between Emerson and Ward involved a serious exploration of the character of one another. Their relationship would continue over RWE's lifetime and throughout his long life Samuel G. Ward would also maintain relationships with his Transcendentalist friends, despite his later relocation to New York where he would become a patron of the arts and founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. James A. Dorr like his brothers George and Francis, spend a good deal of time in Paris during the Third Empire and become ardent admirers of the Napoleonic dynasty. James Dorr translated and published at his own expense (printed in Brussels by Prince Napoleon-Louis Bonaparte), "Idees Napoleoniennes." Copy given to Mary Dorr (7/4/68) that GBD inherited. (DorrMs NEHGS Samuel Ver 2) Incomplete letter from S. G. Ward from New York having sailed there from unspecified point of departure where he dined with Mr. [Sam] Ward where "the young ladies enquiring, as well as their father, with the kindest affection after you, who they seem to consider as another sister, if not something more. I had a long talk with Henry [Ward] last night whom I find just the same but with all his warmth and good qualities the same as ever." Another inadequately dated letter from S.G. Ward in New York to Mary is a response to her "note" where he expresses frustration at being "tired to death of saying nothing and hearing nothing but banks. Samuel G. Ward writes to TWW from Newport (8.9) that "Mary seems to be well and strong...] believe Mary wishes to stay until Commencement, when some of her friends will be coming to Boston. They seem much attached to her, and desirous to have her with them." And later (8.26) "we reluctantly part with Miss Mary, who goes with some young folks who I gladly commit to your kind care. (TWWPapers B3 f8) Undated handwritten letter to Mary from Samuel G. Ward discussing her relationship with Julia [Ward Howe], cautioning her to "take care that those qualities in you are never led astray by the faults of her character. You cannot value more highly than I do her good qualities. So to he stresses that she "not misjudge your father," emphasizing that he is "my father's companion almost more than his son, and I sincerely believe the best friend Henry ever had. " Appears to be advice given immediately following Henry Ward's death, to whom Mary was [apparently] engaged. (TWWPapers B3,f22) "Six letters from Mary to Julia and two from Julia to Mary are preserved in the Houghton collections [of Harvard University]. The first three of Mary's and both of Julia's date from 1839. [and] one [9.17.1839] records the sharp distinction she was beginning to draw between Boston and New Timeline_George Dorr Page 10 of 28 York." (G. Williams. Hungry Heart, p. 19). "Boston is an oasis in the desert, a place where the larger proportion of the people are loving, rational, and happy. I long for its green pastures and still waters, its pure intellectual atmosphere and its sunlight of kindness and truth." (Julia Ward Howe. Yellow House Papers. RG 18. Gardiner Library Association) Entire Ward family is disappointed at John Ward's "failure to enter college," according to letter of Sam G. Ward (9.9) that discusses John's character traits for three pages. On the other hand Sam writes (11.1) three pages on his feelings for Anna Barker (11.1) (TWWPapers B3 f8) The time that Samuel G. Ward spent during October with Miss Barker solidifies his feelings and their relationship and then he rejoined her in New York for the remainder of her visit. He assures his father (1 November) that there never was en engagement between them even though their strong feelings are reciprocal. S.G. Ward continues his own scholarly relationships by sending (10.3) to Emerson poems of his friend, Ellery Channing. Within the year Emerson would introduce readers of The Dial to "verses that please my ear and heart." (See Frank B. Sanborn. "Emerson and Contemporary Poets," The Critic 42 (May 1903) p. 414) Mary Ward writes to Julia Ward [Howe] (10.23)-whom she calls "Jules"- that before their friendship began Mary "had no friend." The fuller expression of this deep affection is in Mary's letters in the Howe Family Papers at Houghton Library; Mary Grant contends that both "savored the pleasures of sharpening their sits together, of practicing clarity of thought, and of discussing literary topics." (Private Person, Public Woman, p. 44) Margaret Fuller moves from Groton to Jamaica Plain before moving in November 1840 to Cambridge where she remains for four years. Boston was her "social center" in the words of R.W. Emerson who edited both "Conversations in Boston" and "Concord" in The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller. On November 6th twenty-five ladies assembled at Elizabeth Peabody's 13 West Street bookshop, "some of the most agreeable and intelligent women to be found in Boston and its neighborhoods" ( V. 1, 328) Emerson quotes a report from that first meeting that Miss Fuller "was not here to teach [but] to give her view on each subject, and provoke the thoughts of others." These conversations were intended to use "Socratic" dialogue to enable women to explore ideas and images. (C. Baker, Emerson among the Eccentrics, p. 134) The conversation leader played the role of Socrates and asked the participants questions-and guided the evolving discussion--on a designated literary, aesthetic, religious, or philosophical topic. This teaching technique was not too dissimilar to that practiced by Bronson Alcott at Boston's Temple School in the mid-1830's which would be reconstituted in the 1870's in Alcott's Concord School of Philosophy. The first series of conversations extended to thirteen-and would be offered each November through 1844--on themes ranging from Grecian Mythology, the fine arts, to the nature of life. A "Miss Mary Ward, "Mrs. S. G. Ward," and a "Miss Dorr" are listed as members of the group which met 22 Nov. 1840. Nov. 27th: The death in NYC of Samuel Ward Sr. Julia's grief at the loss of her father was profound. Six children survived Samuel Ward. The namesake of the park founder, George Bucknam Dorr (1806-72) had married the granddaughter (Joanna Hone Howland) of celebrated merchant and diarist Philip Hone, who made telling remarks on the most significant Timeline_George Dorr Page 11 of 28 event of this date: "Mr. Samuel Ward died this day at noon. There are few citizens of New York whose death would have caused SO great a void in the circles of active business and social intercourse as Mr. Ward's, the moving spirit of a great financial concern Mr. Ward lived in a noble house, which he built a few years ago on the corner of Broadway and Bond Street-the corner below my house-where he had a picture gallery and one of the finest libraries in the city. He was a rich man, and made good use of his money; and such men are not easily spared at this time.' (The Diary of Philip Hone 1828-1851. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1927. Pg. 433) Ward had collected the work of Thomas Cole who death would occur less than two months later. Ward's estate was estimated to be a phenomenal six million dollars. This appeared to be of little comfort to Julia who turned to her brother Henry for comfort. (Clifford. op.cit., p. 40) Julia's suffering would be compounded less than a year later by the sudden death of Henry from typhoid fever; moreover, the following year (1841) her sister-in-law and newborn die in childbirth (Sam's wife, Emily Astor Ward). "The religious doctrines in which [Julia] had been reared asserted themselves 'with terrible force, and for a time she threw herself into revivalist and benevolent activities." (G. Williams. Hungry Heart, p. 19) Emerson writes to S.G. Ward (November 26th) stating that he has difficulty accepting a sepia print offered by Ward from the Capitoline Museum; Emerson family members apparently see this print as emblematic since it still hangs in the parlor of the Emerson house. (The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. E.M. Tilton. Vol. 7, p. 359) Over the next several months prior to Ward's March 24th departure for New Orleans-on a 27 day steamship cruise-Emerson was "awakening his original desire for the life of the literary man. What he saw in Concord he wished for himself (Tilton, "True Romance, " 67) By 5.28 Emerson knows of Miss Barker's refusal of Sam's proposal and that the rejected lover is enroute home, having written to his father on 5.1.40 that he no longer has any expectation of making Anna his wife-arriving in Boston in early June. 1840 Seven letters (from Jan. to early May) from Henry Ward in New York to Sam G. Ward wherein Mary is mentioned increasingly, culminating in a May 10th letter where Henry refers to a "union with Mary.' " We have no letters from Henry to Mary-and none from Mary to Sam that refer to Henry. However, there is a handwritten letter from Henry (4.8) to Sam G. Ward who he supposes is in New Orleans that announces that he is about to hang his shingle, Ward & Fitzgerald. States that the girls have gone to Washington though Julia remains at home though she learns from Mary [Gray Ward] that "your father has serious intentions of going to England in June-in which case he takes with him both Mary and herself [Julia] if they should wish to accompany him. "In the Spring of 1840 Henry proposed to Julia's friend, Mary Ward. Perhaps prompted by Henry's example, Julia decided to accept a proposal of marriage offered by a minister named Kirke. Julia had refused offers in the past, but the knowledge that her brother would soon be striking out on his own may have spurred her to accept the proposal [which she later rejected] Becoming a wife was the only career contemplated in this era for young women in Julia's class and lacking a husband both she and Mary's livelihood would be in doubt. Mary Gray Ward's handwritten letter (4.20) from Boston to S,G, Ward. She refers to how Lydia has SO immersed herself in flowers that "there is some fear that by the time that you return she will have become one Timeline_George Dorr Page 12 of 28 herself." She states that she will be leaving soon for New York with TWW and will be happy to be once again with Julia. (TWWPapers B3 f27). Another letter from Henry (5.11) says that the new firm is working out well "thanks to kind friends, your father among their number." S.G Ward remarks that Mary came with TWW during a recent visit, "a period of bright sunshine for me." He believes that TWW "will not I think object, to my union with Mary. (TWWPapers B3 f27) . S.G. Ward to Mary from New York (6.21) says that he has seen a good deal of Henry "and all promises well." R.W. Emerson is criticized by M. Fuller and Caroline Sturgis for his "inhospitality of Soul," his frosty resistance to friendship offered. He defended himself this summer against these charges as his letters and journal entries attest. His essay on "Friendship" was "more than an exposition of his views, it was his self-defense" (McNulty, 392) ; although his friends prompted the essay it was not written for members of any private circle. The first Issue of The Dial appears July 1st. Two weeks later (July 14) Emerson wrote to S.G. Ward asking for criticism on a draft of his essay on friendship. In 1899 Charles Eliot Norton would gather together 34 Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson to a Friend, 1938-1853 to "show Emerson in a clearer mirror than his poems and essays." That these "intimate expressions" are directed to Samuel G. Ward is nowhere acknowledged but is a matter of fact. Mary's handwritten letter to S.G. Ward (7.7) from Nantucket to describe unpleasant voyage through New Bedford and Wood's Hole to a Nantucket most comfortable boarding house. Martha will not return by sea and will journey home by land through Plymouth. The first issue of The Dial is published in July, edited by Margaret Fuller with R.W Emerson's collaboration. "In Mary's company, Julia Ward mingled with Boston's literati, including such intellectual women as Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Fanny Appleton, Margaret Fuller, and Annie Fields. Julia found the literary salons of the Hub a welcome relief from the parlors of New York," and wrote that this society is "disposed to make the best of you, who have sense enough to perceive your good qualities and charity enough to overlook your faults." (Grant quoting undated Howe Family Papers in Private Woman, Public Person, 41, 47) One of three distinguished sisters born a decade earlier than Mary Gray Ward, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-1894) provides a new venue for the dissemination of ideas. She pioneers a new mercantile role for women in establishing a foreign language bookstore and publishing house on Boston's West Street, deliberately chosen because of its proximity to other publishing houses on Washington Street. (See Megan Marshall. The Peabody Sisters, 2005, ch. 28) The property consisted of a bookstore and foreign (lending) library on the first-floor with rooms upstairs for her family that had relocated to Boston with her. Stocked with hundreds of carefully selected titles imported principally from European publishers, the foreign library at 13 West Street was a place where free thinking men and women gathered to share their ideas on new directions for poetry, religion, social relationships, and the promise of utopian community. More gender specific, Margaret Fuller used one of the rooms here for her celebrated Thursday "Conversations. Peabody sought to develop her collections as a venue to drive reform movements relative to the relationships between God, man, and nature. She "adapted, and in some important respects disregarded common marketing practices to advance her particular interests [creating] a collection for all Timeline_George Dorr Page 13 of 28 readers of similarly sophisticated taste and intellectual predisposition." (Leslie Perrin Wilson. "No Worthless Books' Elizabeth Peabody's Foreign Library, 1840-52," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 99 (2005) : 113-152; what remains of the foreign library was donated by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody the new Concord Free Public Library during the 1870's and is accessible in the William Munroe Special Collections) In the next few years, Elizabeth would publish under her imprint works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Parker, and Margaret Fuller; within six months of its establishment, Elizabeth would take over from Fuller the publication of the new vehicle for transcendental philosophy, The Dial, collaborating as publisher for the next several years with its new editor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The bookshop and foreign library became "an intellectual nucleus, attracting the leading reformers and writers in the Boston area," including the dissenting movement that had arisen in Concord. (Bruce A. Ronda. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on her own terms. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 185) It is significant that it was also the site for a September Transcendentalists' meeting, marking Elizabeth Peabody as the first woman to host such a gathering. (M. Megan. The Peabody Sisters, p. 386) Despite Emerson's attendance at this meeting, shortly thereafter the cohesion of the Transcendentalists suffered--some mark this meeting as their last formal meeting. Nonetheless, the shop continued to be successful, prompting Elizabeth in September 1841 to solicit advice from transcendentalist Samuel Gray Ward about whether she should take a partner to subsidize expansion of the bookstore's stock. (Ronda, op. cit., 186; Wilson, op. cit., 127-128) Samuel G. Ward writes to Mary (?) on 5.1 & 9.28 about Anna and their wedding plans even though the formal announcement was not made. In August news circulates that the broken engagement has been mended and that plans are underway for a fall wedding. Emerson hears of Fuller's dismay at this news since it meant that he had abandoned his principles and entered business, thereby stunting his intellect with crass commercialism. In a letter to Ward, Fuller says that "I had longed to see you a painter when I learned you were to become a merchant, to sit at the dead wood of the desk, and calculate figures, I was betrayed into unbelief." (T.K Wayne. The Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism, p. 308) Moreover, the most interested parties seem to have assumed that marriage would prevent the free interaction of Sam and Anna with the lofty aims of their transcendentalist friends. Emerson counseled Fuller that despite feelings of betrayal she must endure this forthcoming marriage of two people she loved. On August 28th at Mrs. Farrar's home the announcement is made and their fathers communicated with one another about the matter. (Tilton, "True Romance, p. 69-70 and chapter 16 on "Sam and Anna" in Carlos Baker's Emerson among the Eccentrics) On the next day, Emerson writes to Fuller a very upbeat letter in which he says "Ward I shall not lose. My joy for him is very great. I have never had occasion to congratulate any person so truly. What an event to him! Its consequences to the history of his genius who can forsee? But ah! My friend, you must be generous beyond even the strain of heroism to bear your part in this scene & resign without a sigh two Friends..." (Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. R.L. Rusk. Vol. II, p. 327, note punctuation is correct) Samuel G. Ward and Anna Barker marry October 3rd on Sam's 23rd birthday at the Cambridge home of John Farrar where Ward had boarded during college years. He describes it as not being "an occasion of gaiety-but private and solemn-and even under the saddest circumstances must take Timeline_George Dorr Page 14 of 28 place. To the issue at hand, R. W. Emerson was present at the wedding and wrote in his Journal: "Peace go with you, beautiful, pure, & happy friends, --peace & Beauty & the perpetuity and the sure unfolding of all the buds of joy that SO thickly stud your branches" (Journals, 7, 404) On the day before (Oct. 2), Mary Ward's life was profoundly changed when her fiancé Henry Ward succumbed to typhoid fever, a significant blow as well to his siblings, Sam and Julia Ward (See Maud Elliott Howe. Uncle Sam Ward and his Circle, pp. 208-209 and D.P Clifford, op. cit., p. 44) Recall that a year earlier Samuel Ward had died (11.27.39) obliging daughter Julia into the retirement that was customary for the day. Henry's sudden illness threatened another blow and Julia nursed him, "cradling his head in her arms when he died." (Grant, Private Woman, Public Person, p. 48) "While Sam was her ideal of youthful manhood, Henry was [Julia's] mate, the nearest to her in age and in sympathy. The bond between them was close and tender" (L.E. Richards & Maud Howe Elliott, Julia Ward Howe 1819-1910, Vol. I, p. 65 f.) During this time Julia and Mary consoled one another, their closeness intensifying. Julia admitted that she wished she had died with Henry; the death of sister- in-law Emily prolonged her depression. At this moment, however, Julia reached out to Mary and sent her poems reflecting her misery, later collected in a little volume; Mary "wore widow's weeds for several years and until the end held him in close remembrance" (Howe, p. 209). Mary's response was that she knew that Julia must move beyond this grief and begin anew; one might wonder whether Mary heeded her own advice since it would be another six years before her marriage to Charles Hazen Dorr. The newlyweds travel to New Hampshire where Anna Barker Ward writers to father-in-law TWW (10.7) from the White Mountains thanking him for his blessings and anticipating the climb up Mt. Washington the next day which later (10.14) husband Sam describes, including the 30 mile horseback trip prior to arriving in Brattleboro (10.18) enroute to Northampton. Lidian Emerson, Anna Barker Ward, and Mary Gray Ward attend Fuller's Boston Conversations in late November while Sam Ward can't be induced to leave the routines of his house in Louisberg Square and the bride who lived there with him. 1841 During the winter months, Mary Ward counsels Julia against publication of the religious poetry written after the deaths of her father and brother although Margaret Fuller-to whom Mary had apparently shown the poetry-stated that she would like to see the poems published. Julia's growing seriousness about poetry involved other Bostonian literati, and it was during visits to Mary that she had the opportunity to "seek Longfellow's advice and support, which he gave unhesitatingly, and which she repaid by helping him with translation projects." (G. Williams, Hungry Heart, p. 22) Feb. 25th: Death of Susan Dorr, second wife of Samuel Dorr. Having not heard from S.G. Ward for some time, R.W. Emerson writes to him in late Spring that he will not be forgotten for "in my lonely woods I see you and talk with you SO often, that it seems to me that through some of the fine channels which inform fine souls, you must sometimes feel the influence." The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. E. Tilton. Vol. 7, pg. 456). Timeline_George Dorr Page 15 of 28 Sam and Anna Ward receive a celebratory letter from Emerson (9.27) congratulating them on the birth of their first child named for her mother, Anna. Incompletely dated handwritten letter (Oct. 20) to Anna from Mary Ward (first?) reporting to Anna what Mary knows of John Ward's foreign travels -to Hong Kong--and his disposition. (TWWPapers B3 f22). Julia Ward first meets Samuel Gridley Howe this summer while staying with Mary Gray Ward when Longfellow and Sumner came from Cambridge to pay a call on the young ladies and then proposed that they journey together to the Perkins Institute (for details see D.P. Clifford, Mine Eyes have Seen the Glory, 53 f.) Julia was not swept away and an indication is a letter six months later (December 11, 1841, quoted by G. Williams, Hungry Heart, p. 26) where Mary advises Julia on how to handle the solicitous affections of other men; a month later Julia writes to her sisters about the her dance partners during events associated with the Dickens' tour. In the months Mary would encourage Julia's "stormy" courtship with Dr. Howe prior to their marriage in April 1843. The affection between Julia Ward [Howe] and Mary Ward "was as warm as ever." (Grant, Private Woman, Public Person, p. 44). The intensity of feeling is clear in Mary's words: "My own sweet Jules, I shall never in this world have any friend who can fill your place, Jules, nor anyone whom I can love as I love you, SO while our love is yet pure, and while you are yet spared to me, I will make the most of you." (Howe Family Papers, Houghton Library). "It is clear from their letters that neither wanted the demands of marriage to dilute their affection for one each other," fully expecting to continue their relationship regardless of spousal obligations; however, Mary both "shared a tendency to depression and were able to discuss it freely." (Grant, pp. 44-45) Mary Ward's "sense of closeness to Julia has intensified [and] she continues to serve as advisor in questions of romantic attachment" by drawing Julia away from "an unhealthy absorption in debilitating religious ideas." (G. Williams. Hungry Heart, p. 20). She challenged Julia to "step out of the religious atmosphere in which SO much of your life has been passed [to] purge away the old heaven of bigotry and intolerance..." (Mary Ward to Julia Ward, 11 December 1841, quoted by G. Williams, Hungry Heart, p. 220, note 20) , Aided by other resources supplied by Mary, Julia's religious inquiries led to her independence from Calvinism and the acceptance of Unitarian principles. Similarly, the Samuel Ward Family Papers at Houghton Library contain 25 letters from Mary to Julia's sister, Louisa Cutler (Ward) Crawford Terry, penned over five years between 1837 and 1841. They reflect Mary's naive optimism and commitment to the force of internal imperatives: for "before many years have passed away I trust to see my child surrounded by all that Life can give of [the] bright and beautiful and remember that the source of all real happiness springs from within and that it ever depends more upon this inward disposition of the mind than upon outward circumstances." (Harvard University. Houghton. Samuel Ward Family Papers. I. 21. September 10, 1841) With this in mind, it is not surprising that Mary "introduced Julia to Ralph Waldo Emerson" and the optimistic Transcendental concepts of his colleagues which she embraced, despite family opposition. (Grant, pp. 51-52) As the year draws to a close Thomas Wren Ward again offers his letter of resignation as Treasurer of Harvard College. Unlike 1838, this time his offer is accepted but he is asked to delay his departure until the next Timeline_George Dorr Page 16 of 28 year. On August 11 th 1842 his resignation is finalized. (Dorr Collection. NEHGS. Box 7) 1842 Emerson writes of his "extreme sorrow" to Sam and Anna Ward (1.28) following the sudden death the day before of his son, Waldo. In time Emerson would find some consolation but for two years "he suffered unhealed agonies of sorrow, and the last words he uttered, as he lay dying, forty years later, were these: 'Oh, that beautiful boy. (B. Perry. Emerson Today, p. 51). Shortly thereafter Margaret Fuller resigned as The Dial editor and in March Emerson assumed this task. Samuel Atkins Eliot (Harvard 1817) is appointed Treasurer of Harvard College (1842-1853). He publishes "A Sketch of the History of Harvard." (Charles W. Eliot, Harvard Memories. Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1923) Pregnant Joanna Dorr traveling with husband George Bucknam Dorr is confined prematurely in Leamington (near Warwick) where she died giving birth (so too the infant) The baby clothes prepared by the Howland family would later be used by Catherine Howland who GBD traveled with "through the Tyrol" and married architect Richard Hunt. "Kate Hunt and I... came to have a curiously close relation 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.' (Dorr Ms. NEHGS, 'Children of' Sophia Peabody, youngest of three gifted sisters and the first to become engaged, marries Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 9th) in the modest three-story Peabody row house at 3 West Street, Boston. (See Megan Marshall. The Peabody Sisters, 2005, Pp. 1-2). During the Summer of 1842 Julia Ward and her sisters lived in a Boston cottage accompanied by Mary Gray Ward [Dorr], a lifelong friend of all three sisters. (Richards and Elliott, Julia Ward Howe, Vol. I, p. 74) "The great literary event of the winter of 1842 in Boston and New York was the triumphal tour of Charles Dickens" (D.P. Clifford, Mine Eyes have Seen the Glory, 49) ; Julia saw him first in Boston. 1843 Emerson writes to Sam G. Ward from Philadelphia (1.24) that Sam is "a Corinthian-born & bred in the world-and you probably by habit do set your expectations somewhat nearer to the mark than such persons as I, who are always victims of glare & superstition & must continually correct our overestimates.' " (Tilton, Letters of RWE, v.7). According to Joel Myerson (The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial,") "Ward bought and sold well enough to accumulate the beginnings of a good sized fortune," and picked up his pen again and sent some contributions off to Emerson for the Dial, four earlier pieces having been accepted by Margaret Fuller prior to Ward's marriage (p.218) Several months earlier in the fall of 1842 Ward's "The Gallery" was published in The Dial. Though Emerson concealed its authorship, he was sufficiently impressed to ask for a factual piece on the Ward Gallery in the Atheneum (Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. E. Tilton. Vol. 7, p. 512, n. 94) Ward developed additional Dial contributions (of ten published over four years) prior to its cessation as a publication. One of his most important contributions, "Notes on Art and Architecture," extended themes on functional form developed in The Dial by Emerson two years earlier. Ward employed lessons learned in his European travels to show that "the crowning and damning sin of architecture with us, nay, Timeline_George Dorr Page 17 of 28 that of bad taste everywhere, is, the doing of unmeaning, needless things." (The Dial. 4 (1843) p. 108) Instead, he advances the theme that the organic constitution of Nature provided a standard for architecture. (See R.S. Shaffer," Emerson and his Circle: Advocates of Functionalism,' Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 7 (1948) 18-19) Harvard College awards TWW honorary Master of Arts degree. Emerson to Sam G. Ward 4.27) on the birth of their second child named for Ward's mother, Lydia Gray Ward. Although Emerson had written in 1840 on the subject of friendship and solicited Sam G. Ward's critical reaction, on another level their friendship engendered considerable scholarly interest. Both men would celebrate the virtues of friendship in their words and through their actions. Each respected the differences of the other, their families shared in social activities, their children would themselves become friends. "Among Emerson's friends, Samuel Gray Ward stands alone; he was not dependent on Emerson; he did not need a substitute father." Ward's confident was his own father and he says in a letter that in his father he had "a friend whom I need have no reserve." Nonetheless, Ward saw for himself a literary future enveloped by the aesthetics of country life, not unlike Emerson's (E. Tilton, Letters of RWW, V. 7, op.34-37). Sam is now moving in the direction of the ethical precepts of the Transcendentalists, thinking more and more about "cultivating the inner life of harmony and strength, of truth and the 'inner spirit' that Emerson expoused." (Fitch, op. cit., p. 21) July 13: Sam Ward attends the wedding of Henry W. Longfellow to Nathan Appleton's daughter, Fanny, accompanied by Mary Gray Ward. Sam Ward states in a letter to a friend that "She [Mary] looks well and has had a glorious [where?] journey." (Maud Elliott Howe, Sam Ward and his Circle, p. 381). Sam G. Ward to TWW (12/2) offers reasons for being predisposed to country life where occupations "strengthen the body and leave the mind free and clear from anxiety." ( (TWWPapers B3 f10). According to one authority, the Ward's personal worth of $35,000 enabled them to consider such a bold move (Myerson, The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial, p. 218). however, there is suggestive evidence that when the move occurs the following year Thomas Wren Ward will provide financial support for his eldest son's family. At years end, Emerson characterizes Samuel G. Ward as "my friend, the best man in the city and besides all his personal merits, a master of the offices of hospitality." (Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson. Boston: J.R. Osgood. 1883. Vol. 2, pp. 51-52. 1844 Emerson begins to talk with Samuel Gray Ward (described by his son Edward as a man of "high aspirations, careful breeding, much natural gift for and knowledge of art, and entirely at home in society and literature") about a "scheme of a more genial nature than the Symposia [of 1836] for a Town-and-Country Club, where lonely scholars, poets, and naturalists, like those of Concord, might find a welcome resting-place when they come to the city..." (E.W. Emerson, Early History of the Saturday Club, p. 5). Timeline_George Dorr Page 18 of 28 The final issue of The Dial appears on the 8th of April. "Between 1836, when Emerson's Nature was published and the Transcendental Club was founded, and 1844, when the Dial cleased publication, the people known as the Transcendentalists were relatively unified and able to exert great influence." ( Joel Myerson, "Frederick Henry Hedge and the Failure of Transcendentalism," Harvard Library Bulletin 23, #2 (1975) : 396) In May Sam and Anna Ward take up country life in the Berkshires purchasing the Red Cottage in Lenox where Hawthorne would later pen The House of Seven Gables. Mary Ward visits in June and July then in August brother Sam proposes to buy adjacent farmland where a new residence would be constructed. Idealistic newlyweds Samuel and Anna are the pioneer Lenox cottagers, the "first urban transplants to create a country estate they chose a spectacular site overlooking Lake Mehkeenac in 1844, and they hired Richard Upjohn, who was then building Trinity Church in New York, to create Highwood, a center for year-round country life." Cornelia Gilder & Richard S. Jackson Jr. Houses of the Berkshires 1870-1930. New York: Acanthus Press, 2006) S.G. Ward writes from Lenox to his father (8.22) that he and his wife had been searching in the Berkshires for a suitable "permanent residence, united with a good farm." About two miles from the village they find "all that we are in search of," about 150 acres with a $5,000 asking price. (R. DeWitt Mallary, Lenox and the Berkshire Highlands, 1902, pg. 70) To this day Samuel Gray Ward is esteemed for leading others to the Berkshires, residing there continuously from 1844 to 1849. In time other distinguished men would arrive although none may have enjoyed the immediate acceptance given Ward. Charles Sedgwick-his closest Berkshire friend-remarked several months after Ward's arrival that he was "very popular and more beloved than some old settler." After a year on his sizable rural farm in Lenox, integrated into the fabric of rural life, young Samuel Gray Ward was writing to his father with enthusiastic satisfaction: 'I have harvested a hundred bushels of excellent potatoes [and] am thinking of translating Goethe's autobiography this winter. Over the next two decades many other celebrated men of letters would discover in Berkshire County opportunities " for cultural and agricultural accomplishment, and the land was to prove undeniably good for both activities." {TWW Papers 10.20.1845 quoted by R. D. Birdsall in Berkshire County, p.323-24). Dr. Holmes, Hawthorne, and Melville would reap similar inspiration from their engagement with the landscape as well as the pleasant opportunities to converse with the likes of Fanny Kemble, the Sedgwicks, Longfellow and other literati. Birdsall argues that during Ward's first Berkshire stay "the genial glow of his personal charm was perhaps contributing even more to `literary Berkshire' than was his critical work," imparting to Lenox and Stockbridge "an air of quiet distinction and a brilliant if largely imported cultural life. (p. 329, 348; see also Birdsall's "Berkshire's Golden Age, " for an engaging discussion of the interactions between the émigrés and local populations) . Edward Waldo Emerson's biography of S.G. Ward (Early Years of the Saturday Club) notes that "the natural, masterful brusqueness and rather exacting social standards of her husband were surely sweetened" by Anna Ward. Timeline_George Dorr Page 19 of 28 Birth of Edward Waldo Emerson ( son of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lydian Emerson on July 10th), companion and schoolmate of Thomas Wren Ward (see below) Hudson River artist Thomas Cole first visits MDI, boarding at the Lynam Farm at Schooner Head. He returned the next summer with Frederic Edwin Church. On October 15th the first son of Samuel G. Ward-and later cousin of George B. Dorr--is born and named after his distinguished grandfather, Thomas Wren Ward. The joyful father writes to his parents from Lenox that the newborn who looks like his grandfather "is a picture of health." His mother "suffered less than hitherto" and appreciates her sister-in-law Mary's offer to travel to Lenox to provide support. Tom (1844-1940) would be noted for establishing a lifelong relationship with his college roommate, Edward Waldo Emerson. His marriage in 1872 to Sophia Read Howard produced three children who saw their father following in his father's footsteps, spending 41 largely successful years with the same banking company that proved SO lucrative for both his father Sam and his namesake. He carried this off despite the limitation of severe deafness which left him understandably feeling isolated. (University of California, Santa Barbara. Libraries. Ward- Perkins Papers. B.2. f. 8. October 15, 1844 and D. Fitch, "Ward-Perkins Papers," Soundings XVI (1985), p. 44) S.G. Ward writes to TWW from "our new home" Highwood (12.1). He had sent TWW animals and is pleased with care received from TWW. He claims to find "an endless interest" in his new country life and is proud that "my farm will have paid an interest over and above expenses." He returns to TWW a receipt for $5,000, indicating that he received a generous allowance-or subsistence--from his father. The relationship between Julia Ward Howe and Mary Ward suffered when Julia's sister Louisa broke off in 1844 her engagement to Mary's brother John for "in those days an engagement was almost as binding a contract as marriage, and the Boston Wards felt, perhaps rightly, that John had been badly treated" (Clifford, 88) Thus, in this generation there were two New York Ward and Boston Ward engagements, both unfulfilled TWW writes to John and George (12.9) to inform them that he has transferred to each of them (and Sam) stocks and cash totaling $20,000, which is "easy to increase as you come to have knowledge and experience, but difficult to create if you had to begin anew." He then offers a three pages of prudential precepts regarding good business practices. (TWWPapers B1 f18). Emerson writes to TWW (12.17) musing that "I have always wished to know how hill countries look in winter but I doubt I shall ever have vigor enough to go & see them. (Letters of RWE, v.8, p. 621) December 18th. Death of Hon. Samuel Dorr. Estate ($400,000) divided among male offspring (5, if all survived) and shortly thereafter with this capital "and a friend for a partner he [CHD] entered business as a commission merchant." (Dorr Ms. NEHGS). Carried on this business "until the coming of the Civil War " having gone through "difficulties and trying experiences" [wrought by two major panics] he came through "with credit, and undiscouraged, started out afresh.' Birth of Thomas Wren Ward (1844-1940), son of Samuel Gray Ward and Lydia Gray Ward. In 1872 he marries Sophia Read Howard. Timeline_George Dorr Page 20 of 28 1845 On 1.31 Emerson and later Charles Sedgwick (2.2) write separately to Sam Ward in a manner suggesting that the Ward's will be leaving the Berkshire "savage life" for good. Emerson editor Tilton discusses this matter (Letters of RWE, V. 8, p. 3, n.7). In February they are in Boston before departing for New York (before 3 March) SO Anna could receive "treatments from Margaret Fuller's mesmerist, for her neuralgia. Tilton thinks likely that Emerson heard of the efficacy of this treatment from Ms. Fuller. (Tilton, Letters, V. 8, p. 10, n.27 & p. 25, n. 80) James Augustus Dorr purchases a 952 sq. ft. MAC Pine Avenue lot near the entrance to the Mount Auburn Cemetery (4.26). The first burials are on the same date later that year (October 14) when Lucy, Susan, Samuel F. and Samuel Dorr are interred here (presumably from another unspecified cemetery location) George B. Dorr's brother was interred at this site on May 18th 1876 and re-interred in the new Charles H. Dorr lot (#4474) on November 4, 1876. Sixteen Dorr family members are interred here, the most recent-Susan Elizabeth Dorr--in 1889. (Mount Auburn Cemetery Historical Collection, # 1151) Bachelor Francis Calley Gray relocates to Park Street where he entertained his friends of the Wednesday Evening Club, for as 'one of the ornaments of the Club, " he was known for "enlivening its meetings by his wit and wisdom, his rich and varied learning, and cherishing always a lively interest in its prosperity." (Charles K. Bolton. Francis Calley Gray,p. 7) Following her departure from Boston's transcendental circles for New York, Margaret Fuller publishes Woman in the Nineteenth Century, regarded since its day as "one of the most important statements of feminist method and theory in history." (David M. Robinson, "Margaret Fuller and the Transcendental Ethos, Publications of the Modern Language Association 97 (1982) 83-98, note 3. ) Letter from Emerson to Anna Ward (4.30) was apparently left by Emerson at TWW's Park Street home to be forwarded to New York. Encourages her to visit him in Concord before she journeys to the Berkshires where he promises to visit her. (Letters of RWE, V. 8, p. 26). 1846 S.G. Ward to TWW from Lenox (4.30) urging him to visit "we farmers." Thanks him for agricultural presents of animals and farm equipment. In June the Howe family moved into the farmhouse that Samuel Gridley Howe purchased with Julia's money; renamed Green Peace, it would be their home until 1881. Episcopalianism claimed increasing numbers of former Unitarian believers as the Brahmin religious convictions shifted away from the Unitarianism that had dominated Boston society since the first decade of the 19th- century. "Conservative theologically, hierarchical in structure, ceremonial in worship, traditionally aristocratic, and committed to order and decorum, the Episcopal Church [in the 1840s] better suited patrician interests, tastes, and values" (Jaher, The Urban Establishment, p. 101) The triumph of this antebellum religious spirit would be reflected in the emergence of Brahmin clergy William Lawrence, Phillips Brooks, and Endicott Peabody. 1847 Timeline_Geo Dorr Page 21 of 28 John Gilmore and Edward Brewer purchase the summit of Green Mountain from the Bingham estate with an eye toward harvesting its timber. In 1857 all the parcels would pass to Brewer's sons. A distant relative of Mary Gray Ward, the prolific author and poet Epes Sargent (1813- ) becomes editor of The Boston Transcript, a position he held until the year of Mr. Dorr's birth. (Chamberlin, op. cit., ch. 8) Ward visits Emerson in February. In March he writes (3.25) in his Letters (V. 8) that the "kind of travel I should prize And if I could do as I liked, I should probably turn towards Canada, into loneliest retreats, far from cities & friends...' Emerson writes in his Journal at this time that "Ward has aristocratical position. and turns it to excellent account; the only aristocrat who does." (L.H. Butterfield, op. cit. , pp. 1-2) . Of the eight children born to Thomas and Lydia Ward between 1812 and 1831, only the marriages of Sam and his sister Mary yield surviving grandchildren-and first cousins later for George B. Dorr. In 1847 the final child of Sam and Anna Ward is born, Elizabeth Barker Ward. She and her sister Lydia later reside in Europe with their foreign born husbands, removing them from much physical interaction with the Ward family. Their other sister's death in 1875 left Thomas Wren Ward and George to carry on-and for the next six decades they remained in touch with one another. Julia Ward Howe writes (7.1) to sister Louisa about the entertainment she offered groups of friends, stating that the week before she had a meeting of "the mutual correction club," which was more plant that the Five of Clubs gathering earlier. She describes it as made up of "Julia Howe, grand universal philosopher; Jane Belknap, charitable censor; Mary Ward, moderator; Sarah Hale, optimist. I had them all to dinner and we were jolly.' (L. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott, Julia Ward Howe, p. 128) In late July and early August Sam G. Ward and Ogden Haggerty journey to the Adirondack Mts. Ward writes to TWW from Lenox (8.8) reporting on their return "from the wilds having been fifteen days from home.' They traversed the uninhabited country between Amsterdam and northern part of Lake George and on to the Adirondack Iron Works at the foot of Mt. Marcy, an area with "fine trees I have never seen, many being from 150 to 175 feet high, and cutting plank 4 or 5 feet wide." (TWWPapers B3 f15). Emerson makes arrangements with TWW for funds to be secured from the Barings when Emerson is in London in late fall. S.G. Ward forwards book invoice from Little & Brown's (for payment) to TWW from Lenox (12.7). Remarks that his youngest brother, Thomas William Ward (1831-1859), is doing well studying Latin & Greek "regularly with me" to prepare him for college next summer. Dec.: Birth of Frances Greenwood Peabody, Unitarian clergyman and Harvard's Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Dean of the Divinity School. (See A Little Boy in Little Boston (1935) for his childhood memories and friendships) He, GBD, Henry Richards, and William Lawrence would be in different Dixwell School classes during the Civil War years. Uncle of Samuel A. Eliot. 1848 Timeline_George Dorr Page 22 of 28 Emerson writes to SGW (3.20) from London about social engagements (with Thackery, Wordworth, Macaulay) and mentions (in his Letters, v.8, p. 162) having seen Lady Harriet Baring, "esteemed the wittiest woman in London," with whom he will dine (on 3.23) She is the wife of Carlyle's friend, William Bingham Baring; he dined the next day with Baring's father, Lord Ashburton, a family well-known to the Wards as American representatives for their banking interests. June: Mary Ward and others are entertained by Julia Ward Howe who finally "was enjoying a little of the social life she had craved as a young girl in New York and had tasted as a bride in London.' (Grant, Private Woman, Public Person, p. 89). Birth of Oldfarm architect Henry Richards (1848-1940) S.G. Ward to TWW from Lenox (9.3) marked as "Private." Refers to Baring Brothers & Co. reaction to "your retirement," which is unknown at that time though Sam looks "forward to your emancipation and your getting 'time to come to Berkshire, as a new era in your life, and a great source of satisfaction to myself." 1849 Thomas Wren Wards writes to his son Sam informing him that during a conversation with Mr. Bates he had vocalized his "determination to leave" Barings. (Harvard University. Houghton. Samuel Gray Ward and Anna Hazard Barker Ward Papers. III. 1362, May 7, 1849). With his retirement imminent, within a week it is learned that Horace Gray to decline offer to partner with Sam in representing Barings in the Americas. He asks his father to sell his stock to free up funds, some of which will likely be invested in new Boston residence for his family. Matters move quickly and Sam is "summoned to Boston, his father's health making it likely that he would have to return to banking; on the 13th of June, he had decided to do so." Emerson's Letters, V. 8, p. 219, n.65). Highwood would pass into the hands of the William Bullard family and over the decades underwent several alterations. It is currently owned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra having been incorporated into Tanglewood. (See C. Gilder & R.J. Jackson Jr. Houses of the Berkshires 1870-1930. New York: Acanthus, 2006 for a contemporary Highwood photograph) Sam acquired a Boston residence within blocks of Park Street in Louisburg Square. (Harvard University. Houghton. Papers of Samuel Gray Ward and Anna Hazard Barker Ward. III. 1441) According to Edward Waldo Emerson (EYSaturday Club, 111) "Mr. Ward left Lenox, he said, 'because he found a hole in his pocket that could be mended in no other way,' but the real reason was that his father needed him." TT wanted to retire and E.W. Emerson explains the transfer of power by quoting Joshua Bates when asked "how he could confide such large affairs to this untried young man. He simply said, 'I know the stock, and am sure it will be all right The firms great credit business (based on the Barings requirement of exclusivity-taking no credit from other bankers) would double then triple during the 20 years after Sam took over, due to Sam's business talent. Emerson describes him as "a man remarkable for his many-sidedness, an able man of affairs, public-spirited citizen, possessed of talent, social position and aplomb, accomplished, masterful, an intelligent and hospitable householder, a good but sparing writer, wide and critical reader in various languages, well versed in art and an admirable amateur draughtsman." " Timeline_George Dorr Page 23 of 28 Ralph Waldo Emerson writes to Samuel G. Ward (7.19) that the "Horticultural paper never came." Emerson's Letters editor, Eleanor Tilton, refers to suggests that this may be an article by "W" from Lenox on "The Effects in Landscape of Various Common Trees" which appeared in the June 1849 issue of Andrew Jackson Downing's own periodical, The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art (June 1849)-and that the Lenox unidentified author is editorially acknowledged to be "one of the most cultivated and artistic minds in the country" is Sam G. Ward himself. (v.8, p. 219, 66). Emerson and Ward renew their conversation about likely members of what will become known as The Saturday Club. The exact year of this letter George C. Ward to TWW (8.24) is uncertain but the handwritten letter is a request for his father's "concurrence" with the business plan he sets forth. (TWWPapers B1 f15). In September, Sophia visits her friend Caroline Sturgis-Mrs. William Aspinwall Tappan-in Lenox and despite the distance from coastal family and friends Sophia liked the area well enough to encourage her husband to visit. Beginning October 23rd Samuel G. Ward and William Tappan assist Nathaniel Hawthorne (according to his American Notebooks) in Lenox house-hunting tours, settling on the red farmhouse owned by Mr. Tappan, a structure "as red as the Scarlet Letter." 1850 The formation of The Saturday Club seems to Emerson and Ward appears nearing realization-though in fact it will take another six years. See 1855. In early March Thomas Wren Ward completes his last will and testament, appointing his wife and son Sam as executors along with family friends Nathaniel I. Bowditch and J. Ingersoll Bowditch. (Harvard University. Houghton. Samuel Gray Ward and Anna Hazard Barker Ward Papers. III. 1366) Nathaniel Hawthorne's first book to achieve popularity ( The Scarlet Letter) appears in March, depleting his strength and spirits, strengthening his resolve to change their residence. They arrive in Pittsfield late May (5.28) and lodge with the Tappan's at Highwood-the former Ward estate--while the farmhouse is readied for their occupancy (which would last a mere eighteen months) The Tappan's leased the building to the struggling novelist where in the attic he created a literary masterpiece, The House of Seven Gables. Sophia Hawthorne would speak affectionately of the attributes of 'La Rouge Maison' in a lengthy letter to her mother (See E.H. Miller, Salem is my Dwelling Place, pp. 205-206, James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Times, pp. 221- 222) His son Julian would later comment that "it was difficult for him to write in the presence of such a view as the "little red house" commanded. It certainly must have been a scene that expressed otherwise unutterable sublimity." ("The Hawthornes in Lenox," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society ) In this environment, the Hawthorne's would interact socially with residents like the celebrated jurist David Dudley Field, the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, English actress Fanny Kemble, and Herman Melville. Yet within a year-despite its splendid views of the Stockbridge Bowl-- her spouse would make arrangements to return to Boston. Not only was the lease arrangement leading to discord with the Tappan family, Hawthorne had undergone a change of heart and now found the farmhouse on the old Ward property "the most inconvenient and wretched little hovel that I have ever put my Timeline_George Dorr Page 24 of 28 head in. (Miller, p. 305) Nonetheless, it was here on the former property of George B. Dorr's mother's elder brother, two additional Hawthorne titles were incubated: A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853) TWW enroute home says to Lydia (5.8) that George is at Cambridge, and studies hard" while in a letter to John (5.12) he says that " After Mary is married" he' take longer journeys with Mrs. Ward but forsees an "empty nest" issue arising. (TWWPapers B1 f23). End of May: John C. Ward to TWW confessing his how he has been "going wrong for a good while" with his "insane habits," [e.g. taking opium, excessive drinking) hopeful that he can place himself in a "true relation" with TWW since he is "now willing to do everything to get [it] right." (TWWPapers B1 f23). No details of the courtship of Charles Hazen Dorr and Mary Gray Ward are extant. We may surmise that Lenox and Boston are the two likely venues for their initial social encounter and subsequent interaction. We do know that on June 4th they were married, each bringing affluence, high social standing, and the intellectually progressive weight of their families to the union. The remarks of late University of California librarian Donald Fitch about the Wards would apply no less to the Dorr family of the 19th-century: "What is revealed [in the Ward-Perkins Papers] is a remarkable combination of concern for the 'self' and the integrity of one's position with a concern for proper thought, appropriate action, tact, restraint, concern for the world at large. Thus, we see in the Wards, of all three generations [beginning with the first Thomas Wren Ward and ending with the death in 1940 of his same- named grandson] a desire to involve one's self, culturally, politically, literarily and philanthropically, for the benefit of all. The basis of this humaneness resides in family intimacy, harmony, and love. (D. Fitch, "The Ward-Perkins Papers," Soundings: Collections of the University Library XVI [1985] 19) July: First visit to MDI by Frederick Church accompanied by John F. Kensett and Regis F. Gignoux. On August 28th they moved onto Bar Harbor, "a settlement of about twenty houses along a single street and after a visit to the Porcupine Islands they departed in early September after a visit of two months, the first of at least eight visits (L.E. Brown. Acadia National Park, Maine: History Basic Data, 43-44) July 19: death of Margaret Fuller (as well as her husband and child) at 40 years of age in a shipwreck at Fire Island. Two years later the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, edited by R.W. Emerson, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clark, would be published. Aug. 5: Literary picnic on slopes of Monument Mountain (O.W. Holmes, E. Duyckinck, Hermann Melville, N. Hawthorne, and James and Annie Fields) TWW writes to John (8.25) that "Mary seems most at leisure and at lease," and a month later (9.17) states that "Mary is in the family way and perfectly well, and her husband and his house of business all right, and Mary is very happy." (TWWPapers B1 f23). Jamaica Plain home built for the Dorr's "on the border of Jamaica Pond." Describes area as "an old, delightful residential section then, on the border of the Pond from which the first water-supply of Boston was taken in 1795." Timeline_George Dorr Page 25 of 28 "In concert with William Channing of New York & Samuel G. Ward of Boston, I [R.W. Emerson] consented to collect all the letters & Journals and other manuscripts left by her [Margaret Fuller] & to ascertain by inspection of these what materials existed for a memoir.' (RWE to Joseph Mazzini, 10.2.1850 in Rusk's ed. Letters of RWE, V. 4, 232-33). The Reminiscences of Ednah Dow Cheney (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1901, p. 72) recalls the assistance provided by S.G. Ward when she sought to establish in Boston this fall a School of Design for women. Ward was "a rare man, who combined high financial ability and the truest sense of honor and integrity with fine artistic ability.' Given these talents he became our design school committee Treasurer since he "saw the need for improved design for our manufactures, and secured for the school the countenance and pecuniary assistance of several of the leading manufacturing firms in the State." Ms. Cheney's memoirs contain essays on the anti-slavery movement, The Concord School of Philosophy, the character of transcendentalism, the life of Margaret Fuller, having drafted these recollections from her home in Jamaica Plain in 1893 after nearly seventy years of life. Letter from Sam G. Ward to TWW from London (11.1) referring to his frequent interaction with Joshua Bates but limited exposure to Mr. Baring since he only returned yesterday. In letter a week later (11.8) he notes that he dined with Baring at his club and at his home and all is "in every way satisfactory." Called on George Peabody and noted that the kindness of the current Minister to England (Abbott Lawrence, his wife and daughter Kitty who married later Augustus Lowell, later to have sone Percival Lowell (the astronomer) and President Eliot's successor, Abbot Lawrence Lowell. (TWWPapers B3 f18). 1851 Jan. 31st Birth of William Ward Dorr in Jamaica Plain, named for his maternal GF, William Ward of Salem. Emerson reports (7.23) that work on M. Fuller Memoirs continues and that Sam G. Ward is working on his contributions. He also appears to make reference to Sam's father (TWW) as the "old merchant" who is at odds with his own sensibilities on the desirability of free trade and its relationship to morality of slavery. (The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Eds. A. Plumstead & H. Hayford. Vol. XI, p. 408) In A Wonder-Book for Boys and Girls, a portion of Hawthorne's 5.23.1851 letter to James T. Field is included in the introductory note, describing the intent of the work, which was completed less than two months later. Hawthorne includes within this work a reference to himself and his home adjoining Highwood: "That silent man, who lives in the old red house near Tanglewood Avenue, and whom we sometimes meet, with two children by his side, in the woods or at the lake." Hawthorne's character Eustace, cautions Primrose against speaking about the book's author for "If our babble were to reach his ears, and happen not to please him, he has but to fling a quire or two of paper into the stove, and you Primrose, and I...would all turn to smoke, and go whisking up the funnel! Our neighbor in the red house is a harmless sort of person enough, for aught I know, as concerns the rest of the world; but something whispers to me that he has a terrible power over ourselves, extending to nothing short of annihilation.' (N. Hawthorne. A Wonder- Book for Girls and Boys. Pp. 9-10, 194-95). The Tanglewood Tales followed immediately, creating a local habitation and a name. (M.A. DeWolfe Howe, The Tale of Tanglewood, p. 23) Timeline_George Dorr Page 26 of 28 Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne writes in Summer to her mother that "On Sunday Mr. Samuel G. Ward came to see us. He gave me an excellent drawing of Highwood Porch, for A Wonder-Book, which he had asked Burrill Curtis to draw. We have sent it to Mr. Fields.' TWW to son John states that George signed a partnership agreement for five years under the firm name of Blake, Ward, and Co., which pleases them. (TWWPapers B1 f24) TWW to John (11.2) reports that "Mary and her baby and Mr. Dorr are all first rate.' (TWWPapers B1 f24) Maud Howe Eliott (This Was My Newport) describes the early 1850's as a period when Boston 'discovered' Newport and some of her "brightest literary and artistic stars" established themselves at Cliff House: Longfellow, Tom Appleton, Charles Summer, and Samuel and Julia Howe and their children; and Longfellow would be visited there by his very dear friend, Sam Ward of NYC. (pp. 79-81) 1852 Birth of novelist, judge, and GBD associate Robert Grant (1/24/1852- 5/19/1940). Cultural and experiential overlap with GBD is most striking. Use Grant's Forescore (1934) for his account of boyhood and Harvard years, noting that his "attitude toward society and toward fiction was not unlike that of his friend Edith Wharton." ( (DAB, Supp. 2) Grant will be the judge in 1893 that will probate the estate of Charles Hazen Dorr. TWW to John (1.25) that George was married three days earlier and he and his wife are staying at the Dorr Jamaica Plain residence while the Dorrs are spending a couple of weeks on Park Street with the Wards. Later (3.9) TWW reports to John that "Mary and Mr. Dorr are as happy as possible, and Mr. Dorr is a favorite with us all from his excellent qualities." (TWWPapers B1 f25) "Without much deliberation" Samuel Gridley Howe purchased very small farm house on a very poor farm in Lawton's Valley, Portsmouth RI. Julia initially opposed the purchase "but I soon became much attached to the valley, which my husband's care greatly beautified." And in daughter Maud's This Was My Newport she states that "A great many of Mamma's 'Owls' followed her to the Valley. We endured their company the best we could where they had tea and talked about objective and subjective, the categorical imperative-all that nonsense!" (JWH. Reminiscences: 1819- 1899 and Maud Howe Elliott, quoted in "Lawton's Valley: a Natural and Historic Treasure in Rhode Island, Raytheon Internet Resource) TWW to John C. Ward (8.26) acknowledges receipt of John's letter (7.31) and his intention to pass a year in Vienna. Thomas Baring will make us a short visit; TWW has not seen him for 23 years and while he's here retirement arrangements will be made. TWW asks what he will do with this leisure, stressing that Lydia would like a "small inexpensive farm with a garden, flowers, fruits, etc., and this I think I too, should like." Comments on John's siblings and emphasizes the fact that ":everybody seems to be in a state of hurry and excitement [with] changes SO great, sudden and unlooked for that I am often led to inquire," Where is the world into which I was born?" Discusses additional changes that yield "much to regret and much to hope." All of this is prelude to TWW's encouragement to John to "being out of the great current of affairs and studying the philosophy of life and its conditions." (TWWPapers B1 f25). Timeline_George Dorr Page 27 of 28 Thomas Wren Ward invites the Hon. Daniel Webster to dine at 3 Park Street on September 20th in the company of Thomas Baring and a large party of guests. Webster "appeared at Mr. Ward's table during the dessert course," one month before Webster's death. (Lawrence, Old Park Street, 60) . Edward Everett sat next to Mrs. Samuel G. Ward and Everett recalls that "she spoke with enthusiasm and intelligence of Dante, which she and her husband had thoroughly studied together. How many bankers and their wives in Europe can say as much?" (Paul Frothingham. Edward Everett: Orator and Statesman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1925, p. 325) Even such delightful conversation could distract guests who were visibly shocked at Webster's appearance. The very discrete George Ticknor remarked that "If a ghost had come among us, it could hardly have startled us more." (R. Remini, DW, p. 754). Those present realized how near death he was; Webster's 'last supper' for never again would he cross a friend's threshold. Two months later Ticknor writes to Everett informing him that he had sent a "strong letter" to Thomas Wren Ward two weeks earlier about the funds required for the establishment of an endowment to sustain the Boston Public Library once the $50,000. gift from Ward's Baring Brothers partner, Joshua Bates, had been exhausted in erecting the new structure. (Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor. Ed. Anna Ticknor & S.G. Hillard. 2nd ed. Vol. 1,p. 232) Timeline_George Dorr Page 28 of 28 GEORGE BUCKNAM DORR Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D BEGIN 1853 (November 10, 2008) 1853 While the Ward family had led the way to Lenox in 1844, the Dorr family nearly a decade later is attracted by its charm. In December 1853 New York import merchant Francis Fiske Dorr purchased thirty acres on a Lenox hillside overlooking Laurel Lake from the Reverend Russell Salmon Cook, an influential ecclesiastical figure of his day. (The most authoritative study of Highlawn is to be found in the brilliant study of Cornelia Brooke Gilder. Hawthorne's Lenox: The Tanglewood Circle. Charleston: History Press, 2008. Pp. 59-62) Four years earlier, Cook had a house built "of the old sloped-roof pattern, boarded up and down outside and painted and sanded not unlike the primitive railroad stations often seen in small towns. (Lenox Life. June 1, 1901). Francis Dorr and his brother George Bucknam Dorr (1806-1876) -after whom the founder of Acadia will be named-had been renting the property but would soon be joined by their two sisters Elizabeth and Martha Ann Dorr Edwards, occasional residents over their lifetime. Newly named Highlawn, the Dorrs would welcome the two younger Dorr half siblings, Susan and Charles. In subsequent years Charles would be joined by his wife Mary and their sons William and George Bucknam Dorr, named after his uncle. Mary would quickly establish herself as "an intrepid horsewoman," second only to their friend, the internationally renown actress Fanny Kemble. (Gilder, op. cit., pg. 61) Earlier that Summer Richard Star Dana visited his aunt in Lenox and his letters home were centered on observations on the equine status of people around town. To his mother Juliette Starr Dana he wrote that "There are a good many people in Lenox now and some of them make quite a dash. There is a Mr. Dorr here from New York that has 12 horses and about as many vehicles of different descriptions." (July 12, 1853. Dana Family Papers. Private Collection of David T. Dana.) The proximity of the Highlawn and Highwood properties as well as their related ownership led to comparisons. Highlawn was considered "more elaborate and symmetrical" of the two, in large part due to the energy and time that merchant George B. Dorr dedicated to the grand house. Highlawn gave him the opportunity to expand his horticultural passion and landscaping skills. His neighbor, Henry Ward Beecher, begins his 1854 essay on "Dream-Culture" by stating that "there is something in the owning of a piece of ground, which affects me as did the old ruins of England it takes me but a second to run down that eastern slope, across the meadow, over the road, up that long hillside (which the benevolent Mr. Dorr is SO beautifully planting with shrubbery for my sake-blessings on him!) [Star Papers; Experiences of Art and Nature. New York: C. Derby, 1855, p. 267-68) Over the last two decades of his life, the uncle of Acadia's founder spent his summers transforming the grounds of Highlawn into "a seat of unsurpassed beauty," recognized "for extent and variety of prospect, and the high culture of its immediate surroundings. (Gilder, quoting the Gleaner and Advocate. August 7 & September 28, 1876) Frequent visits by the Mary and Charles Dorr family DORR1853 Page 1 of 21 would expose their sons to the beautiful hilltop plantings and inspire young George in ways that none recognized in their day. At 14 years of age, Ellen Tucker Emerson is sent for a year to study with Mrs. Catharine Sedgwick in Lenox before returning at sixteen years of age to enroll in Mr. Agassiz's school in Cambridge. (See Edith Emerson Webster Gregg, Emerson and his Children: Their Childhood Memories," Harvard Library Bulletin (1980) 407-430) Thomas and Lydia Ward depart June 14th for trip abroad with Chief Justice Shaw following dinner in NYC with George Cabot Ward and Hermann Melville, several others arriving later. Departs next day and his journal recounts social encounters aboard and progress of vessel. Trip to the Isle of Man takes nine days, 17 hours. (TWWPapers 3.19). T.W. Ward letter to son Sam from Steamer Arabia off coast of Ireland (6.24) describing fine health following smooth voyage experienced by Lydia, himself, and Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw (their traveling companion). Offers "best love to Anna & Martha, to Mr. Dorr and Mary, & to all the children..." Two days later in another letter he writes of import duties on his cigars, uncertainty about confiscation of his books, and thought little of the family and nothing about Barings or their business. (TWWPapers 3.19). TWW to SGW letter to Sam & Anna Ward from London (6.29) describing his visit with Lydia to the Regents Park horticultural exhibit and the Zoological Gardens with Lydia being "perfectly astonished & delighted & it appeared to me that nothing in the world that we know of at present could equal the effect of the whole Exhibition. (TWW Papers 3.19). Nearly eighty years later, George B. Dorr informs us that they departed for "Holland and up the Rhine, where the will to travel further gave out on grandmother's part apparently, and they-grandfather and grandmother- returned home, on getting letters concerning Aunt Martha, who died soon after." (University of California. Santa Barbara. Ward-Perkins Papers. B. 5. f. 20. Dorr letter to cousin Thomas Wren Ward, March 24, 1934) Julia Ward Howe's husband secures $60,000. that had been held in trust for Julia, transferring Julia's considerable wealth to his own control. Julia's response was to involve Samuel Gray Ward-in July--as administrator of a legacy trust that had been under control of her brother, Charles Ward. (Grant, Private Woman, Public Person, p. 103) , On June 30th has dinner with George Peabody who an annotated note by GBD informs us that Peabody would later partner with Junius Spencer Morgan of Hartford to form J.P. Morgan & Co. Several days later TWW writes (7.4) to Sam to describe the dinner with Thomas T. and Francis Baring at #41 Grosevenor St. More site seeing at Kew Gardens, Hampton Court, Westminster Abbey, House of Lords, despite an ongoing concern about Lydia ward's health. Depart for Amsterdam then Rotterdam in mid-July and finally Brussels where they expect son John to join them. Then onto Louvain, Liege, and Frankfort and travels on the Rhine to Geneva (7.30). (TWWPapersB3 f20). Diverted to Paris rather than Geneva because Lydia wants to consult a physician; visit the Louvre and then Versailles (8.7) and by the time they reach London (8.12) she is "perfectly well." T.W. Ward's letter (8.6) refers to discussion with Albert Dorr (likely in London) who was in discussion with George Cabot Ward about a partnership that never materialized. TWW refers to "his talents and knowledge of languages are useful and is successful enough to live comfortably. He is as perfect a gentleman as one could wish. " (TWWPapers DORR1853 Page 2 of 21 3.20 and DorrMs 'Children Vers. 2) Nathaniel Hawthorne is in Liverpool at this time but we have no evidence of their interaction even though the Hawthorne-Ticknor dealings involve frequent reliance on Barings for financial transactions (Letters of Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor 1851- 1864). Onto Wales then Dublin (8.22) where TWW's father had been confined as a prisoner captured at sea during the Rev. War (TWWPapers B3 (21) Emerson's daughters Ellen and Edith are sent to a private school in Cambridge run by the family of Louis Agassiz when not enrolled at Frank Sanborn's academy in Concord. His girls were maturing "on roughly equal social terms with Sedgwicks, Lowells, Higginsons, Parkmans, and Bancrofts, as well as with such wealthier families as those of Sam and Anna Ward, William and Caroline Tappan " (C. Baker, Emerson among the Eccentrics, 399). Between 1850 and 1855 Emerson customarily came to Boston every Saturday --or on the last Saturday of every month--to see friends and transact business, especially with Ticknor & Fields. Meeting for dinner with Horatio Woodman, Sam G. Ward was soon included as the circle of friends which quickly expanded to eventually include O.W. Holmes, H.W. Longfellow, and nine others known collectively as "The Saturday Club" (Charles Francis Adams, Richard Henry Dana: A Biography, v.2, 162 ff.) Anna Ward's extensive family correspondence reveals that Mary had been ill at this time but that she is on the mend and is summering at Nahant. It is possible that morning sickness might be the explanation for within six months the Dorr family will welcome George Bucknam Dorr into the world. (Harvard University. Houghton. Samuel Gray Ward and Anna Barker Ward Family Papers. III. 1332. July 1, 1853). While the sisters-in-law do not see each other that often, their relationship appears supportive. That fall Sam and Anna purchase the farm at Canton formerly belonging to his friend Ingersoll Bowditch. The Dorrs would purchase this farm after the death of TWW-- adding to their residential real estate holdings in Jamaica Plains and Lenox--when Sam and Anna moved to Manhattan for three years. Henry Thoreau arrives in Bangor September 14th on his second of three trips to the Maine Woods. Before his return eleven days later he would journey through Monson and the Moosehead Lake region, paddling the West Branch of the Penobscot River to Chesuncook Lake. John G. Ward writes (10/26) to his father (TWW) from Paris that he regrets that Martha's heath has not improved. His foreshadowing remarks that "What matters it if one's life is young in years, when the change comes, SO long as it is old in high thoughts and good works." He also remarks that his daily experience of Parisian gardens always brings Lydia to mind. (TWWPapers 1.25). Nov. After many years as an invalid, the death of Martha Ann Ward is recorded (11.2) in her father's diary: "My darling, you are going where there is happy and quiet rest." Obituary notice for Martha Ann Ward, first born of TWW. Describes her charitable work "to the abject and forlorn" visiting their dreary homes as a "beautiful example of Christian excellence." Dated 11.9.53. (TWWPapers 8.4) Emerson writes from Concord to Sam G. Ward (11.22) two days after the 64th birthday of TWW "cheered by the sight of your hand" informing him of the death of Emerson's 84 year old mother-a gentle woman residing in DORR1853 Page 3 of 21 the front chamber over his study-- who "lived through the whole existence of this nation." (Rusk, Letters of RWE, v.4, pp. 403-04). TWW records in his Diary that three days before Christmas he was reading Aristotle's Ethics. Two days later on a Saturday evening the Ward Family may have been wondered what holiday festivities were being celebrated by friends not near at hand. The Wards stayed close to their home on the Common since Mary's pregnancy was coming to term. In Concord, however, on this Christmas Eve, more than a thousand people came together in a very public display of holiday spirit, demonstrating how far they had come from their Puritan beginnings. (For the vivid details see Anna Maria Whiting, "Christmas in Concord," The Commonwealth, Dec. 26, 1853, and Leslie Perrin Wilson, "The Community Christmas of Concord, December 1853," The Concord Journal, Dec. 26, 2002, p. 10) Four days before the birth of George Bucknam Dorr, a liberating spirit in Concord rebelled against two centuries of Puritan discouragement of Christmas celebrations. It appears auspicious that as Dorr matures he will return repeatedly to the tension expressed in Concord at this moment: the festive public sharing of community goods overwhelming the Puritan disapproval of fanfare associated with common benefit and enjoyment. In Maine Thoreau had just completed the second of three journeys that would become part of the literary canon. On Mount Desert Island, federal funds were invested as part of the larger mapping of the Atlantic coastline. A survey station was erected on the top of Green, later Cadillac, Mountain, a structure that would evolve into the first Green Mountain Hotel and later--under Dorr's administration--become the Cadillac Mountain Tavern. Of course it was mere coincidence that the first step toward the utilitarian use of the mountain would occur on the eve of the birth of a man who would grapple with tension between the wildness of the terrain and pressures to accommodate the needs of man. As the first snow of the season fell on the 26th the family gathered around a Christmas tree at Henry Ingersoll Bowditch's with 23 grandchildren and other relatives. On the next two days many took part in the first sleighing opportunity of the season as the elder Ward paged through a new multi-volume sets of books acquired for his library. As the day ended for what would have been his father's 92nd birthday (12.28), Mary's father noted that a "violent snowstorm," commenced at midnight and three hours later with the temperature at 6 degrees above zero, George Bucknam Dorr made his entrance into the world in the Dorr weather-besieged residence in Jamaica Plain. (See the recollections of Jamaica Plain at this time dictated by a Dorr family neighbor, W. Rodman Peabody. "A Family Letter from W. Rodman Peabody," Old-Time New England XLVII, #3 [1957] 57-71) Neighboring homes were not visible through the driving snow which would continue for the next twelve hours, blocking rail transportation. (MHS. TWWPapers. B13 f5) Dorr's paternal ancestry in well documented at the New England Genealogical and Historical Society; his maternal ancestry is voluminously chronicled at the Massachusetts Historical Society. In both instances, Mr. Dorr annotated and transcribed a large number of documents. He reports that he "arrived at night in the midst of a wild snow-storm, through which my father ploughed his way on foot the following day to carry the news to my mother's father in his Park Street home." (Dorr Ms. NEHGS) Eighty-five years later Dorr will recall that "the house I was born in and the land it was built upon were long since taken over by the Boston Metropolitan Park system, one of whose DORR1853 Page 4 of 21 principal roads passes directly across the house's site and through the garden ground, where I remember my father pruning his pear trees of a summer afternoon and where my brother and I played together as young children." (ANPA. B. 1. f. January 5, 1939) 1854 The January 3rd entry in the diary of Anna Barker Hazard Ward, Dorr's maternal aunt, records that Thomas Wren Ward arrived that morning and took her and all the children out "to see Mary Dorr and her new born boy-all doing well." (University of California. Santa Barbara. Library. Ward-Perkins Papers. 3.4.f.14) TWW writes to John G. Ward (1.15) noting that he has not heard from him since 10.26, possible admonishment for not writing since Martha's death two months earlier. Announces birth of GBD and that Mary "has another fine boy and is as happy as possible" though the family in their unmentioned grief has kept very quiet and close to home. Lauds the fine order of his own library (of more than 1,200 volumes) and talks very positively about " a life so full of interest and incidents" as his own. (TWWPapers 1.26). Mary's letter to Aunt Lucy (3.11) states that "Willie has been ill the last week" and SO her visit must be delayed. Invites Lucy to Jamaica Plain for "you must see my boys-fine boys, though I say it. Willie is already my companion and friend - Georgie is my beauty. You will admire him very much." She talks of bodily infirmities and "great trials" that each of us must endure but "it rests very much with ourselves whether these trials shall prove themselves in the end great blessings." Refers to CHD as "Charlie." (TWWPapers ,f.12). Young George was not yet four months old when the Ward family cast its acquisitive eyes to the countryside outside Boston. In early April the now retired T.W. Ward purchases rural property near the celebrated Blue Hills on the west side of Pleasant Street in Canton, fifteen miles south west of Boston. Eighty years later George writes to his cousin Thomas Wren Ward inquiring whether "you can tell me anything about the old house in Canton. I always understood that it had been built by Ingersoll Bowditch and that the square cupola that surmounted the roof had been built by him to observe the stars. I think this must be true. I was under the impression that grandfather bought at Canton before your father did but in a letter to Mr. Bates he speaks of buying the 'old Nichols farm' the spring following the trip to Europe [1854], after your father had already established himself there apparently, on moving from Lenox in 1850 to help in the agency." (March 24, 1934. University of California. Santa Barbara. Library. Ward-Perkins Papers. B. 5. f. 20; Charles P. Bowditch speaks to the family sale of the Canton property: "I cannot remember any special year in which our acquaintance [with the Ward family] began as about that time he bought my father's place in Canton for himself or perhaps Dorr." (January 18, 1921 letter to William C. Endicott, Jr. Massachusetts Historical Society. Endicott Family Papers. B. 24. f. 27) Samuel G. Ward also invested in Canton, acquiring a property called Bywood. After exiting Lenox, Samuel leased Highwood to tenants and stored in the Highwood attic recreational gear that he says will be useful at Bywood. (C. Gilder email to R. Epp. July 31, 2003) For the handsome sum of $7,600, the elder Ward acquired 20 acres of partially developed Pleasant Street property "immediately adjoining" Samuel's property. (TWWPapers 1.25). Three years later he would acquire DORR1853 Page 5 of 21 additional acreage, creating a 38 acre estate which the family would own until 1876. The elder Ward wrote to his son John that summer that Lydia is delighted with her farm, "perfectly well and entirely satisfied. She is having greenhouses made and a garden of an acre prepared for fruits and flowers and is to have all kinds of grapes, etc. She and Sam have both a natural taste for the Country." For the next two decades the Dorr family would spend their weekends, holidays, and much of the Summer months in Canton, more SO than the more distance Lenox and Newport. The letters among family members are not lacking in concern about their physical well being though there still is the occasional ostrich-like comment to the effect that "cholera has become more common and we think nothing of it. (July 18, 1854. MHS. TWWPapers 1.26). During the years preceding the Civil War, Ward's property improvements exceeded $40,000, not counting the expense for a 45 acre parcel on the easterly side of Pleasant Street where the Dorr family would later reside. This environment just south of the celebrated Blue Hills will stimulate the exploratory interests of Charles and Mary's children for more than a decade prior to their entrance into Harvard College. (That property today is a 33 acre multi-purpose conservation area known as Pequitside Farm. Relocation to the country involved the movement of many support staff. Even as late as 1870, the Dorr family, a coachman, family nurse, and three domestics would relocate to their Canton home on the property of Mary's father. (1870 Census Records, Canton, MA. Pg. 45 [226]. See also www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/1496/pequit.htm for Chris Brindley's "Brief History of Pequitside Farm. Daniel T.V. Huntoon's History of the Town of Canton, Norfolk County, Massachusetts [Cambridge: J. Wilson & Son, 1893 is also useful) Following a 1933 visit with his closest relatives, Louise and William Crowninshield Endicott Jr., Dorr and the Endicott's revisited the Ward family property in Canton. (March 24, 1934 letter to Thomas Wren Ward Jr., University of California at Santa Barbara Library. Ward-Perkins Papers. B.5.f.20). Hospitably received by the current owners, Dorr was moved several years later to finalize a lengthy unsigned essay on the "Country Home at Canton. The sole surviving copy later became part of the Endicott Family Papers. (Authorship of this essay was unknown for more than fifty years until I was able to identify Mr. Dorr as its author based on handwritten annotations, style, and content; cousin Tom's response to Dorr's March 24, 1934 letter likely bolstered the essay's historical detail (May 22, 1938. Massachusetts Historical Society. Endicott Family Papers. B.35.f. 29) Reflecting the interests of a child, Dorr's adult recollections are rich in detail, especially about the physical environment of his grandparents' country home. If literary effort is a measure of value, then it is noteworthy that the Canton essay contains more contextual detail and emotional fabric than any of Dorr's musings on other family residences. Canton was simply the home that mattered most. He well recognized that its landscape informed his values. Young George found his grandfather's property delightfully wild, with the adjacent Reservoir Pond to sail and fish. (A transcript from Thomas Wren Ward's diary of 1855 refers to the "many baskets" of fish taken from this pond. Massachusetts Historical Society. Endicott Family Papers. B. 35. .21. Pg. 14) His grandfather routinely rode several miles on horseback before breakfast, later recounting impressions that surely whetted the appetites of William and George to explore the woods- roads that led to the more sizable Ponkapoag Pond to the north. It lay at the base of miles of rugged terrain, where the mountains, valleys, and natural splendors of the Blue Hills aroused the curiosity of the Dorr children. DORR1853 Page 6 of 21 There Dorr collected bird's eggs, identified birds by their song and appearance, and examined nest construction and suspension techniques in great detail. All in all, "those springs at Canton with their long afternoons, half-holidays on Saturdays and the whole of Sunday, for there was no Church out there which we attended, were a great education, teaching us to love the country and the wilderness about us without need of company." (Endicott Papers. "Country Home at Canton," op. cit., p. 5) The Ward property contained one hundred pear trees, one hundred peach trees, fifty apple trees, and a wide array of produce including potatoes, cauliflower, nectarines, and plums. The harvested produce won prizes in the Boston Flower Show. As might be expected from an outdoorsman and horticulturist, Dorr's recollections center on his grandmother's greenhouse and grapehouse which produced "the most delicious grapes I have ever known." (The reminiscences of family friend William Rodman Peabody's about Canton and Jamaica Plain provide useful insight into the culture of the day. "A Family Letter from W. Rodman Peabody, Old-Time New England XLVII, #3 (1957) : 57-71) But there was another rural environment that Dorr directly links to his later life in Maine. As the heat of summer grew oppressive, the family went off to seashore or to Lenox, "real country there, where my mother had stayed with my uncle and, as a girl, had ridden over the whole region-the most fearless horsewoman save Fanny Kemble. There we spent delightful summers, driving about the country or exploring it-my brother and I-on horseback or on foot. This migratory habit of the family was to prove important afterward in leading us to Bar Harbor." [Dorr Papers]. The benefits of country life were appreciated by other family members. Mary writes to her aunt in early June thanking Lucy for her gift to "little Willie." The new mother apologizes for not being able to travel since her nurse has been ill and she "could not bring Georgie without her, neither could I come without him." Mary says she is "run down and have had an ill turn in consequence, and we are all ordered off to Berkshire for mountain air. I am wearied out with city life and long inexpressibly for my quiet country home," a comment that suggests that her weakened condition foreshadowed the consumption that would debilitate her the following summer. (MHS. TWWPapers B7.f.12) Mary further states that "Pa is a new man in the county. My baby is beautiful. Pa thinks he looks like Grandpa Ward." Her husband adds a postscript that he's been busy "preparing to take Mary to Lenox." Marriage of Mr. & Mrs. James T. Fields resulting in liberal entertaining at their residence, an acknowledgement of their union and of Fields publishing accomplishments. It had been eleven years since George Ticknor had made Fields his junior partner and in that time the sphere of publishing had shifted from New York and Philadelphia to Boston where SO many native authors of poetry, fiction, essays, and serious tomes were being appreciated by national and international audiences. In the years ahead The Atlantic Monthly would debut (1857) and from 1854 to 1864 the North American Review appeared under their imprint. Following Ticknor's death in 1864 Fields would manage the firm until his retirement in 1871. By the end of that decade the publishing house had morphed into Houghton Mifflin & Co. November 9: Birth of Maud Howe (later Elliott) at the Perkins Institute to Julia Ward Howe and Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe. DORR1853 Page 7 of 21 Mary writes on Christmas Eve ( a four-page letter, the most lengthy from Mary extant I do believe) to Lucy from Jamaica Plain (12.24) conveying holiday greetings and a box of bon-bons from Willie. Talks of Christmas shopping "in town" and being "obliged to hurry back to nurse George with half my business unfinished." She is disinclined to travel because George's teeth "trouble him and he does not go out now." Christmas letter continues, reflecting the realities of life in mid- century: "Her boys "are fine promising lads. If they live I think they will be a pleasure and comfort to us." Describes the Christmas tree "all hung round with drums and trumpets and dogs and horses and six-penny whistles, and gay streamers," looking forward to Christmas day when they are to have a dozen other children to "merry-make and divide with, thereby learning the blessings of giving as well as receiving." Mary describes her home as "comfortable and beautiful, and in perfect order." States that CHD "is afraid that we have too many blessings but we endeavor not to grow selfish in our happiness." Mary acknowledges that she is "too poor a correspondent" but claims that she has "never been able to write more than a short note without pain since Willie's birth" due to an unstated affliction that requires her to be "propped up with pillows" in order to write. Mary further describes summer renovation and unreliable employees SO that she "worked until I was ill in bed, and then got well and went to work again.' Finally, she laments the "hard times" in this part of the world and European warfare, hopeful that "the time will come when man shall be SO far advanced that there shall be no more war on the earth." Ends by offering "a Mother's unbiased opinion" (with tongue in cheek) that "Wllie is remarkably intelligent, and George is exceedingly splendid and promises something quite uncommon. " A group of Harvard students start a new literary monthly, Harvard Magazine. Franklin B. Sanborn is at the center of the editorial direction of a publication that included very frequent articles on student vacation encounters with the New England landscape. Unlike the scientific approach that will be demonstrated a quarter century later in the explorations of Mount Desert Island by the children of Charles W. Eliot, at this time "the encounter with nature was tinged with romantic and teleological assumptions." (William A. Koelsch, "Antebellum Harvard students and the recreational exploration of the New England landscape," Journal of Historical Geography 8 (1982) : 364) Vacation rambles to the Adirondacks, the White Mountains, and the hills of Massachusetts reported in Harvard Magazine show a common appreciation for the divine creator of the splendors of Nature, a sentiment that is uncommon in Dorr's memoirs. From boyhood through middle age, Dorr will spend most of his days exploring the lay of the land, charting paths that will unfold scenic splendor, and studying how Nature and culture are mixed in the visible landscape. 1855 Charles Tracy's diary documents the adventure of a party of travelers (including Hudson River School artist Frederic Edwin Church) that spent August exploring MDI. Church had previously explored Maine with a visit three years earlier to Mt. Katahdin. (Myron H. Avery. "Artists and Katahdin," In the Maine Woods. 1940. Pp. 13-20). At some unspecified date, Dorr came into possession of the original diary prior to its redirection to the J. Pierpont Morgan Library. Mrs. Morgan and her sister Mrs. Hoppin loaned the diary to Dorr who reports that it he then had it copied and then duplicates for distribution to interested parties. (Dorr to W. O. Sawtelle, Oct. 5, 1931, ANPA. Sawtelle Collection. B48. E.8; for a somewhat different rendering of the DORR1853 Page 8 of 21 manuscript history, see Anne Mazlish, "A Research Adventure: The Tracy Log Book of 1855," The History Journal: Mount Desert Island Historical Society 1 (1998) 33-48; see also The Tracy Log Book: 1855. Ed. Anne Mazlish. Bar Harbor: Acadia, 1997) In later years, lacking a copy in hand, Dorr composes from memory an eight-page "Commentary on the Tracy Log," signaling the importance he assigned to attorney Tracy's experience of the Island prior to the coming of the summer residents. (Jesup Memorial Library Archives) The purchase in Canton the year earlier of the old Nichols homestead came about because grandfather Ward was told by his physician "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." After departing from Lenox, his son Sam bought the adjacent property--built by Ingersoll Bowditch--for the enjoyment of his family and that of his sister Mary, Mrs. Charles Dorr. (Massachusetts Historical Society. Endicott Family Papers. B. 34. f. 15) The Ward residence may have been called "Bywood" since according to Lenox historian Cornelia Gilder, in the early 1850's he writes his tenant at his house in Lenox seeking items in the attic- archery equipment-which he says will be useful at Bywood. (Gilder, email 7.31.2003) (Later, when business took Sam to New York to live, the Dorr's bought Sam's residence ["The families "Dorr Papers]. Earlier that year, Ward's diary chronicles the February accident of the father of his son-in-law, Samuel A. Dorr who slipped on Park Street and fell heavily. Within two weeks this "good man and citizen" was dead and from this time forward the role of Dorr family members recedes in its influence on George Bucknam Dorr. For the next two decades the Dorr residence within the Ward compound at Canton would be the center of their summer activities. "There, in real county, with woods and a lake for neighbors, dogs and horses for companions, my bother and I grew up, springs and falls, till college days." Wm. sailed, George "gathering wild flowers and collecting birds' eggs." (DorrMs NEHGS. Charles Hazen Dorr. Version 2) Ward's early summer letter to son John from Canton stated that he and Lydia "are anchored here in the country now, and well We have done our work on our farm here, and have nothing now to do but carry it on, and this your mother does mainly with the gardener, taking great satisfaction in her country life." Urges John to visit and while he takes comfort in the fact that the Haggerty's are close by in Paris, a notation added by GBD informs us that it is from them that word came of John's contracting consumption of which he died the following spring. (July 13, 1855. TWW Papers B.1 .26) Within the next two years the elder Ward increased his Canton land holdings through the purchase of the Little Red House parcel of six acres and another twelve acres (for $3,600). He also purchased 45 acres for $9,000 on the easterly side of Pleasant Street, spending over $40,000 to beautify the estate through the erection of a greenhouse and grape arbor as well as the Pleasant Street plantings of forest, fruit, and shade trees. The Endicott Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society contain an newly uncovered essay that can now be attributed to Dorr in his later years. This essay on their "Country Home at Canton," refers to the Ward rural property where by GBD dated May 22, 1938 on "Country home at Canton." In Spring, his parents relocated to the country "giving abundant leisure. for play at home." (I was able to provide evidence for attributing this unattributed May 22, 1938 essay to George B. Dorr since a handwritten note by "GBD" is attached, the style coheres with his DORR1853 Page 9 of 21 other writings, and the unique horticultural authority in the text is consistent with other Dorr documents) Canton was reached by the Providence RR where grandfather had bought a farm on his doctors advice a few years before his death. He bought the Nichols family homestead beside the Ingersoll Bowditch country home; later Samuel Gray Ward bought an adjacent property that the Dorr's occupied several years after the Samuel G. Ward family relocated to New York. [see Endicott Papers, "Country Home at Canton;" see also The Dorr Papers, "The families.. "It was delightfully wild there at that time, with a big pond to sail on and old roads and wood-roads over which to ride with scarce a house upon them." Grandmother Ward had "a passion for gardening which her life in the city gave no opportunity for gratifying.' Both heated and cold green houses were maintained as well as a grape house gave an early start to plants and protection against the winter frosts. Dorr celebrates the "perfection" of the Ward peaches though his father reminisced that peaches of such quality were grown elsewhere around Boston. So too, Barlette, Bickles, and juicy Buerres Bosques pears grew well as they did on the Dorr property at Lenox. Mrs. Ward entered her finest flowers in horticultural shows where she took many prizes, due to good care and not lavish expenditures. "Those springs at Canton with their long afternoons, half holidays on Saturdays and the whole of Sunday were a great education, teaching us to love the country and the wilderness about us without need of company." When summer heat was too severe the family went off to the seashore. (See Robert Grant, "The North Shore of Massachusetts," Scribner's Magazine 16, #1 (1894) for an account of why the shore at Cape Ann proved SO appealing to "men of comfortable means.") Yet to Dorr his sights were drawn to the Berkshire hills, to Lenox "real country then, where my mother had stayed with my uncle [Sam] and, as a girl, ridden the whole region-the most fearless horsewoman, Mr. Curtis the old inn keeper at Lenox, told me in later years, that he had even known save Fanny Kemble. There we spent delightful summers on horseback or foot. This migratory habit of the family [continuing through 1868 ] was to prove important afterward in leading us to Bar Harbor." Charles and Mary Dorr visit St. Augustine, Florida [Dorr Papers 1.19] in the fall because Mary contracted consumption which had been responsible for the death of a sister and two brothers. Mary's father's family physician, Dr. James Jackson, who had attended sister Martha (who succumbed to the disease) "gave little hope" for her [Mary's] recovery but CHD "acting on his own initiative" took her this fall to St. Augustine where they spent the winter where "the climate conquered and her life was saved." (Dorr Ms. NEHGS) Dorr children are cared for in Jamaica Plain by a Welch nurse who "was with my mother when I was born and cared for me thereafter as though I were her own," remaining with the Dorr's until her death. She is buried with CHD & MGD at Mt. Auburn. When Dorr's return from Florida "my mother brought back some Indian things she purchased there which were the delight of my childhood, a toy 'dug-out' canoe, a pair of Indian moccasins, delightfully soft and ornamented with colored beads, some strings of coral and a piece of the crumbling shell conglomerate which fringed the shore." (DorrPapers 1, f.13). At their Jamaica Plain home, the two Dorr brothers would have made use of these playthings as Dorr later recalled. DORR1853 Page 10 of 21 "I remember my father pruning his pear trees of a summer afternoon and where my brother and I played together as young children." (January 3, 1939. Letter to Serenus Rodick. NAPA. B. 1. f. 10) Erection of the Agamont House overlooking the Bar Harbor town pier. By 1872 the number of hotels would soar to fifteen. 1856 R.W. Emerson writes from Concord (5.6) to Jane Welch Carlyle 1801-6 wife of Emerson's Scottish literary friend, maker her aware that Ann Barker Ward, "my dear and honored friend" is visiting England though "her health is bad, her physicians advise travel" and SO Mrs. Ward is enroute to Switzerland where her son is at school. She leaves for Europe (5.9) and returns in late September. According to Eleanor Tilton young TWW, the Wards only son, had long been deaf from a childhood illness but apparently overroad the handicap (Letters of RWE, v.8, p. 551, n.17). Tilton also notes that the Emerson children "frequently visited the Wards." (v.8, p.560,n.45). Emerson writes that he is to dine with Sam G. Ward later that week (12.16) Could this be at the Saturday Club? (Ruck, Letters of RWE, 5, pg. 47). It appears that Ward later offers (2.24.58) investment advice to Emerson (Rusk, 5, p. 100). The Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the City of Boston had for many decades seen the Back Bay as primarily an effective source of water power for its southern shore mills. The Mill Dam causeway generated toll income but despite its regulation of tidal flows there was increased public demand to fill in the Back Bay to correct unsanitary conditions of the tidal flats. A massive landfill project began that would ultimately add 450 acres to the original 783 acres of Boston urban space, providing in turn a new residence for the Ward and Dorr families. Dec. 29th, Death on the birthday of GBD of Francis Calley Gray, his mother's uncle. Harvard is the beneficiary of a considerable portion of his estate including over 3,000 engravings together with an endowment and an additional $50,000 to establish and maintain a museum of comparative zoology. 1857 Charles W. Eliot & friend Moorefield Story and several others travel to Rockland where they charter a small fishing schooner and navigated their way to MDI for "their first sight of these hills and harbors." (BHT 7.12.1956 in 1859-63 chrono reporting establishment of memorial tablet in memory of Samuel A. Eliot and his wife Frances Hopkinson Eliot by their sons) Dorr recalls (Dorr Papers 1.14) that the bookcase in the Storm Beach Cottage library stood first in the "late 1850's against the wall of the library of my grandfather's Ward's house on Park Street, Boston. I remember well climbing up on a chair to look at the back of the books on the shelves, for I could not yet read.' He then describes a title of the Arabian Knights with delightful engravings and GBD took the book home to Jamaica Plain where his "kind old nurse" Mrs. Hind read to him from the book while he sat "in a high chair." Dorr still had "long, fair curls and not to have graduated into trousers yet." Subsequent trips secured the two other volumes of the set. Describes TWW view from library onto the Granary Burial Ground over "a back garden that my grandmother tended" while front rooms "looked out delightfully over the Common with the sunlight streaming in the afternoon and throwing on the walls DORR1853 Page 11 of 21 colored light from glass prisms hanging from a great chandelier in the center of the parlor." After TWW's death they lived for a winter in the house until sold by his executors while "we built ourselves a new home alongside my grandmother, being among the first to build on the new-made land beyond the Public Gardens." The Atlantic Monthly established under the editorship of James Russell Lowell who was succeeded in 1861 by James T. Fields. Samuel Fox Dorr's son, Samuel Dorr (1836- ), graduates from Harvard, half-brother to CHD. Sam's younger brother, Hazen (1837-56) had died June 7th 1856 alone in his Cambridge room at Harvard College "of some sudden seizure that came without warning and whose nature was never clearly understood. (Dorr Ms. 'Children Ver. 2) In the Dorr Ms. ('Children of Sam Dorr'), GBD recalls solitary memory of Francis Fiske Dorr "when I saw him at Lenox during occasional visits that I made to Highlawn, the family estate, as a child where I recall him--a kindly old gentleman, he seemed to me then-pruning trees that bordered on the beautiful great lawn, while I stood beside him." At nearly seventy years of age (March .1923), Dorr would recall in a letter to J.D. Rockefeller Jr. that "open grassy spaces like wild sheep pastures, are often better in contrast to continuous woods. I used to be familiar with them, wandering over the Berkshire country when I was a boy." (RAC. III.2.I. B. 83. f. 827) Dorr recalls Francis' "wonderful [Parisian] cookoo clock" and that he was given "a tiny sip of the famous green Chartreuse." If we ponder why Dorr is not more expansive in recalling his elders, it is wise to heed the judgment of one of his peers, Maud Howe Elliott who discerns that "Children take grown people for granted, accept them as fixed facts like the earth, the heaven, and the stars. They do not analyze them as they do their contemporaries" (Three Generations, 24) It is most likely that Thomas Wren Ward was elected Honorary Member of The Hasting Pudding Club. The practice of electing honorary members from the Faculty began in this year and the records are not reliable but T.W. Ward is one of nine elected between 1850 and 1867. 1858 Arlington Street and Commonwealth Avenue are laid out in the Back Bay. On March 4th Thomas Wren Ward died at his Park Street home (Mount Auburn Cemetery Historical Collections, #235). Expressions of condolence are received by the family from friends and business associates. Merchant and philanthropist Pelatiah Perit (1785-1864) had been "much with him in the interesting commercial and political movements" of the last four decades" and found in Thomas "a true friend. I owe mainly to his influence, my connection with this [banking] house, and the position which I hold in this community. It gives me pleasure to make this to you, when I can no longer make it to him." (University of California. Santa Barbara. Library. Ward-Perkins Papers. B. 3. f. 37) Newspaper obituaries refer to him as the son of Captain William Ward who followed in the business of "a mariner" and first officer of a ship that his father commanded as well as his own command of "an Indiaman" belonging to the Honorable William Gray. He is lauded as "a man of strict integrity, of great enterprise and uncommon business capacity, and much respected in the community." (TWWPapers 8.4). Much later Dorr will display an extraordinary interest in family roots, a manifestation of what Cleveland Amory refers to as "Grandfather on the Brain," a Boston phenomena "dating from the days when the grandfather-merchant as the golden Family Founder, was the key figure of the whole Boston society DORR1853 Page 12 of 21 system and was entitled to almost godlike respect" (C. Amory, The Proper Bostonians, ch. 3). One element of T.W. Ward's estate is an institutional gift of $ 5,000 "to the [Harvard] College library" with the requirement that the income be annually expended to purchase books." He also gifted to Harvard a "volume containing my account of my administration as Treasurer of that institution" and his portrait by W. Page. Ward's last will and testament also directs his executors to be conservative in their investments of his capital, adhering to the minimal risk principle that had profited him SO well in life. The overarching conservative goal is that investments shall be directed "in the safest manner, not caring for a high rate of interest, but rather for permanent security of the principle." (Harvard University. Houghton. Samuel Gray Ward and Anna Hazard Barker Ward Papers. III. 1366) The Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Missionary Society, the American Peace Society and his sister receive small portions of an estate exceeding half a million dollars at the time that the will was completed eight years earlier. The Park Street home and revenue from these investments belong to Lydia and at her death the property is to be equally divided among their children. For each of their children, ten thousand dollars is held in trust and the principle paid back to their survivors on their deaths. Unusual for a document of this time, Ward writes at length about his concern for the fate of their two daughters. Mindful of social paternalism, he insists that their inheritance is "wholly free" from the debts, control, or entanglements of any of their husbands. In a nutshell, Mary's portion of the Ward family inheritance is not to be administered by her husband. The elder Ward had kept letters he received in his long correspondence with the Barings and copies of letters he wrote, "meaning to use them in writing a history of his time when he was through," according to his grandson George. The Dorr Papers (B2 f3) report that the elder Ward "unwisely" mentioned this intent in a letter to the Barings and they became "alarmed," apparently fearful of the publicity. They later asked Samuel Gray Ward "to burn the whole, which he did, without even examining the contents for historical material, as his son, Thomas Wren Ward, who is still living in his early nineties, told me" when he was directed by Samuel Gray Ward to destroy the documents when he first entered the office in 1867. No confirming documentation exists and it is not mentioned by Samuel in The Ward Family Papers, which is began with Samuel's printing of his grandfather William Ward's letter to his grandchildren, a tradition that the grandson embraced when he crafted his own biography for his grandchildren. It is most puzzling that George Bucknam Dorr would focus on the destruction of business records instead of praising his uncle for the preservation and biographical expansion of the personal history of the Ward family. Dorr is quite right when he recognizes that "every generation sees such material in great quantity go to destruction," yet such documents are not only useful for study but also "for the study of human life and character, which, far more than history in the broader sense would furnish the material to make men better.' (DorrPapers B2f3) Samuel Ward may not have had access to all the content contained in chests filled with historical documents that had came into Mary's hands and through her to Dorr. Clearly he found such documents "full of interest. Some day a portion of this, I trust may be given to the public.' True to his word, these Ward and Dorr family documents were deposited in the Massachusetts Historical Society and the New England Historic and Genealogical Society following Dorr's death. What uncle Sam accomplished was the publication of manuscript material in his DORR1853 Page 13 of 21 possession while he still lived; following his death additional family letters and correspondence became part of the public archive. Samuel Gray Ward becomes the sole U.S. representative of the Barings taking over the 28 State Street office of his father. Ward and Emerson see each other frequently at the Saturday Club until business conditions before the close of the Civil War require that the Ward's sell their Louisburg Square address and relocate at 89 Madison Avenue in New York City where his office is located at 52 Wall Street (Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. R. Rusk. V. 6, pg. 6. n. 15; also Harvard University. Houghton. Papers of Samuel Gray Ward and Anna Hazard Barker Ward. III. 1441) In 1867 Sam's "most faithful and devoted friend," his brother George, became his Barings partner. But the death of grandfather Ward forced hard decisions about his wife's solitary circumstances on Park Street. Less than five years of age, George later recalled the Jamaica Plain life that they would shortly leave behind as the Dorr's planned the sale of their home in Jamaica Plain and relocation to #4 Park Street. Dorr's memories he likens to "an old-time Magic Lantern show." He sees his parents "on horse-back, going off together for a ride and turning back to wave to me as I stand watching at the door." He vividly recalls carriage rides with the family and images of "our lake, Jamaica Pond, frozen in winter, with people skating-my mother with me and my father on his skates close by. More so, "gay sleighing scenes upon the snowy Boston road, with friendly racing and the sound of bells." A change of seasons with "great white swans with arching necks and black, formidable-looking beaks marked with red" sailing by on the Pond. In the dog days of summer off to Lenox, "more often to Newport where my mother as a girl staying with friends had sketched and ridden horseback." Brother William contracted scarlet fever here. (DorrMs, NEHGS, CHD) But now life presented the challenges of an urban existence within a stones throw of the State House. Plans were being executed to establish the new Public Garden across the Common from the Ward-Dorr family residence on Park Street. Dorr's memoirs do not refer to the impact of these gardens on his personal development though he admits to a friend with some regret that "the house I was born in and the land it was built upon were long since taken over by the Boston Metropolitan Park system, one of whose principle roads passes directly across the house's site and through the garden ground where my brother and I played together as young children." Dorr to Serenus Rodick. January 5, 1939. ANPA. B.1. f.10) Dorr learned first hand about the impermanence of cultural structures and the enduring qualities of public places-lessons not lost in Maine. The Emerson and Ward families had known one another for two decades by the middle of the 1850s. Emerson remained one of Wards intellectual companions despite the claims made by the four children of the now middle-aged couple. Neuralgia-troubled Anna (1841-1875) was the first born, followed by Lydia (1843-1929), Elizabeth (1847-1920), and long lived Thomas Wren Ward (1844-1940), named after his paternal grandfather. Following in his father's footsteps, Sam looked for an educational environment beyond Boston for his son Tom. Emerson provided assistance in locating appropriate lodging for Tom when he attended Franklin B. Sanborn's School in Concord. Tom had spent several years abroad at Edward Sillig's Boarding Institution in Vevey, near Lake Geneva, Switzerland. (For family correspondence see the Ward-Perkins Papers held by the University of California, Santa Barbara). Apparently it was hoped DORR1853 Page 14 of 21 that this institution could assist Tom in learning, despite his deafness. Reunited with his family and placed within the shelter of the Concord Emersonians, young Tom fares well. year later on 6 June 1859 Emerson again invites Sam, this time for the "fortnight's declamation." A month later Tom informs Emerson he is to be one of the 'speakers" at the Examination and Emerson's daughter Ellen will bring Lily (that is, Lydia) and Bessie (that is, Elizabeth) Ward to hear and see him. Much has been written and interpreted regarding Emerson's reaction to the March 1858 conversion of Anna Barker Ward to the Church of Rome. It is not an overstatement to state that this news shocked and alarmed Boston Brahmins and Concord intellectuals. Emerson had elevated Anna-a Quaker turned Unitarian-regarding her "as an archetype of the best in American womanhood." The Sage of Concord saw Catholicism as untrue and a retreat to medievalism. "Anna's conversion symbolized American submission to the Old World and the dead past" and Emerson's anti- Catholic bitterness was not short-lived. (R.D. Birdsall, "Emerson and the Church of Rome," 277) Emerson saw her illness as a motivating factor for her conversion and hoped that she would recover both physically and spiritually. Thomas Wren Ward summers in Canton while the Dorr family is in Lenox cultivating relationships that originated during the nine years that Sam and Mary spent developing Highwood. (Harvard University. Houghton. Samuel Gray Ward and Anna Hazard Barker Ward Papers. III. 1367. August 17, 1856) Further West, journalist W.J. Stillman departed on August 2nd for the Adirondacks with a group of Harvard friends in tow. His purpose was to expose its members "for a short time each summer, to the undiluted influence of the great mother, Nature." (See .J. Stillman, "The Philosopher's Camp," The Century 46, #4 (1893) : 598-606; the authors pencil sketch of the campsite and its symbolically placed visitors hangs in the Special Collections suite, Concord Free Public Library) Included in the group were Ralph Waldo Emerson, naturalists Louis Agassiz and Jeffries Wyman, James Russell Lowell, Concord Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar and five others that the local population referred to collectively as the 'philosophers. , Stillman's vivid recollections of this philosophical party of twenty (which included a local guide to accompany each of the ten celebrated sages) as they journeyed from Saranac to the sources of the Raquette River offers the best portrait of Emerson's first-and only-contact with wilderness, the forest primeval. As they camped that week on the shores of Follansbee Pond, these cosmopolitan men were uniquely challenged by "the state where what each man was and had made of himself was the real measure of his relation to the world." (Stillman, p. 604) Shortly afterward their return to Boston on August 17th, Emerson documented his responses to authentic wilderness-experiences both humiliating and enlightening--in a three hundred line poem titled "The Adirondacks. A Journal.' (See Paul F. Jamieson, "Emerson in the Adirondacks," New York History 39, #3 (1958) 215-237; for a contrasting view see Philip G. Terrie, "Romantic Travelers in the Adirondack Wilderness," American Studies 24 (1983) 59-75) Whether Emerson shared related impressions with Ward family friends, among them being four year old George Bucknam Dorr and his cousin Tom, there sadly is no documentation. DORR1853 Page 15 of 21 Eight year old Henry Cabot Lodge moves with his family to 31 Beacon Street next to the Hancock house that his mother occupied for 40 years. This was the home which Samuel Eliot (Charles W. Eliot's father) had occupied until the panic of 1857 caused him to lose all his property (H.C. Lodge, Early Memories, 59-62) Lodge's father secured subscribers to purchase Eliot's library and return it to him. Henry Cabot was enrolled in a small private school (until 1961) under Park Street Church run by Master Thomas Russell Sullivan where Henry Parkman was one of his classmates. Charles W. Eliot followed the "First Family tradition" and in October married Miss Ellen Derby Peabody, granddaughter of Elias Hasket Derby, the world's largest shipowner; Eliot then built two adjoining houses in Cambridge and set up his parents in the home beside his own. Charles Dorr "read to me already as a child John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress. " and only later when he could read himself did GBD begin to more fully appreciate the intense religious spirit of early Puritan days. [Dorr Papers, 2.3]. 1859 No information is available regarding GBD's early education whether at the hands of tutors or his family. It is possible that his education followed a course similar to that documented by Robert Grant in Fourscore: An Autobiography, a family friend whose book offers valuable insight into the character of Dorr's mother, Mary. Like many of his class, Robert Grant attended a school for both boys and girls taught a few doors away from the Grant residence though the details are sketchy. (p. 26-27). In 1863 Dorr will enter Epes Dixwell's School but prior to that year he mentions that there were few boarding schools in those days--nowhere does he mention attending public schools as had his father. Julia Ward Howe's daughter Florence (1845-1922) refers to her experience of lodging (for an indefinite period) with the Dorr's in Jamaica Plain. Dr. and Mrs. Howe visited the West Indies and arranged for their children to stay with relatives and friends like the Dorr's. While we have few specifics on the interaction of Florence (known as "Flossy") and young George, we do know that the Jamaica Plain experience was a positive one as were her repeated visits to the Dorr residence in Canton, where she and George likely shared portions of their youth being only eleven months apart. (Mary Ward Dorr. Typescript. Yellow House Papers: The Laura E. Richards Collection. Gardiner Library Association and Maine Historical Society. Coll. 2C85. RG9B.f.11, pg. 3) But while in Canton, her schooling by Miss Lucia M. Peabody was SO effective "that I was willing to take the trip of some six miles daily, for more than three years, walking from South Boston to the Jamaica Plain horse-car in Boston." (Florence Howe Hall. Memories Grave and Gay, pp. 84-85). R.W. Emerson writes to Anna Barker Ward (5.5) that he sees Tom "almost daily," whose "deafness was some angelic guard to defend his ear from vulgarity and vice. He is the darling of the young people, who all prize in him this infantile purity & grace." (Letters of RWE, V. 5 pp. 142- 43, 176) Late July and early August trip by Sam G. Ward and Edward Emerson to the Adirondac's (Letters of RWE, V. 5, p. 163, 168), On their return Ralph Waldo Emerson writes to his "dear friend" Sam G. Ward regarding Anna's conversion to Catholicism that "the high way to deal with her is to DORR1853 Page 16 of 21 accept the total pretension of the Roman Church, & urge her through the whole rococo" recognizing that her "own house, her children, & her husband's claims to daily & lifelong respect & confidence, are the best electuary." (Letters, pg. 169) Two other children, Lydia [von Hoffman] and Elizabeth [de Schonberg] will survive their father (SGW) and be named in the will filed Nov. 18, 1907. A.L. Higgins property map of East Eden listing all the names of mail recipients and their mapped property locations. 1860 Birth in Salem of William Crowninshield Endicott [Jr.] (9.28) in "an ancient gambrel roofed house, built and formerly owned by George Cabot, and still standing at 365 Essex Street." Son of W.C.E. (same name) and Ellen Peabody. [See MHS biographical sketches of family members] Following his Harvard graduation (1883) he served as an assistant to his father in Washington, the latter Secretary of War in the Cleveland administration. Louise Marie Thoron (1864-1958) marries WCE in 1889. Due to her ancestry, the Ward Family Papers (1799-1938) form a part of the Endicott Family Papers (MHS, carton 35, folders 15-29) which includes G.B. Dorr's very personal ten-page 1938 essay on the history of the Canton summer home of his grandfather, Thomas Wren Ward. Mr. Dorr will attend the funeral of WCE (d. 11.28.1936) . The Rev. William Lawrence's biographical essay on WCE provides an unequalled source of information about Endicott's character and achievements, especially those related to the MHS, Fruitlands, The Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the Abbe Museum, and friendships with Charles S. Sargent and Mrs. 'Jack' Gardner. 1861 April: The attack on Ft. Sumter etches itself permanently into the memories of every Bostonian. Robert Grant recalls the exact spot where he stood when his father announced the news (Fourscore, 36) while Lydia Ward brings to Jamaica Plain the newspaper informing everyone of the firing on Fort Sumter. GBD has vivid recollection of the "sun streaming into the parlor where they sat from across the lake, the leaves not yet out upon the trees would screen the house from it it was the end of our life at Jamaica Plain." (Dorr Papers 1.14, recalled in May 1938). Well, not quite, for CHD being "deeply stirred, at once enlisted." It was planned that he would serve as a major in a Massachusetts regiment commanded by his friend and Jamaica Plain neighbor, Col. Francis Lee. During training prior to disembarking-involving daily trips to Boston for drill upon the Common--CHD caught "a typhoid fever and was ill for weeks; recovering, and impatient at the delay, he took up his training again [but he] suffered a relapse which was all but fatal and left him invalided for years thereafter." A "bitter blow" when his regiment left for the south. Emerson writes to Abel Adams (7.8) that son Edward is to be examined for College in five days and then he goes with Tom Ward, Julian Hawthorne, and several other boys to Monadnoc to camp out for a week. (Rusk. Letters of RWE, 5, p. 250). Following the late July Battle of Bull Run, CHD went to Washington on some mission for Massachusetts Governor Andrew, a personal friend. Mary traveled with him and on their return described the scene in terms that were "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.' " (DorrrMs NEHGS CHD Ver 2) DORR1853 Page 17 of 21 Henry Cabot Lodge enrolled in Mr. Dixwell's private Latin school to prepare over the next five years for college. GBD would have been one of his classmates as was William Lawrence. Dixwell had "no patience with slovenliness of mind; he also taught well. and was an especially good critic and instructor in declamation" (H.C. Lodge, Early Memories, 82- 83). But the emphasis was on Latin and Greek grammars as well as being drilled in algebra and plane geometry while "the history of our own country was thought quite needless." This emphasis is reinforced by Robert Grant's experience at the Latin Grammar School, where he says that "all we learned was to memorize and that the reasoning faculty was kept in abeyance." (Fourscore, p. 33). The Naval Academy is moved from Annapolis to Newport at the opening of the Civil War. The Howe's and Dorr's had abandoned the summer heat of Boston for the ocean breezes of Newport. Julia Howe writes to her father (Aug. 13) that Mrs. Dorr had arranged for a party for Massachusetts Governor Andrew, inviting Julia Ward Howe as well. Her teenage daughters had been content to remain at their Lawton's Valley home until at the last moment they were invited. The "merry time" at the Dorr Newport residence is described vividly; the two Dorr brothers-William and George nowhere mentioned. (Florence Howe Hall, Memories Grave and Gay, pp. 124-125) George's maternal uncle, George Cabot Ward (1824-87), was "one of the most active and energetic supporters of the Government" in New York City, coordinating with several others the establishment of the Union League Club, functioning as its President and its Treasurer until his declining health forced him to distance himself from active involvement. (Massachusetts Historical Society. T.W. Ward Papers. B. 8.f.4). Dorr describes 1861 through 1865 as "the most impressionable in life," when "war dominated" his experience and "the news from which I hung day by day.' He can't recall the question raised of separation-instead, it was "slavery that made the Civil War for us and our friends in Boston a holy thing." Refers to the principles that guided action, dismissing consequentialism. (Dorr Papers 1.14). For both sons the war years were "an unforgettable experience. They saw the troops assemble, among them older brothers of their friends; they heard of the battles and losses sustained by these troops; they saw them return "with torn banners and depleted ranks." And the youngsters drilled themselves at school- "everywhere the war was in our thoughts." Refers also to the battle between the Monitor and Merrimac "that changed in a few hours the whole system of naval warfare-and the Battle of Gettysburg "which definitely turned the tide." (DorrMs NEHGS CHD & Ver. 2) Dorr's maternal cousin, Thomas Wren Ward (1844-1940), enters Harvard- despite a deafness following an early illness--but withdrew two months later for private study in Cambridge. The following year he re-enters Harvard joining the class of 1866. "His keen interest in exploration resulted in his again leaving the college in 1865 to join Professor Louis Agassiz, leader of a scientific expedition to Brazil. (NYT July 19, 1940 obit) During the Civil War era both the Dorr and Ward families relocated more often than at any other time in the life of their families. In the fall the Dorrs relocated to the Ward family townhouse at 3 Park Street where a new life began for not only nine year old George but the entire family. The move was clearly not motivated solely by concern for Mrs. Ward (following TWW death in 1858) but by his father's desire to be close to the State House where he offered "aid as need there was to DORR1853 Page 18 of 21 Governor Andrew." Their Jamaica Plain property would be incorporated later into the Metropolitan Park (date uncertain), yet in a letter (1.5.39) to Serenus Rodick, Dorr says that one of the principle roads of the park system "passes directly across the houses' site and through the garden ground, where I remember my father pruning pear trees of a summer afternoon and where my brother and I played together as young children." (ANPA B1, f. 12. Dorr speaks frequently of the Park Street home that the Wards first occupied in 1816, describing it as "roomy and spacious, and opening directly on my brother's and my playground on the Common, with its broad malls and arching elms." For Mary it had been her birthplace and home until the time of her marriage whereas to her sons it was "a home rich in the mystery of the past.' It is most peculiar that Dorr is almost completely silent on the interior life of the Commonwealth Avenue residence where he would live for nearly sixty years! Samuel occupied offices at 28 State Street. As had been true at Lenox, Edward Waldo Emerson (EY of the Saturday Club, 115) characterizes Samuel G. Ward as was one of the "pioneer residents" of the reclaimed Back Bay. Since the completion of the Mill Dam in 1821, the Boston Water Power Company, city officials, and urban planners had developed plans for turning the swampy flats into residential housing through a variety of landmaking schemes. The 1857 legislative authorization enabled Boston to use revenue from the sale of this land to pay for the filling of Back Bay, ostensibly to reduce population pressures throughout Boston. In This 450 acre area from Charles Dam on the north to Tremont Street on the south and from the western edge of the Common to the new Boston University Campus on the west, would become until the Great Depression Boston's fashionable residential quarter. (See Bainbridge Bunting. Houses of Boston's Back Bay. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. Pg. 1) Despite the public rhetoric, however, "the hidden agenda of these projects [Was] creating attractive residential areas SO that upper middle-class Yankees, who were valued as both voters and taxpayers, would remain in the city to counteract the Irish immigrants pouring into Boston at the time. (Nancy S. Seasholes. Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Pg. 178) Beginning at the Public Gardens, Commonwealth Avenue "represents one of the country's first concerted efforts to create a homogeneous urban environment on a grande scale the Back Bay is for Victorian Boston what Beacon Hill is for the city's Republican era." (Bunting, op. cit., pgs. 2-3) At the head of this great boulevard, Samuel G. Ward contracted for the first stately brownstone mansion on the north side, Number One Commonwealth Avenue, next to the Arlington Avenue residence of his father's colleague, Joshua Bates. Within a few years he would acquire two lots on the south side of Commonwealth Avenue where his mother, Lydia Ward, would reside (#20). Charles Dorr purchased the matching five-story Number 18 from his brother-in-law following the sale of the Ward family Park Avenue property on the east side of the Common. (DorrMs, NEHGS, CHD & Ver.2 Number 18 Commonwealth Avenue would be George Dorr's principle residence for more than fifty years. (Bunting, op. cit., Appendix A; figure 47 offers a glimpse of #18 in a rare photograph from a much later era) As a teenager, Dorr paid close attention to the interplay between the central mall and its four parallel rows of trees and related plantings, observing how vast empty lots were filled piecemeal over many years with scores of Commonwealth Avenue residences modeled on contemporary French models. Unlike Bar Harbor of a later era, here the distinctive façade of each residence was intended to enhance the entire avenue rather than DORR1853 Page 19 of 21 direct attention to itself. (Bunting, op. cit. , pg. 69) In his planting decisions sixty years later, Dorr would apply this principle through the selection of distinctive flora that improved the scenic design of the park landscape as a whole. At the same time, Samuel, Anna, and the Ward family relocated to New York City where they resided at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Streets. In 1865, the Wards also built also a beautiful summer house on the cliffs of Newport, having weaned his family from the Canton summer home. In both Boston and Canton, Sam's desire to relocate provided the opportunity for the Dorr family to acquire his property, very likely at less than market value. For recreation GBD had the Common at his doorstep. A contemporary and friend, Robert Grant, best characterizes the school days and recreation of Dorr's neighbors in Jack Hall (1888), offering dramatic accounts of his own youth. Vivid accounts of snow-ball fights, skirmishes with hordes of boys from other localities who bore names like the "Round- pointers and the Nigger-hillers, and the North-enders and the South- enders, and the Charlestown pigs.' (Jack Hall, pg. 52. See also Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams. New York: Modern Library, 1983. Chapters 2 & 3) Grant's autobiography (Fourscore) reiterates the boyish pleasure taken in the "long icy coasts on the Common, the best of which started in front of the State House, attracted hordes of boys from all over the city.' (p. 35) Then again, Early Memories by Henry Cabot Lodge is also an important window into this era and place, remarking on their vigorous outdoor life. Not only spare hours for boys to walk and take expeditions, for they "also played all games assiduously--football, baseball, hockey, and the rest, varied in winter by coasting, skating, and savage snowball fights on the Common with boys from the South End and the back of Beacon Hill, whom we called 'muckers''' (89) It was also the site for special events. James Lovett's Old Boston Boys and the Games They Played notes that it was "the camping ground for all visiting circuses" where children would be drawn to the area by announcements that "the elephants would bathe in the Frog Pond, at a given hour" (p. 17) Mark A. De Wolfe Howe's Boston Common is the definitive study which also emphasizes the ceremonies held annually on the Comnmon, especially the military gatherings which proved "of special delight to the juvenile members of the population" (p. 52) To be sure it was the site of kite flying, baseball, and above all coasting-the most favored sledding on "the 'Long Coast' from the corner of Park and Beacon Streets to the West Street entrance..." (p. 55) There one might see Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, or Rufus Choate on their morning promenade. However, it was during these years that the Common emerges as "a place of poignant association with the ardors and the pathos of the war-time" since it was "a rallying point of soldiers departing for actual battles or returning from it." (pp. 58-59). Innumerable farewells to departing troops with town boys displaying delight in being allowed to refill soldier canteens. 1862 New England literati account for much of the MDI visitation. Hawthorne visits in late July (L.E. Brown, Acadia National Park, Maine: History Basic Data, 52) . 1863 DORR1853 Page 20 of 21 Julia Ward Howe visits New York City, the first visit of eight year old Maud to Manhattan where they stayed with Julia's uncles John (President of the New York Stock Exchange) and Richard Ward. Julia's father, Sam Ward, "was a banker of the firm of Prime, Ward and King, founder and president of the Bank of Commerce, patron of artists, literati, political exiles, and poor relations..." However, Maud at this time met her own uncle, Sam Ward, "my mother's only surviving brother the most agreeable man I have ever known. He threw a spell over me in those days at Islip that still holds, though he has been dead more than thirty years" (Maud Howe Elliott, Three Generations, 68-69). Dorr confirms here his mother's frequent Lenox visits during the 1840's when her brother, Anna, and the children had resided at Highwood. Nearly two decades later Mary and the family spent summer days at her brother- in-laws Highlawn estate where New York merchants James and George became gentleman farmers. It was "a very adult world occupied by the quartet of elderly, childless Dorr uncles and aunts" occupying a small part of "the fourteen bedroom house with its library, dining room and music room." (C. Gilder. "Highlawn.") The children of Charles and Mary Dorr observed and learned from their horticulturist uncles and witnessed the involvement of uncle George in village improvement projects, including in later years "embellishing the Lee and Lenoxdale roads on either side of Highlawn. (Gilder, Op. cit. , quoting the Gleaner and Advocate, Oct. 22, 1874) . Other close friends set their eyes on less fashionable destinations as is evidence by the four documented trips taken by the Henry Ingersoll Bowditch family in 1863, 1865, 1866, and 1873 when they journeyed to the Adirondacks where they could change camp daily "in the heart of the primeval forest, miles from human habitation" (V.Y Bowditch, Life and Correspondence of Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, I, 58 ff.) Henry, the recognized medical authority on the cause and treatment of consumption, would write to his wife that "The woods! The woods! They are the elixir of life for me." Decades later, of course, the Trudeau family would interpret the Adirondacks as a remedy for the debilitating effects of tuberculosis. Dorr's cousin Thomas Wren Ward (1844-1940), a student at Harvard, traveled West this year with Alexander Agassiz to St. Joseph, the end of the only railroad to the Missouri River. Spurred on by Agassiz's scientific interests and Ward's family interest in possible commercial routes for rail development, Ward was SO affected by the land and its potential that he resolved to return after college "and build its roads and bridges" on the other side of this powerful river. (On this unique episode in Dorr's cousin's life and what it may portend for young George B. Dorr, see the memoir of Ward's personal secretary, Margaret Snyder, `The Other Side of the River' (Thomas Wren Ward, 1844- 1940), New England Quarterly 14, 33 (1941) : 423-436) DORR1853 Page 21 of 21 GEORGE BUCKNAM DORR Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. BEGIN 1864 (March 24, ,2008) 1864 Likely date for Dorr's first occupancy of 18 Commonwealth Avenue. Architects: G.J.F. Bryant & Arthur Gilman. Dorr enters Epes Sargent Dixwell's School in Boston where prepared for college" reading Greek and Latin as the mainstays of the curriculum for the next six years. School was small having no more than fifty boys divided into six classes; sports were available. "There was no choice of studies; all was definite and fixed and the goal was Harvard." [Dorr Papers 1.13]. In the Dorr Ms. ('Children of Ver. 2) he says that in June 1866 he was in Dixwell's School prior to his namesake coming up from New York to receive a belated Harvard degree (Class of 1824) The course of study "was of the old, traditional stamp under which we 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 individual character and needs." (DorrMs NEHGS CHD Ver2) Dixwell's School educated many who achieved prominence following the Civil War and post-Civil War years, some not staying the course as did GBD. Francis G. Peabody, William Lawrence, and Henry Richards were among them. During the Civil War military drill became the order of the day at Dixwell's and the Rev. William Lawrence remarks that when Roger and Huntington Wolcott entered Mr. Dixwell's School it "was formed into a military company. Twice a week they drilled under the supervision of an army officer," an exercise that appears likely to be in place when George B. Dorr enters. (Roger Wolcott, p. 21). Roger would later become Governor of Massachusetts (1896) and an Old Farm guest of the Dorrs. Families of 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." The Dorr family continued to spend the summer months at their home in Canton. Their residence at 256 Pleasant Street was across the street from the eighty acre estate that Thomas Wren Ward had acquired in the years before his death. The Dorr residence was not a simple cottage but a large residence requiring a handful of live in servants to attend to domestic chores; the beloved nurse who cared for the Dorr children, Elizabeth Hind, journeyed from Boston with the family and resided with the family until the time of her death. (United States 1870 Census, Massachusetts, Suffolk County, Canton. Charles Dorr's occupation is listed as "merchant" whose property is valued at $60,000) In the Endicott Family Paper, GBD focuses nearly half the "Country Home at Canton" essay on his adolescent interest in making a collection of birds' eggs. Dorr recalls the boys theft strategy of removing one or several eggs from each nest but always leaving others behind; he recalls the splendid hue of a Scarlet Tanager from whose nest he took but one egg (of several) yet the bird abandoned the eggs; Dorr regrets this plundering behavior more than 70 years later. He is not only DORR1864 interested in bird characteristics but also the selection of nest materials, nest construction technique, and nest site location. The death in London on September 24 of Joshua Bates was surely felt both by Lydia Ward and many Boston residents who recalled Bates as "its most valued friend and generous benefactor.. [for] before his intervention there were words; after it there was a library." (Walter Muir Whitehill. Boston Public Library. A Centennial History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956. Pg. 66) In the fifteen years since the original bequest, Ticknor and Everett and exchanges hundreds of letters concerning library development but Everett's death four months after Bates left the scene led to reconsideration of the future development of one of Boston's most celebrated institutions. 1865 Julia Ward Howe's "Journal" notes her preparation (1.10) for "my charade for Mary Dorr," the next month (2.23) Mary takes Julia to a reception at the Reeds but her "severe headache and general misery" caused Julia to miss the evening get together at the Dorr's with Helen Bull; within two weeks (3.8) Julia and "spent a good deal of time arranging a charade for M.G. Dorr's party this evening" that she describes as "very funny." (Julia Ward Howe, "Journal," transcribed by Ethel Cochrane under supervision of Laura E. Richards 1911-12, Yellow House Papers, RG 18), March 15: Henry W. Longfellow writes to Mary Dorr accepting her invitation to dinner (Letters of HWL, vol. IV, p. 476]. See also 1868. In Spring Emerson reinvolves himself with his alma mater. He serves on two Harvard commemorative committees to consider what might be done to honor those alumni and students who had died in the Civil War. The Memorial Hall Committee included Emerson, Samuel Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton, and Samuel G. Ward. (Harvard University: Its History, Influence, Equipment and Characteristics, ed. Joshua Chamberlain, 1900, p. 98) Emerson collected funds from his class and over the next few years sufficient funds were raised from all quarters to begin construction. Coincidentally, with the 1836 (?) Divinity School speech furor now largely erased from institutional memory, Emerson served his first term as Harvard overseer (1867-1873); later he would further involve himself with his alma mater by delivering in 1870 a series of philosophy lectures initiated by President Eliot. Julia Ward Howe records in her journal that she visited Mary Dorr to discuss a Charade and the costuming; Mary's involvement in another charade in 1866 is repeated. (Laura Richards & M. H. Elliott, Julia Ward Howe, Vol. I, p. 214, 238). One April morning near the end of the Civil War, "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 President Lincoln had been shot. Great tragedy as it was alike to North and South, it was a fitting end to a great drama." GBD says in his father's biography that he can still "see [Charles] standing there as he told us, [this] has always remained, throughout the years, one of life's great moments." (DorrMs NEHGS CHE & Ver.2). Similarly, family friend Vincent Bowditch recalls that "the deed which shocked the whole DORR1864 2. civilized world are indelibly impressed upon my memory. I was standing in one of the rooms of the lower floor of the house in Boyleston Street, when suddenly I saw [my father Henry Ingersoll Bowditch] rush past the door, and go rapidly upstairs toward my mother's room... to find my mother in tears exclaiming, 'Oh, what will become of the country?' My father's stern, set face, but flashing eyes, and deep tone of voice, as he told me what had happened, filled me with awe-struck wonder, and impressed me deeply with the awful nature of the deed" (V.Y. Bowditch, Life and Correspondence of Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, I, 47). Friends of the Dorr Family recommend visit to Bar Harbor following their MDI visit. William James and his "chum" Tom Ward spend a year in Brazil with a specimen-collecting expedition team led by the Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz. Against the advice of his father who worried about his health, young Tom Ward hoped to show his family that he was able to make his own way. Yet misfortune intervened when a canoe capsized carrying the marine specimens Ward had collected, leaving him with nothing to show for his effort. On his return Tom shifted rapidly from a clerkship on Wall Street, a year of scientific studies in the Lawrence Scientific School, and then reemployment in his father's offices. (Baldwin, Puritan Aristocrat, p. 291). William James is more clear-headed about his goals, resolving that on his return to America he is going to study philosophy all my days, preferring a speculative rather than an active life (Corr. I, pg. xxvi). 1866 Mr. Dorr's cousin, Thomas Wren Ward (1844-1940) returns from South American expedition with Louis Agassiz and resumed his studies later this year at Harvard, departing again before his course work was completed; in June 1897 he received retroactively his B.A degree, some suggesting that this recognition was brought about through William James' intervention. During this Summer TWW worked as a clerk in the New York commission office of F. Consinnery & Co., returning in the fall to Cambridge where he enrolled in the Lawrence Scientific School to study mining engineering through the following Spring when he returned to NYC to rejoin the Consinnery firm. (NYT July 19, 1940 obit) Dorrs had heard at Bangor that "the food and absence of accommodations at Bar Harbor" that the family went to the White Mountains and onto Canada where Dorr remembers the steamboat running the famous Lachine Rapids. Onto Burlington and into the Adirondacks where "all as yet was very wild and primitive." Dorr recalls "a wonderful canoe trip" up the Raquette River" then onto Niagara where he says "we aimed at Bar Harbor but failed to reach it. (Dorr Papers, 2.3 from 5/21/39) See 1868 for next visit. Hulls Cove landowner Daniel Webster Brewer built a small hotel ("The Mountain House") atop Green Mountain by following a portion of the 1853 government road. For much of the next two decades thousands of visitors visited the mountaintop annually. Wm. James's correspondence with Thomas Wren Ward begins (Corr. 4 on 6.8.66, 1. 7.68, 5.24.68) where he offers lengthy confidence building advice to his friend Tom, suggesting that Marcus Aurelius would be wise DORR1864 3. counsel; James' optimism shines through. Reveals James' gradual shift from physiology to philosophy (see 3.14.70). William James (1842-1910) journeys to France and Germany to remedy ailments (back pain, weak vision, digestive disorders, and suicidal thoughts) Stays abroad for two years studying under Helmholtz and other leading psychologists. Brief discussion [Dorr Papers 2.2] of Charles Sumner and the conditions that permitted his unhappy marriage. Dorr begins essay with following [self-referential?] sentence: "After his mother's death Charles Sumner felt for the first time that he had the means and was at liberty to get married." Julia Ward Howe lunches (11.10) with Mary Dorr, Levi Thaxter, T.G. Appleton, Helen Gell, Field of Philadelphia, and Kate Field. (JWH, "Journal," transcribed by E. Cochrane, YHP, RG18). 1867 Clara Barnes Martin's Mount Desert Island on the Coast of Maine is published, the first in a series of early MDI travel guides. Notes from her 1866 visit were first published in weekly columns in The Portland Transcript. The first two Bar Harbor hotels-The Agamont and The Roderick-are erected and in the early 1870's other hotels will follow (W.B. Lapham, Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island, 3rd ed. , p. 7). Mrs. James T. Fields (Annie Fields) diary for February 28th records her husband's evening with Longfellow and the fact that he had been to two large dinners recently-one at Mrs. Charles Dorr's "where there were sixteen at table and the room 'for heat was like the black hole of Calcutta' but the company was very brilliant." (Memories of a Hostess, M.A. DeWolfe Howe, p. 35) . In June 1867 Ellen Emerson visits the Wards in Newport where she found Anna still "as of old suffering the most intolerable neuralgia." Likely date (" a dozen years" after first Florida visit, elsewhere described as "late 0' s" ) when CHD took William to Florida "and brought him back with health restored." Also the "young and ardent naturalist" Dr. Henry Bowditch was along and CHD's letters to Mary and George told of Bowditch's "studies into the wilderness life of Florida" and the "humorous side of their life" at that time. (DorrPapers, 1,13 & 14, see chrono 53-58) . Uncertain whether William contracted consumption but it is significant that one of New England's authorities on this affliction joins them; in 1862 Bowditch published Consumption in New England (Boston: Ticknor & Fields), a topographical study of the geographical distribution of the disease and the role of wet areas to its spread. Rev. William Lawrence enters Harvard, Class of 1871. In his Memories of a Happy Life he characterizes the intellectual interests of the 159 members of his class, discussing the Harvard faculty and focusing special attention on the college pastor, Rev. Andrew Peabody (19-24). Mary Dorr and Julia Ward Howe (10.31) visit with mourners following the death of Governor John A. Andrews. (JWH, "Journal," trans. Ethel Cochrane, JHP RG 18) This is the last entry in Howe's "Journal" about Mary Dorr until June 21, 1891. DORR1864 4 The five month American Tour of Charles Dickens brings him to Boston. On November 30th the distinguished guest gathered with 22 members of the Saturday Club for their monthly dinner in a Parker House private dining-room. The public appearances in the next few weeks led up to a public reading on Christmas Eve of 'The Christmas Carol" by its author. But privately, his hostess, Annie Fields, served up a Christmas dinner at her home for their dear friend, the only available night that that the author had available. (Edward F. Payne, Dickens Days in Boston, p. 206) She prepared a Christmas feast to be remembered with roast turkey and all the delicacies, with "plum pudding, brought on blazing, and not to be surpassed in any house in England," writes Dickens in his 12/22/67 letter from Boston to Ms. Georgiana Hogarth, London [Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. G. Storey, vol. 12, p. 518]. However, we also have in Mrs. Fields' diaries, her observations. Guests were Dickens, his manager Dolby, James Russell Lowell and his daughter Mabel, and M/Mrs. Dorr [see Payne, Dickens Days in Boston, p. 206 but more importantly M.A.De Wolfe Howe's publications of extracts from Mrs. Fields's diary, "With Dickens in America. "] Her entry for December 22nd states that "It was really a beautiful Christmas festival, as we intended it should be for the love of this new apostle of Christmas. Mr. Dickens talked all the time, as he always will do, generously, when the moment comes that he sees that it is expected We played games at the table afterward, which turned out SO queerly that we had storms of laughter." Mrs. Fields recalls that on an earlier occasion Mrs. Dorr reported the "unparallel and brilliant " charade that Ms. Laura Howe wrote at the Dorr's home, claiming that "no one could have outshone her-not even the present company. 'In the same given time, I trust?' said Dickens. 'No, no,' said the lady, persistently.' (p. 712 Howe, reproduced from Howe's celebrated Memories of a Hostess, pp. 149-150). Dickens also dined in November with R.W. Emerson at the Field's residence (p. 475). "Although Dickens had announced in advance that he never stayed with friends during a reading tour, he now asked if he could spend four days at [the field's home on] Charles Street after returning from New York. (R. Gollin. Annie Adams Fields: Woman of Letters. P. 68) 1868 March 22: H.W. Longfellow accepts dinner invitation from Mary Dorr (Letters of HWL, V, pg. 222) , Cleveland Amory (The Proper Bostonian) describes the Boston woman of this era and class, which included a zeal for reform, a leading role in church activities, and emancipation from "the yes-dear second fiddle to her merchant-husband, even in the domain of ordering meals and hiring servants, she soon fought fire with fire and became an executive in her own right" (107) On the hospitality of Mrs. Dorr much can be said. Cleveland Amory cites a letter to the editor of the Evening Transcript that the 1918 death of Mrs. Bell that in her generation she was unique among those who recognized "...the friendship of Anna Cabot Lodge, the loveliness of Mrs. James T. Fields, and the hospitality of Mrs. Dorr" (quoted in The Proper Bostonians, 129). Steamboat service first reaches Bar Harbor. With the growing number of summer visitors the Portland to Eastport coasting steams first included Bar Harbor in their weekly route. [Dorr Papers B2.6]. Dorr discusses means of accessing island. Before this date one DORR1864 5 disembarked at Southwest Harbor and took a stage on a 16 mile ride through Somesville pulled by "horses toiling over the rough roads and long, steep hills as my mother and I once did I remember in that summer of 1868, on the steamboat other than the one that put into Bar Harbor on its twice weekly trip." (Dorr Papers 2,f3). The rail line from Bangor to Trenton had not yet been built when the Dorrs first visited MDI. He discusses the "Mount Desert Ferry" and the risks and benefits of steamboat service (Dorr Papers 1.14). Describes arrival scene from later visits. Dorr says his father "had heard of the beauty of the place from old friends and neighbors at Jamaica Plain.' (See also L.E. Brown, Acadia National Park, Maine, 51-56, for a cultural profile) Dorr writes of a "whole summer's journey" when he was 15 that sketched in the background for much historic reading inspired by his father for whom the facts of history were dominating while for George "its causes and meaning" were of more importance. He discusses his reading habits and reflects on the importance of imagination. [Dorr Papers] Dorr (March 29 dictaphone memo) says that "none of the mountain names on the Island were old when we came down in 1868. Discusses mountain naming motives. (Dorr Papers 1,13). GBD Letter to FDR (8.1.40) refers to the park originating in land that Charles H. Dorr acquired in 1868-not 1870 (see below). This validated in another Dorr Papers essay on 'Frenchmans Bay' (pg. 4) In Dorr Papers ( B1,f13 titled 'separated paper') Oldfarm was defined by the Cousens farm grant "extending from the north side of Champlain Mountain to the sea with two brooks flowing through it (Bear Brook and Compass Harbor} and winding through the Ogden, Coles and other lands to come out at the base of Ogden's point into Compass Harbor. "From the beginning on [this land] has been tied up inextricably with the Park. It is long before the Park was established that its real history begins. In writing my history of the Park beginning, I want this clearly recognized and established." [See also 1798 date] Dorr states that summer of 1868 was the first when people began to buy [land] "to secure themselves in the community against a growing future... [since] the cost of land was low." Later that summer when only six or seven sites had been taken Charles Dorr purchased "the western, cultivated portion of the Henry Higgins tract, extending down to Compass Harbor" just outside the village. (Dorr Papers 2.3). The motivations for the first visit to MDI by the Dorr family is not clear but they and others may well have been inspired by the Maine travels of Professor Louis Agassiz, the esteemed Harvard geologist, who published the year before his vivid topographical descriptions in the Atlantic Monthly. Additional documentation for this date (Among the first tracts.. discusses Henry Higgens family and property acquisition. In one page historical memo (2.12.1940) [Ben Hadley's obit also confirms date], Dorr refers to property as "the foundation stone from which, as a starting point, Acadia National Park has risen.' (Dorr Papers 1,14). From 1868 until 1879 the Dorr family spent summers in BH when not abroad. DORR1864 6 Charles and William Dorr visit St. Augustine, FL in the late 1860's [Dorr Papers 1.19] with Henry Bowditch. On 11/19/38 Dorr reflects on his parents: "two people with a delightful gift of narrative. What they told of lived...father more reserved but with a delightful sense of humor but of his inner self I never heard him talk. It was too intimate and personal." Mary had a remarkable "gift of description" between the two of them their own childhood lived again for me." But neither Mary or any of the other Ward's "had the gift of humor which my father and his sister, my much loved aunt, had SO strongly." Discusses humor/wit of James & Royce. In what may have been an unstated reference to the Harvard College plans of Charles Dorr for his son William, poet James Russell Lowell on November 28th writes to Charles that he has made discrete inquiries regarding an unspecified house that he had spoken of and found it to be of good character with the faculty. (Harvard University. Houghton. James Russell Lowell. Miscellaneous Letters. Charles Hazen Dorr) 1869 Bachelor James A. Dorr, dines at "my father's house in the country [Canton] February 18th "my father tending him with infinite kindness." (Dorr Ms. NEHGS 'Children of The petition to Mount Auburn Cemetery for a change in proprietorship lists James's four brothers and two sisters, and a nephew; it states that the whole estate was given in trust to Charles H. and Samuel Dorr to divide into seven shares, three held in trust for Albert, Martha, and Susan. Charles H. Dorr is designated Proprietor. (Mount Auburn Cemetery Historical Collections, #1151). In the most interesting of the five surviving letters of James Russell Lowell to Charles Hazen Dorr, Lowell does much more than to thank Dorr for his birthday gift of Stilton cheese. (Harvard University. Houghton. James Russell Lowell. Miscellaneous Papers. March 11, 1869) Lowell begins by admitting that "cheese, even when SO good as yours, is hardly a subject for the Muses." Yet Lowell then drafts a six page latter which experiments with several variant openings for his ode to cheese. Lowell finds his voice and composes an 81 stanza cheese-inspired poem dedicated to Charles Hazen Dorr that nowhere appears to this day in Lowell's published collected poems. Contemporary scholarship might dismiss this as a trivial experiment to entertain a friend. Only Edward Wagenknecht has referred to it as evidence of Lowell's creative talent for the poet "claimed to be able to write verse faster than prose and he once sent a six letter-paper sides of verse to Charles Hazen Dorr, praising the cheese he had sent him. (James Russell Lowell: Portrait of a Many-Sided Man. New York: Oxford U.P., 1971. Pg. 105) William Tucker Washburn's Fair Harvard: A Story of American College Life (NY: G.P. Putnam & Son, 1869) is published, a fictional account of Harvard life in the 1850's. As William Ward Dorr prepares to enter a Harvard little changed from Washburn's characterization, the future architect of the Dorr's Old Farm estate in Bar Harbor graduates in the class of 1869. (Harvard University Archives, Harvard College Admission Book, 1860-1873, pp. 55-56, 63-64) Namely, architect Henry Richards later states that "the only real work I did at Harvard counted for DORR1864 7 nothing, and I came through with no more than what is known nowadays as a 'gentleman's mark. Russell Gray is his best college chum and the two frequently took walking trips throughout New England. Within weeks, Richards is introduced to Laura Howe-with whom the Dorr family has strong family associations--and their engagement is announced in September. (Ninety Years On, 263) GBD joins the Episcopal Church in Boston (Harvard Class Book of 1874). During the Summer months James Russell Lowell pens two additional witty letters to Charles Hazen Dorr: 'Dear Sir. You make Mt. Desert SO tempting that we were heathen if we did not come thither. Accented as it is, it sounds like one of the stations in Pilgrims Progress. (Harvard University. Houghton. James Russell Lowell. Miscellaneous Letters. Charles Hazen Dorr. July 13, 1869) Lowell noted his pleasure that Dorr's son had passed his Harvard entrance examinations. But the thrust of the letter concerns a visit to unfamiliar Mount Desert since Lowell did not know that "Down East was Eden. Since [we] will be in Eden, then we will bring a pippin apple with us." Despite the claim that "we had even got our figleaves ready for East Eden," the trip was not undertaken because of his wife's health and the expenses involved. (August 12, 1869) London tourist guide Thomas Cook takes his first tourists to Egypt and the Holy Land initiating Middle East tourism that flourished. Within a decade John Cook claimed that 75% of American and British visitors bound for the Holy Land traveled under arrangements that his agency managed. By 1888 when the Dorr family is considering travel to the area, Thomas Cook & Sons "had three new fast mail boats, a flotilla of launches and older towing steamers, a number of specially built, steel- hulled dahabeahs, assorted small craft and barges, as well as the four first-class steamers" (P. Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism, 224) Famed for immaculate service, meals equal to those served in Edwardian country houses, by time of the Dorr visit the floating spacious quarters were equipped with every comfort of the day. On October 19th Charles W. Eliot is inaugurated as President of Harvard College, following election to this office six months earlier. Harvard had changed little over the last decade. The thousand students and thirty faculty were little prepared for the changes that the new President would champion. James Russell Lowell, H.W. Longfellow, Judge Wm. Gray, and Ralph Waldo Emerson participate. Eliot's inaugural address sets the agenda for the new culture that George Bucknam Dorr encounters eight months later when he takes his class of 1874 entrance examinations. (Eliot's reformation plan for the college is published in the NYT the next day; see also The Development of Harvard University. Ed. Samuel Eliot Morison. Pp. xixl-lxxviii) Brother William Dorr enters Harvard in the class of 1873 but the foundational changes that Eliot introduces will impact on his younger brother more SO than on him during his two years in residence. Eliot knew that there would be hostility to his educational reforms, especially to the elective principle which let students choose their own course of study. Three decades later Eliot will enlist Dorr in pursuit of a novel conservation plan on Mount Desert Island that also involves the educational reform of island culture. The explanation for Dorr's attachment to Eliot's vision for the island is complicated. He DORR1864 will risk his fortune, home, and reputation in executing Charles Eliot's aims for coastal Maine. And Dorr will also pay the piper as Eliot had. Eliot claimed toward the end of his life that he had not experienced the loneliness that we often associate with high office for "I always had a fight on my hands!" Ignoring for the moment Eliot's personal tragedies, immediately following Eliot's death in 1926 Rollo Brown would describe the loneliness of the fighter who has the odds against him. "Despite his persistent activity, [Eliot] was much alone among men. It is true that his loneliness changed in quality as he passed through the succeeding phases of his life, but he never escaped it. Despite his intimate and loyal friendships, he somehow was a man apart." (Rollo Walter Brown. Harvard Yard in the Golden Age. New York: A.A. Wynn, 1948 reprint, 24) So too, following Eliot's resignation from the Presidency of Harvard Dorr will become widely known for his pugnacity as a conservationist. This tenacious quality will express itself in his heroic efforts to preserve the landscape of Mount Desert- and he too will be "much alone among men." 1870 Celebrated Shakespearean actor Charles Fechter comes to lunch at the Charles Street residence of James T. Fields (Feb. 25th) along with Longfellow, Appleton, and Mr. & Mrs. Dorr. (Memories of a Hostess, M.A. DeWolfe Howe, pp. 209 f.) Rev. Phillips Brooks begins a seven year stint at St. John's Church, Cambridge, preaching the third Sunday of every month to the community with Harvard students offering being strongly supportive through their enthusiastic and persistent involvement; it is most likely that Dorr's belief in the the spiritual power of Rev. Brooks was reinforced in this environment during his undergraduate years. (A. Allen. Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, V. 2, p. 28) President Eliot establishes a set of lectures in large part to promote philosophy and its subsequent development as a department of the college. Emerson at this time was awaiting publication of his Society and Solitude which would be the last book for which he was solely responsible. In his late sixties, he was reluctant to accept Eliot's invitation in large part because he had never produced three lectures a week delivered to the same group of students. (Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. E. Tilton. Vol. 7. p. 84) According to the Springfield Republican there were other motivating factors: declining annual income as a lecturer, the fact that Harvard asked this of him, and affection for his alma mater. These lectures titled "The Natural History of the Intellect" were never published and scholars bemoan the partial and disordered state of surviving manuscripts which that make a contemporary reconstruction impossible according to the foremost Emersonians of our day. (Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Bicentennial Exhibition at Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library, curated by Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, p. 76) John D. Rockefeller establishes (4.18) the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, the first step in his plan to transform the oil industry. Within the next decade he will control 90% of the oil refining capacity globally creating an international monopoly of what is becoming the most important commodity in the world. DORR1864 William James is offered instructorship in physiology at Harvard; spends part of the summer vacationing first at MDI and then journeys by steamboat to Portland and Scarborough [G. Allen Wm. James, 175-6]. Charles Hazen Dorr purchases the farm of Henry Higgens, more than a hundred acres fronting Frenchman Bay just south of Compass Harbor. (Source?) "In the history of land titles" from Cadillac and Sir Frances Bernard and then finally after the Rev. War by the State of Massachusetts the property was divided in two up the Somes Sound fiord. The de Gregoire eastern tract was sold off tract by tract, including property containing OLdfarm [Dorr Papers 1.14]. "The original Oldfarm grant acquired by my father extended back from the Compass Harbor shore and the Storm Beach point beyond for a measured mile, ending on the all but precipitous slope of Champlain Mountain..." This Oldfarm tract in its entirety I inherited from my father." (Dorr Papers B2f16 "Some Thoughts...") The 1929 land deeded by Dorr to the JAX appears to have been part of this initial purchase (BHT 5.8.29). June: Death of Charles Dickens. July: Francis G. Peabody and William Lawrence took the steamer Lewiston from Portland to Bar Harbor, Rev. Lawrence to stay for two or three weeks with his classmate George Minot. Lawrence doubts that in his fifty-five summers on MDI there is "any seashore place in this country has harbored a greater variety of interesting people" (189) Discusses the changes that took place with the arrival of the rusticators, emphasizing that "neither clothes, pearls, nor automobiles can steal away the beauty of the mountains, the glory of the sea and cliff, and the bracing air" (193) Friendships with Jesup, Mitchell, Kennedy, Thayer, Maher, and Charles W. Eliot discussed as well as origin of the HCTPR "represented by the indefatigable George Dorr." (196). George Cabot Ward enters his father's firm, S.G. and G.C. Ward & Co., bankers and American representatives of the Baring Brothers where he remained until 1886 when he joined Kidder, Peabody & Co. on the dissolution of the Ward Company; in 1895 he became associated with the banking firm of Baring, Magoun & Co., retiring in 1909 to travel abroad for the next two years. Boston became his home on his return to the United States and in 1918 he made his home with his daughter Mrs. Charles Bruen Perkins in Jamaica Plain. It is here that the decade long correspondence with Margaret Snyder begins. Samuel G. Ward had withdrawn from active involvement in the business shortly after George's arrival. He turned his attention to the formation of The Metropolitan Museum of Art--where Samuel G. Ward was one of 26 founding Trustees. Before he and his family left for three years in Rome (1870-73), in May 1865 he agreed to serve with ten others on a committee to erect a memorial to the alumni and students of Harvard who lost their lives for the sake of the Union during the Civil War. (Harvard University: Its history, influence, equipment and characteristics. Ed. Joshua Chamberlain. Boston: R. Herndon, 1900. pg. 98) His nephew George B. Dorr will be impressed by this slow growth of this great edifice, a reminder to all of the price self-determination. DORR1864 10. Late June was the traditional date when candidates for entrance into Harvard College took their three days of examinations. Entrance exams consisted of Greek composition and grammar, history and geography, English into Latin, Latin grammar, plane geometry, arithmetic and algebra; candidates learned their fate immediately after completion of the exercises. John Langdon Sibley's Private Journal, 1846-1882 informs us that two hundred and seven applicants applied. (June 30, 1870 entry, hul.harvard.edu/huarc/refshelf/Sibley.htm) Unlike nearly all his classmates, Dorr was admitted October 1st two days after the start of the term. (Harvard University Archives. Admission Book, 1860-1873, pgs. 63-64) At sixteen years of age Dorr lodges at #18 Harvard Block during freshman year, "chumming with David Sears of Boston." (Harvard University Archives. Harvard Class Book of 1874) Edward S. Martin describes Harvard culture as he experienced at this time. Each class was divided on an alphabetical basis into divisions of 30-40 men (out of 200) where roll-call at lectures helped identify class members akin to campus prayers where freshmen saw his classmates all together. Class feeling flourished. "In those days about three- fifths of the cursory talk of average undergraduates was about one another." ("Undergraduate Life at Harvard," Scribner's Magazine 21, #5 [1897] p. 534) As a freshman Dorr had no role in the selection of his courses or instructors. During this first year many of the courses were more advanced courses from what he had experienced at Dixwell's School. Elocution, Ethics, Latin, Greek Poetry, Greek Composition, French and Advanced French challenged him that first year. Performance on examinations, however, were not the only measure for the assignment of grades. Harvard used a complicated ranking system that combined test scores with points received for themes, recitations, orations, and other endeavors. The aggregate system factored in deductions for absences from class and prayers as well as infractions for smoking in the yard, speaking in inappropriate circumstances, and other violations of the personal conduct expected of a gentleman. (Harley P. Holden. "Student Records: The Harvard Experience." The American Archivist 39, #4 [1976) : 461-467) Details about Harvard culture have also been preserved by Dorr family friend Judge Robert Grant who entered Harvard in 1969 as a classmate of William Ward Dorr and Edward Wharton. Edward would extend his friendship with Dorr three decades later by encouraging a significant horticultural collaboration with Wharton's wife, Edith. Grant's understanding of this culture is well founded since he earned in turn at Harvard his B.A., the then new degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and the 1879 Bachelor of Laws degree. His 1896 lecture on "Harvard College in the Seventies" coupled with his 1934 autobiography (Fourscore) provide what is arguably the best personal perspective on "the beginnings of the reforms in the methods of government and instruction by means of which Harvard has become a University instead of a college." ("Harvard College in the Seventies," Scribner's Magazine 21, #5 [May 1897]) Under Eliot's leadership, campus facilities were expanding with the addition of Thayer, Mathews, and Weld Hall in part to reflect the needs created by a rapidly expanding student body. Freshmen who weathered the DORR1864 first term were permitted to carry canes and wear tall hats; they often celebrated their emancipation from freshman hazing by parading en masse on Beacon Street. Academically, Dorr's class followed in the footsteps of Grant's class, benefiting from the liberalizing effects of Eliot's new elective curriculum with fewer required courses, a greatly expanded number of academic options, and new faculty appointments. As Grant points out, some behaviors are less likely to be changed administratively. "There was much sociability among the students in my day. There was considerable loafing in one another's rooms, and sitting around doing nothing [and] the classes were still small enough for a man to know all his classmates by sight, and the majority of them pretty well Though we were boyish, we were, as a rule, right-minded and eager at heart to do well, and thoughtful withal when no proctor's vicinity catered to our taste for mischief.' (Grant. "Harvard College in the Seventies," p. 564) Even the most disciplined a students would not likely to be drawn to the treasures in the college library for it figured little in the life of student scholars. Gore Hall was a storage facility not a point of access for students. As difficult as it might be to accept, Harvard spent in the early 1870's a mere $ 2,775 annually on new titles to add to its collection of 122,000 volumes. (S.E. Morison. The Development of Harvard University, Ch. 38) In the mid-twentieth century those who sought to honor the founder of Acadia National Park would emphasize his scholarly character. That attribute is not without precedent. Harvard College figures prominently in the lives of the Dorr and Ward families over more than two centuries. In the family line that led to George Bucknam Dorr, family graduates included both Joseph Dorr and his son (1711, 1752), William (1784), Samuel (1795), George Bucknam (1824), Frances Oliver (1825), James Augustus (1832), Joseph Hawley (1837), and Frederick William (1854) nine graduates spanning 143 years. The elder son of Charles Hazen Dorr, William Ward Dorr, was accepted into the Harvard class of 1873 but college records show that his coursework did not extend beyond his sophomore year and that his sole sibling George Bucknam would continue this academic lineage. (Quinquennial Catalogue of Officers and Graduates of Harvard University 1636-1910. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1905) On his mother's side, Harvard graduates included William Ward (1816), Samuel Gray Ward (1836), George Cabot Ward (1843), Thomas Wren Ward (1843, honorary A.M.), Thomas Wren Ward (1866, awarded 1897), and Samuel Gray Ward (1876), six graduates spanning 83 years. Two close relatives would serve as Overseers (John Chipman Gray 1847-54 and William Gray 1866-72). As we have seen Dorr's maternal grandfather-- Thomas Wren Ward--served was Harvard Treasurer from 1830-42. As he entered the Harvard Yard that fall, freshman George Bucknam Dorr was conscious of the fact that thirteen members of his family were Harvard alums. Much that was never made explicit by the Dorr and Ward families was indeed expected of him. Not only was Eliot changing the administration of the institution, the campus was physically in flux. Thayer Hall had just been completed, Massachusetts Hall was being converted into lecture halls, an expansion of Harvard Hall was underway, and the President's House was being renovated for student housing. In his sophomore year Dorr will relocate to Holyoke House, a large residence hall that at the corner of Harvard and Holyoke streets now under construction. (Sibley, Journal, op. cit., DORR1864 12 September 29, 1870) On a raw, rainy, and windy October 6th, E. Rockwood Hoar delivered an address for the laying of the cornerstone for Harvard's Memorial Hall. The distinguished structure will not be completed until four years later and between these bookend dates Dorr's class will daily witness progress on this massive memorial honoring Harvard's sacrifice during the Civil War. The diary of Annie Fields documents that on December 10th the Dorr's entertained at their home James and Annie Fields and actor Charles Fechter. (Memories of a Hostess, M.A. DeWolfe Howe, p. 215) Two weeks later Dorr returns to Commonwealth Avenue for a two week Christmas recess. 1871 Charles H. Dorr, proprietor of Mount Auburn Cemetery lot #1151, signs order for interment (2.10) of Francis F. Dorr who died in London 2.8.1870. (Mount Auburn Cemetery Historical Collections, #1151), . George Dorr's father is proprietor of Dorr Family Lot which by this date contained nine Dorr family members, including the original proprietor, James Augustus Dorr (deceased, Feb. 1869). Henry Richards marries Laura E. Howe, June 17th Shortly after, to expand his knowledge of architecture, the couple travels to Europe. Two earlier generations of the Richards family had represented the Baring interests in Maine. (Laura E. Richards, Stepping Westward, pp. 132-36). Ralph Waldo Emerson's lectures at Harvard on "The Natural History of the Intellect" were well attended though Emerson was both intellectually and physically exhausted by the exercise. On completion of the second series (7 April), Emerson began the recuperative process by traveling by train to California. The high point was a meeting with John Muir during a thirteen day excursion to Yosemite Valley. When the academic year concluded in mind-June, George Dorr could appreciate his standing in the class of 1874. Student scales of merit were combined annually and documents in the Harvard University Archives show that Dorr ranked 94th in his class of 176, roughly in the middle of the class. (Harvard University Archives. Scales of Merit. 1848-1874; see also Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Absences from Recitations, etc., 1827-1874) His brother William had not fared as well either in his freshman or sophomore year and decided not to continue his education at Harvard. Charles Dorr may have wished to console his son William and reward George when he asked the two college men to join their parents on the Continent A lengthy undated twenty-page essay in his memoirs describes his trip abroad (Dorr Papers, B1,f.13 in 1871-73 chrono file), beginning with the 13 day Cunard voyage and his first impressions of Liverpool, Chester, London, and Hyde Park. The Dorr brothers are entranced by the wealth along Piccadilly and purchase for the appropriate clothes (including top hats) for their summer adventure. They cross the channel to the Belgian coast and then take a steamer up the Rhine to Baden-Baden. In his memoirs he recalls an incident at Leamington hotel several months before the Dorr brother's arrival. An elderly waiter asked if Charles Dorr was a relative of a George Bucknam Dorr who lodged there DORR1864 13 in 1842 with his young wife. This was Charles Dorr's older half-brother whose name the then college freshman bears. His namesake was married to Joanna Hone Dorr, daughter of Samuel S. Howland of New York. The Dorr family proceeded to Heidelberg where Mary's younger brother George Cabot Ward had been a student; then on to Dresden, Nuremberg, and the Bavarian Alps to see the Oberammergau Passion Play (described at length). There they encounter the artist Augustus Hoppin before journeying to Augsburg and then Switzerland where they spent four weeks. Heading South, they crossed into Italy and Lake Como area of Lombardy where George was fascinated with mountain passes where the Dorrs were reunited with the Hugh Davids family (and the two daughters of same age as George and his brother) George describes Davids as "one of the most interesting men I have ever known." It is here that we find Dorr offering his first indication of a future career. Whereas his postgraduate travel will encourage interest "which led me on the one hand into the realms of philosophy and on the other into those of religion and on the foundation that it rested on. I became interested in nature, too, the development of life and the development of landscape interest first aroused to conscious life when by brother and I made our first trip together." (Dorr Papers. B. 1. f. 2) At this time he was inspired by fellow family traveling companion Hugh Davids "to become a landscape painter [a] desire that stayed with me for years." No explanation appears in his memoirs for why this goal was not pursued even in his subsequent selection of academic electives. "And, as for my parents...' Lake Lucerne, Mont Blanc, and Basle [were] visited before travel to Paris where the "destructive work of the Commune" was evident. George indicates that his brother withdrew from Harvard and remained abroad to spend fall and early winter on the Riviera "with our aunt and cousin on our mother's side" while the rest of the family return to America prior to the start of his sophomore year. Apparently unknown to the Dorrs, the Eliot family spent its first summer this year on Mount Desert Island, specifically camping on Calf Island just South of Mount Desert. In A Late Harvest (1924) Eliot recalls that this first trip was SO captivating that for the next fifty years this one hundred square miles island in Hancock County would provide " a simple wholesome, natural life in close contact with the ocean, woods and hills, with opportunity for various excellent kinds of physical and mental activity." In the most recent edition of Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect, the editor emphasizes the truth that "Maine would remain thereafter a central and important part of Charles Eliot's life." Nearing the end of more than four decades in Maine, Charles W. Eliot writes to "My dear Dorr" that prior to the time when his Northeast Harbor home was completed (1881) he camped first on Calf Island (1871) and described hikes and sailing destinations. Eliot here was not just reminiscing. He was calling upon his familiarity with the shores of Frenchman Bay in order to lend his enthusiastic support to Dorr's efforts to acquire land holdings on the Schoodic Peninsula-and ultimately extend the land holdings of Lafayette National Park beyond Mount Desert Island. (Dorr Papers, Eliot letter dated 9.14.1923). DORR1864 14 From Henry James' biography (of Charles W. Eliot) we learn that CWE purchased his sloop Jessie (replaced the next year by the 43.5 foot Sunshine) in May and on July 8th sailed with five acquaintances from Boston and on the 14th established on Calf Island his first camp, retrieving his sons at Bar Harbor the next day. For five seasons Eliot ran this tent colony, "arranged and led exploring expeditions and picnics, and was, in short, skipper, shore commander, housekeeper, host, and organizer of entertainments" (v. 1, 321). He undertook this formidable challenge SO much removed from the daily Harvard College pressures at a time when summer camping was comparatively rare, as was cruising on the uncharted Maine coast. As Dorr completed his freshman year, Harvard's President charted a new direction that the Dorr family would later embrace when in 1881 their Old Farm home in Bar Harbor was completed, the same year that the Eliot's first occupied their Northeast Harbor home. Such coincidences of timing would become more pronounced in the years ahead. The cornerstone their collaboration would not be laid for another twenty years when in 1901 Eliot and Dorr would join their conservation concerns in establishing the Hancock County Trustees. Benjamin Franklin DeCosta's Rambles in Mount Desert published as a compilation of travel essays published in periodicals like Harper's. Both his book and Martin's described for the first time to a larger public the island and its marked paths. During Dorr's sophomore year (1871-72) he is a member of the Institute of 1770 (Harvard Class Book of 1874). This student organization originated as a "speaking club" to emphasize the oratory that its members believed was insufficiently emphasized in the curriculum; it celebrates the tradition of cultivating "declamation, composition, and debate." (See Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonian, on Harvard and its clubs, ch. 13) Membership in this organization was held in high regard and its mission is clearly at odds with local published anecdotes that attribute a stuttering difficulty to Dorr. He now roomed alone at #18 Holyoke House, a new residence hall, where he labored over courses in required chemistry, elocution, natural history, physics, rhetoric, and both classical and modern languages (German and French). His class rank improved to 69th out of 169 students. The three sisters of Maud Ward marry during this year and her brother Marion left home following graduation from Harvard. "He became a student of the steel works at Troy, and here he met his fate," marriage three years later to Fannie Gay, the daughter of a leading Troy banker. Mary Gray Ward Dorr provided Marion with a letter of introduction to banker Willard Gay, perhaps unconsciously serving as matchmaker (Eliott, Three Generations, 87) . 1872 Novelist Henry James attends a gathering at the Dorr home which he describes in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton. (Henry James. Selected Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1987. February 4, 1872) James somewhat begrudgingly offers to Norton who is traveling abroad his general impression about Cambridge: "the strange thing seems its aridity." He found Longfellow "bland and mildly anecdotal," and the DORR1864 15 argumentation of a new metaphysical club with which his brother is aligned "gives me a headache." The only relief for the novelist took place at "a little party last night at Mrs. Dorr's (arida nutrix leonum! As someone called her) where I conversed with a certain Miss Bessy Minturn of N. whom Mrs. D. tenders you as 'probably the most learned woman now living!" (pp. 92- 93) The Odes of the Roman poet Horace provide the context for the unidentified Latin characterization of Mrs. Dorr, "an arid nurse of lions." It returns us to James' earlier characterization of local culture but also prompts us to ask what the speaker really means-and why James opts to include such a characterization. These three words may derive from the speakers familiarity with Mary's avowed spiritualism, making explicit her sterility and the implied necessity to find spiritual direction from external sources, as philosopher Josiah Royce will provide many years later. However, like barren nurse-midwives of her day it may be implied that Mary possesses nutritive powers in nursing the fearless leaders of tomorrow who are not of her own loins. But such speculative interpretations are the very stuff that may drive the reader-as it did Henry James-to a headache. What matters here is recognizing that over the next three decades of her life Mary Dorr's character will invite public comment and will always be spoken of without reservation. In the Spring William Dorr returns from the Italian town of Mentone on the Genoese Riviera where he resided for several months with an unidentified aunt and cousin. This may have been Anna Hazard Barker Ward and her daughter one of her daughters. Anna's husband Sam had moved the family abroad about this time since "having been twenty years at work, [the challenges] had begun to tell upon my health, [and] I wished to withdraw, the business being in perfect order so I went with my family to live in Europe for three years. (Ward Family Papers. Ch. 28) The influence of a recent publication by London physician J. Henry Bennet who spent ten winters and springs on its restorative shores may have contributed to the visit by Ward family members. (Winter and Spring on the Shores of the Mediterranean. 4th ed. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1970) The Charles Hazen Dorr family spends the summer in Bar Harbor. Sufficiently impressed by the beauty of the region during their visit four years earlier, Charles acquired through successive purchases the whole of the original Old Farm tract for a future home, including later the western portion of Henry Higgins lot from Mrs. Mahan, the widow of the renown Admiral A.T. Mahan. This summer Episcopalian Bishop] William Lawrence first visits Bar Harbor and though the Dorr family friendship with the Lawrence's will grow it is not known whether these newcomers interacted with one another at this time. Marriage April 29th of Thomas Wren Ward (cousin of GBD) of New York to Sophia Read, daughter of the late Charles Ridgeley Howard of Baltimore. The character of Cambridge at this time is brought to life in Louis Menand's recent The Metaphysical Club (2002) This was an informal gathering of academics who met in Cambridge for less than a year. We DORR1864 16 know of its existence thanks to an unpublished manuscript of Charles S. Peirce who identified John Fiske, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Chauncey Wright and others as club members although none mention the existence of this intellectual cohort other than Peirce. Evolution, free will, scientific law, and the nature of knowledge were recurring themes. There is no evidence that the just completed Emerson lectures either precipitated this philosophical discourse but it is unlikely that club gatherings escaped the notice of President Eliot, the champion of such developments both within and outside the Yard. Henry James writes critically to Charles Eliot Norton that his brother and several Cambridge "long-bearded youths have combined to form a metaphysical club, where they wrangle grimly and stick to the question. It gives me a headache merely to know of it." (Henry James. Selected Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1987. February 4, 1872. Pg. 92) The Eliot family spends its second summer on MDI. Charles W. acquires a 43 and one-half foot sloop, the Sunshine. Before the end of the sophomore year Dorr is elected to membership in the Institute of 1770, a Harvard society founded in 1770 for the improvement of elocution. Dorr's uncle Samuel Gray Ward had been a member of this most prestigious College society whose members for the past century had been devoted to improving their skills in declamation, composition, and debate. (In 1924 the Institute of 1770-D.K.E. would be amalgamated with the Hasting Pudding Club. See Harvard University. The First Catalogue of the Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770). It is not clear where CBD spent his summers at this time nor how he spent them. A hint may be given by Maud Howe Elliott (Three Generations, ch. 8) when discussing her life in Newport in the early seventies, she states that I spent part of one season with my mother's friend, Mrs. Charles H. Dorr, in Newport, and entered more fully into the social life of the place than I had done before." Harvard College accepts James Arnold bequest, establishes Arnold Arboretum on its Busey estate in West Roxbury. Shortly before Dorr began his junior year at Harvard College, William and Charles Dorr sail from NY in September on new White Star Liner Baltic for London then Paris. Whereas his younger brother had professed an interest in landscape architecture, William plans to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. There the Dorrs took a suite of rooms overlooking the Garden of the Tuilleries which the younger son and his father would occupy again the following summer. Dorr attributes to his elder brother great facility with his hands, could "draw excellently" and had a keen interest in design. Charles is concerned about "the effect of the work and climate upon my brother's health" and accompanies him. Charles found congenial companionship in Paris with James Russell Lowell and John Holmes. After several months William withdrew from the EBA since the seclusion and other factors were at odds with "our American way of thought." He then traveled south along the Mediterranean through Genoa to Rome, returning to America in the Spring of 1873 following William's "intimate friendship with Mrs. Lewis L. Delafield" who suggested that he come study law in her husband's New York office. DORR1864 17 During Dorr's junior year at Harvard he took advantage of Eliot's elective system by expanding his familiarity with the arts and sciences. Besides more advanced courses in French and German, he completes physics, political economy, history, rhetoric, forensics (logic), and themes-an area where he excels. (Harvard University Archives. Yearly Returns: Examinations and Aggregates, 1872-1873). Dorr frequently would hurry to class from his quarters in one of the 47 Holyoke House upper level rooms, past F. E. Saunders' Drygoods store and the Hubbard apothecary shop, dart between the butcher and grocer carts on Harvard Street, and enter the Yard sheltered by towering elms. (For the best characterization of the Harvard Square neighborhood at this time consult the vivid recollections of Lilley Howe, "Harvard Square in the 'Seventies and 'Eighties," Cambridge Historical Society Proceedings 30 (1945) : 12-27) Dorr's undergraduate friendships are nowhere documented. Dorr's contemporaries would admit that it was "not easy to describe the more elusive features of college life the friendships formed, the walks and talks, the grapplings with the problems of existence in company of by one's self. [and] when the corner-stone of Memorial Hall was laid on October, 1870, some of us envied the glory of those in whose memory it was done, and felt that we had been deprived by fate of an opportunity." (See the two excellent Scribner's Magazine articles on Harvard in the seventies, R. Grant, op. cit., p. 564, and Edwards S. Martin, "Undergraduate Life at Harvard," XXI [1897] 531-53) Simply put, a discreet student did not enter into friendships lightly for social eagerness could later be interpreted as a social detriment, a neediness that cast doubt on the strength of one's character. A campus student culture of indifference resulted. (See Mark Sullivan, Boston Evening Transcript, July 11, 1900) Despite this prevailing campus mood, given the long-standing Ward family relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson it is not unlikely that Dorr and classmate Edward Emerson Simmons had more than a casual relationship. Concord born Simmons was the Emerson's second cousin, a member of the celebrated Hasty Pudding Club. Simmons would share with Dorr an enthusiasm for the arts though unlike Dorr he would develop into a renown artist, designing a stained glass window for Memorial Hall and painting a mural ceiling for the Arts and Manufactures Building at the 1893 World's Columbia Exposition in Chicago. (See Leslie Perrin Wilson, "Edward Emerson Simmons, Concord's other public artist," The Concord Journal, Dec. 27, 2001) Simmons would likely have been home for the summer in Concord when Emerson's Concord home was heavily damaged by fire. Several months later he and other Harvard students would have been in on campus where they witnessed the Great Boston fire of 9 and 10 November. From Dorr's remarks it appears that he was at his Commonwealth Avenue home where he witnessed the damaging effect of the fire on the neighborhood of his youth. Trinity Church will be lost but what survives quite clearly in Dorr's memory is his admiration for Reverend Phillips Brooks. Other accounts document that the fire quickly consumed 65 acres and by morning of November 12 left " a charred crater where much of Boston's financial district had been. The houses on Park Street were "nearer to the seat of the conflagration than any dwelling-house of that period." [R.M. Lawrence, Old Park Street, p.110; of course, Park Street was the location where Mary Gray Ward Dorr and her siblings had been born and DORR1864 18 raised and where her sons had spent much of their youth before the family relocated during the Civil War to their new Commonwealth Avenue homes) . Beginning in a granite warehouse on the south-easterly side of Summer and Kingston Streets, a failed steam-boiler ignited the merchandise and despite the best efforts of fire companies it spread with astonishing rapidity (R.H. Conwell. History of the Great Fire in Boston, ch. 4) Residents began to fear that the city itself could be lost. More distant from the flames, Maud Howe "watched the terrible conflagration from the window of the room in the Institution for the Blind, where eighteen years before I first saw the light. Hour after hour passed, as I sat at the open easement watching the flames devour whole blocks of the city [ands] the white spire of Park Street Church was often threatened [and when] I caught a glimpse of that white finger pointing heavenward, fresh hope sprang up; SO long as the steeple stood, we knew that the fire had not crossed the Common, and that Beacon Hill and the State House were safe" (Eliott, Three Generations, 107-108). Henry Richards gives his own account from the same location. (Ninety Years, 309) Emerson departs for Europe in late October with his daughter Ellen. Emerson writes to his mother's brother, Samuel G. Ward (11.29), from Florence where he had hoped to find SGW in Rome where he might coax him to journey with RWE to Karnak but before leaving NYC Sam's brother George Ward told Emerson that he was too late-Sam had already departed "with a company" for Egypt. Emerson writes to his wife Lidian from Cairo in the final days of 1872 that it was a "great disappointment" to have missed Ward as he departed Cairo a few days earlier. (Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. R. Rusk. Vol. 6, p. 115, n. 127, p. 236.) In the same spirit he writes to Ward (1.29.73) from Assuan that he was grieved to learn that he had already departed and flatters Ward with the statement that he has "few letters that I value more than two or three of yours. He thanks Ward for providing funds to offset the restoration costs of the July 24 fire that destroyed much of Emerson's home. 1873 Winter provided travel opportunities for both the Dorrs and the Samuel G. Ward family. Emerson provides us with one detail when he writes February 19th from Alexandria (Egypt) to William. H. Forbes that "It was a great disappointment not to find Mr. Ward. He remained long at the first Cataract, as I learned from every returning darbeeah"; Ward had not known that Emerson was SO near. Rusk, Letters of RWE, 6, pp. 235- 36). Ward's family returns from abroad-perhaps motivated by a desire to attend to Lydia Ward--and "yielded to the urgency of the Barings that he should again superintend their affairs here. He built a house in Lenox." [E. W. Emerson, Early Years of the Saturday Club] Elsewhere, Charles Hazen Dorr is credited by James Russell Lowell with making enjoyable his journey that Winter from America to London. In the final substantial surviving letter sent to Dorr in London by Lowell from Paris, he wishes Dorr bon voyage and more than hints that they had been traveling companions. "I trust we shall meet again in all good time on the other side and talk over the days of our exile. I wish I DORR1864 19 could make your voyage as pleasant for you as you had the journey to London for me. (Harvard University. Houghton. James Russell Lowell. Miscellaneous Letters. May 13, 1873; this manuscript collection also contains five Lowell notes to Mary Gray Ward Dorr written between 1866 and 1872 that largely concern social invitations) Concern for the health of Lydia Ward likely prompted the return of the Wards from their three year sojourn in Europe, mostly in Rome. Samuel had given thought to retirement but on his return he took up the Barings work for the next fifteen years until his retirement in 1888. (Baldwin, Puritan Aristocrat, p. 261., note 70) So too the Dorrs return to America. Shortly thereafter, Mary and Charles "wisely thought my brother and myself were best away." Before the Spring term ends, George experiences his first "trouble with my eyes" which made reading difficult. This "trouble" will prove to be a chronic condition that will recur and worsen over the course of Dorr's long life, eventually resulting in blindness that is episodic at first and then more persistent as he enters his last decade of life. During the summer, William & George journeyed to NYC and then to London where they set us HQ in London's Queen's Hotel on a Piccadilly side street. Following a London tour with " one of the old Dana family of America" (Note: whether this was mineralogist Edward Salisbury Dana (1849-1935), John Cotton Dana (1856-1929), librarian and museum director, or Richard Henry Dana 3rd (1851-1931) public servant and author of Hospitable England in the Seventies cannot be documented) The brothers travel to Oxford, take leisurely boat rides down Thames, visit the Isle of Man, spurred on by their efforts to identify historio sites through their literary descriptions. Perhaps foreshadowing his later daily swims in Compass Harbor, he and his brother bath nude in the Isle of Man waters and experience anxious efforts to get back on land and escape the eyes of the curious bystanders. They return to Barrow and travel down coast to Bangor where William Ward of Salem (GBD's maternal GGF) had been held prisoner for nine months after being captured at sea during the Rev. War. To Wales and the Carnarvon ruins and then the climb up Mt. Snowdon, "following our father's footsteps," since Charles had made the climb in 1848 on his first trip aboard on a Cunard business voyage. Leaving Wales went up western coast to Keswick "to do what had been for years a dream of mine to do. To hike the Cumberland Lake District, "the home of a group of poets and writers [Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlisle, Ruskin] with whom my mother had made me familiar from childhood on. " Expanding on the Lake District's aesthetic merits, he describes the region as "one of the loveliest in the world" implicitly suggesting later associations with Mount Desert Island. Describes self as "an excellent walker in those days, active and strong, and a good climber, unwearied in long ascents." Onto York and the great cathedral, "whose photograph I have kept by me in my chambers ever since, where I daily see it. Summer over they journey back to London then on to Paris and the Hotel du Louvre where they stayed until Charles Dorr arrived in early October. William and Charles return to Boston to spend the winter with Mary in Boston to care for her mother while George returns to his studies in Cambridge. DORR1864 20 President Grant (BDG 8/15/73) travels Down East to MDI, the first visit by a sitting U.S. President. This occurred weeks before Dorr entered Harvard for his senior year registering for courses in forensics (advanced logic) history, German, and philosophy. (Elbridge Gerry Kimball's Scrapbook of Harvard Undergraduate Student Life, 1873-1877 in the Harvard University Archives offers unrivaled documentation of student culture during Dorr's senior year) By the end of the fall term, Dorr had been received instruction from nearly two dozen Harvard faculty, many just a few years his senior. For example, University of Tubingen-trained philosopher George Herbert Palmer who had been hired by Eliot in 1870 to teach Greek but in 1872 was appointed Instructor in Philosophy, secularizing the discipline of philosophy and preparing the way for Harvard and Johns Hopkins to offer graduate studies in that discipline. See his The Autobiography of a Philosopher. New York: Greenwood Press reprint, 1968). Because of Eliot's appointment, Dorr was spared the expression of "philosophy" articulated by ministers for the purpose of edification. Palmer departed from the traditional curriculum by introducing an innovation taken for granted in our own day: that is, constructive criticism situated within the original source material, rather than carefully prepared textbook accounts of the philosopher's writings. "Philosophy as an autonomous division of instruction in the university is largely the work of his thought and labor." (George Herbert Palmer 1842-1933: Memorial Essays. Cambridge: Harvard U.P. 1935, p. 50) In the years ahead, his openness to the yet unexplained will ally him with Dorr and fellow Harvard philosophy professors James and Royce as they develop the American Society for Psychical Research. On the other hand Old Guard faculty like Alford professor of natural religion, philosophy, and civil polity Francis Bowen (1811-1890), editor of the prestigious North American Review, were less challenged by students like Dorr than by the new scholarly directions of President Eliot. Similarly, he received instruction in Themes by the brilliant and widely published Boylston professor of rhetoric, oratory, and elocution Francis James Child (1825-1896), who graduated Harvard in 1846 having achieved the highest class rank in all subjects taken. Dorr's grades in Child's class are among his best. In an era where the notions of college majors and minors had not yet come into fashion, Dorr's work clearly was concentrated in the classical and modern languages. Charles Sprague Sargent, a distant relative of Dorr, is appointed director of both the Harvard Botanic Gardens and the newly created Arnold Arboretum. In 1879 he relinquished the Botanic Garden administration and devoted all his energies to the Arboretum, plans he worked out with F. L. Olmsted; it was not, however, until 1886 that the first trees were planted in their permanent groupings. Until his death in 1927 the development and enlargement of the Arboretum was his chief interest. He was the step cousin of GBD (E. Gray, William Gray of Lynn, p. 12) A major economic reversal begins in Europe and reached the US in the fall, the Grant Administration Panic of 1873, following the failure of Jay Cooke and Co. the country's preeminent investment banking concern (9/18) . "NY Stock exchange closes for 10 days, credit dried up, DORR1864 21, foreclosures were common banks failed, and factories closed their doors. Postwar period had seen unregulated growth with no government curbing of abuses and the extreme overbuilding of railroads laid the groundwork for the Panic and the depression that followed until the 1878 recovery." A series of Revolutionary Centennial anniversary celebrations began in eastern Massachusetts, beginning this month with the Boston Tea Party. William James is appointed Instructor in anatomy and physiology. 1874 Boston Daily Globe (1/17/74) announces that CWE's 1872-73 report to the Harvard Overseers documented 59 faculty. John D. Rockefeller Jr. is born January 29th. George Dorr returned to Europe with his father in the Spring of 1874. According to his memoirs, the Harvard College Dean granted him permission for reasons of health to continue his studies abroad during the final term of his senior year. Attendance at lectures "not required" and he might engage in studies with father and take final exams "on my return the following spring. He read history, including Mccaulay's great work on the History of England. Whether the travels of the Dorr and Eliot family intersected in the next few months we cannot say. Harvard's President departed for Europe January 31st and did not return until May 7th. (Sibley, Journal, op. cit., May 7, 1874) Dorr states that in his early college days "on certain reading I had long wished to do, recalling the Greek I had given up during my second year at college, because of the development of this muscular trouble.. (Chrono. 71-73, "On our return...) Another description refers to " a hitherto unexpected lack of muscular convergence of the two eyes, which made long-continued reading difficult. [Chrono. 71-73, 1872-74 Trip, p. 16]. At end of the winter in Paris they spent some weeks at Nice on the Riviera "continuing our reading still but taking long walks together into the high, mountainous interior. Returning to Boston he experienced "no difficulty in resuming my class work and taking my degree." (Dorr Papers1,2, 18 pp. See chrono entry for 1875 regarding wanderjahr; here M.A. De Wolfe Howe offers interpretative commentary on Barrett Wendell's father that equally applies to Charles Dorr: "That he was far from robust in his physical and nervous equipment, that his father was able and ready to deal with his condition by supplementing his schooling with much travel, and that the boy had the wit and character to make the most of the opportunities thus afforded-these facts provide the true link between his boyhood and his maturity" (Barrett Wendell and his Letters, p. 17). As the end of the year approached, Dorr learned on October 7th of the death in Canton of his eighty-six year old maternal grandmother, Lydia Gray Ward, in whose Park Street home he had spent much of his youth. As Proprietor of Lot 235 of the Mount Auburn Cemetery, his uncle Samuel G. Ward signed the order for interment. The erosive effects of time on human memory is revealed when Dorr at nearly eighty-five years of age writes the Superintendent of Mt. Auburn asking for specific information DORR1864 22 on her death which "took place during the 1870's but in what year or on what date I have no record." (Mount Auburn Cemetery Historical Collections, #235. Letter of October 6, 1938) Following examinations in Cambridge, Dorr graduates on June 24th He states in the Harvard Class Book of 1874 that he intends "to study abroad for a couple of years, and for after that, my plans are undecided." Ben Hadley will remark in Dorr's obituary that "his real education was acquired from reading, travel and contact with the scientific and social life of his time. Here apart from his park work, he found his greatest delight and took his greatest reward." Hadley's judgment about "his real education" is biased since there is no evidence that he knew much of the first half of Dorr's life, let alone the consequences of Dorr's attachment to Harvard. Hadley raises an interesting issue regarding education one that fascinated William James throughout his life. In June 1903 he would employ the venue of a Harvard Commencement Dinner to speak about "The True Harvard," a view strikingly at odds with the class conscious club culture. Since James was not an alumnus there is a certain level of detachment that permits him to advocate as a faculty member a view of education in the Yard that will apply to Dorr's maturation in the decades ahead: "The true Harvard is the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and independent and often very solitary sons. Thoughts are the precious seeds of which our universities should be the botanical gardens [and] as a nursery for independent and lonely thinkers, I do believe that Harvard is still in the [vanguard]. Here they find the climate SO propitious that they can be happy in their very solitude. The day when Harvard shall stamp a single hard and fast type of character upon her children, will be that of her downfall. Our undisciplinables are our proudest product." (W. James. Memories and Studies. New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1912. Pp. 354-55) Despite the disappointing weather on Senior Class Day, the tents proved adequate to sheltering the graduating class and their guests from the heavy rain following Appleton Chapel prayers, lunch at faculty residences, music, fellowship, and festive dancing throughout the evening hours. (Sibley, Journal, June 19, 1874) But Harvard's annual Commencement exercises were highly distinctive this year for it was the first occasion when Memorial Hall would serve as location for the annual rite of passage. On June 23rd Harvard College's Memorial Hall was dedicated (see 1870 for the cornerstone installation on the old college playground, the Delta). Hundreds of students, faculty, alumni, students, and military officers were involved in the procession to Memorial Hall which "was packed full of humanity." (Sibley, Journal, op. cit., June 23, 1874) This massive new edifice was intended to commemorate the "memory of her brave sons who served their country in the field of war during the great Rebellion." [See May 1865]. The Civil War ended nine years earlier and the new structure was explicitly not a monument to "the glories of war" and reflected no "spirit of hostility toward, or exaltation over the defeated in our late civil war." Instead, this edifice of remembrance in the words of President Eliot would magnify "the heroic qualities of human nature. We say here to our children and our children's children, 'Admire and love more than all things else courage, self-sacrifice, endurance and faith in freedom. These are the DORR1864 qualities which immortalize men. These are the qualities which make States great. " It is unfortunate that the Dorr memorabilia contains no mention of either the dedication or the erection of the facility for the foundation was laid in the summer of 1870, the walls and roof erected in 1871, and the vestibule and two hundred foot tower was in place by the end of Dorr's sophomore year. The expansive dining hall with seating capacity of a thousand, theatre, and conference rooms provided much needed space for alumni and undergraduate use. (Boston Evening Transcript June 23, 24, and 25, 1874). The erection of this massive building-310 feet long and 115 feet wide-with its impressive interior and exterior represents a milestone whose timeframe directly overlaps that of Mr. Dorr. According to the Director of Boston Athenaeum, this is the first time that Harvard "physically and architecturally abandoned the limitations of a rural college or academy and attempted to express its coming status as a great university" (Walter M. Whitehill. Boston and the Civil War. P.12) . The following day Dorr returned to Memorial Hall to line up with his classmates for the Commencement Day procession to the front of Holworthy, Stoughton & Appleton Chapel where the exercises were held and degrees conferred. Returning to Memorial Hall for dinner, the hall proved to be a failure for those who wished to hear the speeches by President Eliot and other Boston luminaries. (Sibley, Journal, June 24, 1874) Over the next two decades, Dorr will interact socially with his peers in Boston and Cambridge, travel abroad repeatedly with his parents, and take the fateful step of establishing a new summer home in Bar Harbor. Fortunately, The Dorr Papers provide more detail of his involvements Down East than what transpires at 18 Commonwealth Avenue (Boston) for more than six months of every year. There are many gaps in our knowledge of his activities during these two decades when his parents provided him with the financial resources required for a gentleman who actively pursued no career. We will attempt to fill in some of these gaps but others cannot be reconstituted; biographical errors that have been repeated over the last century will be addressed. DORR1864 24 Becoming Acadia National Park Sample Chapter The Harvard Experience Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. On October 19th 1869, Charles W. Eliot was inaugurated as President of Harvard College, six months after having been elected to that office. Eliot claimed toward the end of his life that he had not experienced the loneliness that we often associate with high office for "I always had a fight on my hands!" The loneliness of the fighter who has the odds against him characterized Eliot throughout his adult life. "Despite his persistent activity, [Eliot] was much alone among men, " wrote Rollo Brown in Harvard Yard in the Golden Age. It is true that this loneliness changed in quality as he passed through the succeeding phases of his life, but he never entirely escaped it. "Despite his intimate and loyal friendships, he somehow was a man apart."(1) The Harvard over which Eliot now presided had changed little during the prior decade. Its roughly one thousand students and thirty faculty members had little inkling of the changes that the new President would champion. The leading dignitaries of the v--James Russell Lowell, H.W. Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson among them-listened attentively as Harvard's new leader spoke that autumn afternoon. In his inaugural address, President Eliot outlined an agenda for the new culture that the Harvard community would experience. Eliot's reformation plan for the college was published in the New York Times the next day. (2) 2 Eliot knew that there would be hostility to his educational reforms, especially to the elective principle which let students choose their own course of study. He was, however, determined to introduce a new spirit of learning and study in Harvard's venerable halls. Years later, he would again summon his reformer's spirit as he spearheaded another renewal: the culture of Mount Desert Island. One element of President Eliot's reforms called for the establishment of a set of lectures to promote philosophy and its subsequent development as a department of the college. Eliot had determined that Ralph Waldo Emerson was the obvious choice to anchor this part of his curricular innovation. Emerson at this time was awaiting publication of his Society and Solitude which would be the last book for which he was solely responsible. Now in his late sixties, he was reluctant to accept Eliot's invitation in large part because he had never produced three lectures a week delivered to the same group of students. (3) Emerson's relationship with his alma mater had been uneasy in the decades following his famous "Divinity Address" of 1838 wherein he challenged conventional orthodoxy. Now in the twilight of his stellar career, Emerson's affection for Harvard and the repeated and heartfelt entreaties of President Eliot prevailed. These lectures titled "The Natural History of the Intellect" were highly popular and well-attended. (4) Having secured a genuine American luminary to advance his reforms, Eliot next turned to enlisting the services of an emerging intellectual powerhouse. William James was offered an instructorship in physiology at Harvard and, like Emerson, accepted. George Bucknam Dorr was part of the earliest cohort to breathe the air of this newly invigorated culture. In late June of 1870, he sat for the Harvard Class of 1874 entrance examinations. These took place over three days, and 3 presented a wide range of intellectual challenges to all prospective students. Examinees needed to demonstrate proficiency in Greek composition and grammar, Latin grammar, translating English to Latin, arithmetic and algebra, plane geometry, and history and geography. Candidates for admission were spared a protracted waiting period and learned their fate immediately upon completion of the exercises. (5) Out of an examination pool of two hundred and seven, Dorr was among those whom emerged triumphant. Dorr was sixteen when he was formally admitted to Harvard College on October 1st, 1870. (6) The term had actually begun two days earlier, but as he set up his living quarters at #18 Harvard Block, "chumming with David Sears of Boston," Dorr undeniably felt himself a part of the illustrious institution that counted a host of the members of his family among its alumnae. (7) In the family line that led to George Bucknam Dorr, family graduates included both Joseph Dorr and his son (1711, 1752), William (1784), Samuel (1795), George Bucknam (1824), Frances Oliver (1825), James Augustus (1832), Joseph Hawley (1837), and Frederick William (1854) nine graduates spanning 143 years. The elder son of Charles Hazen Dorr, William Ward Dorr, was accepted into the Harvard class of 1873 but college records show that his coursework did not extend beyond his sophomore year and that his sole sibling George Bucknam would continue this academic lineage. (8) On his mother's side, Harvard graduates included William Ward (1816), Samuel Gray Ward (1836), George Cabot Ward (1843), Thomas Wren Ward (1843, honorary A.M.), Thomas Wren Ward (1866, awarded 1897), and Samuel Gray Ward (1876); six graduates spanning 83 years. 4 A contemporary of George Dorr, Edward S. Martin, described Harvard culture as he-and Dorr-experienced it as the 1870s began. Each class was divided on an alphabetical basis into divisions of 30-40 men (out of 200) where roll-call at lectures helped identify class members akin to campus prayers where freshmen saw his classmates all together. Class feeling flourished. "In those days about three-fifths of the cursory talk of average undergraduates was about one another." (9) As a freshman Dorr had no say in the selection of his courses or of his instructors. During this first year, many of the courses were more advanced versions of what he had experienced at Dixwell's School. Elocution, Ethics, Latin, Greek Poetry, Greek Composition, French and Advanced French challenged him that first year. Performance on examinations, however, was not the only measure for the assignment of grades. Harvard used a complicated ranking system that combined test scores with points received for themes, recitations, orations, and other endeavors. The aggregate system factored in deductions for absences from class and prayers as well as infractions for smoking in the yard, speaking in inappropriate circumstances, and other violations of the personal conduct expected of a gentleman. (10) George Dorr had little trouble acclimating himself to the life of a Harvard undergraduate. Robert Grant, the later judge and novelist, who entered Harvard in 1869 as a classmate of William Ward Dorr and Edward Wharton-future husband of Edith-sketched this account of college life outside the classroom: "There was much sociability among the students in my day. There was considerable loafing in one another's rooms, and sitting around doing nothing . [and] the classes were still small enough for a man to know all his classmates by sight, and the majority of them pretty well. Though we were 5 boyish, we were, as a rule, right-minded and eager at heart to do well, and thoughtful withal when no proctor's vicinity catered to our taste for mischief." (11) While Harvard's students may have enjoyed "sitting around doing nothing," " its president was pursuing a more active posture. Charles Eliot's vision for the institution he now headed included not only changes in to its pedagogical infrastructure but also physical changes to its external shape and dimensions. (12) Under Eliot's leadership, Campus facilities were expanding with the addition of Thayer, Mathews, and Weld Hall in part as a response to a rapidly expanding student body. A large residence hall at the corner of Harvard and Holyoke streets was under construction; Dorr will relocate to the luxurious new Holyoke House the next fall. (13) Massachusetts Hall was being converted into lecture halls, an expansion of Harvard Hall was underway, and the President's House was being renovated for student housing. Yet none of these changes in the physical environment can compare with the symbolism that unfolded on a raw, windy, and rainy October 6th Concordian E. Rockwood Hoar delivered an address for the laying of the cornerstone for Memorial Hall. The distinguished structure will not be completed for four years and between these bookend dates the Class of 1874 will witness progress on this massive memorial honoring Harvard's sacrifice during the Civil War. Freshmen like Dorr who weathered the first term were permitted to carry canes and wear tall hats; they often celebrated their emancipation from freshman hazing by parading en masse on Beacon Street. Academically, Dorr's class followed in the footsteps of Grant's class, benefiting from the liberalizing 6 effects of Eliot's new elective curriculum with fewer required courses, a greatly expanded number of academic options, and new faculty appointments. Some behaviors are less likely to be changed administratively. Even the most disciplined a students would not likely to be drawn to the treasures in the college library for it figured little in the life of student scholars. Gore Hall was a storage facility not a point of access for students. As difficult as it might be to accept, Harvard spent in the early 1870's a mere $ 2,775 annually on new titles to add to its collection of 122,000 volumes. (14) As the year 1870 drew to a close, George Dorr was now feeling more and more settled at Harvard. He was, however, looking forward to the approaching break from academia which the Christmas recess would provide. His parents had already commenced the season of holiday entertaining in their Commonwealth Avenue home. On December 10th, they hosted a party attended by James and Annie Fields, as well as by the Shakespearean actor Charles Fechter. (15) One bit of news did cast a pall over an otherwise festive month: Francis F. Dorr (1811- 1870), the half-brother of Dorr's father, died in London. (16) Shortly after the New Year, 1871, Dorr again took up residence in Cambridge and plunged headlong into the world of reading and lectures. During this Winter term Emerson continued his lectured series "The Natural History of the Intellect." But advancing age and the rigors of intellectual life were beginning to take their toll on the great man. In early April, an exhausted Emerson boarded a train and headed to California. There, while touring Yosemite Valley, he met John Muir. George Dorr's first year at Harvard is best described as a qualified success. He had established many lasting and important friendships. Dorr arrived on the campus just as a new current of energy-personified by President 7 Eliot-had become to reshape the college, both intellectually and physically. But the son of Charles H. Dorr had not exactly set the intellectual world on fire. George ended his first academic year ranked 94th in a class of 176. (17) Unlike Emerson, who had temporarily migrated west, George and his brother William embarked upon a thirteen day voyage across the Atlantic, eventually joining up with their parents in Europe. (18) As the Cunard ship streamed over the thousands of miles of ocean, the brothers anticipated not only the novel sights and sounds of unexplored lands, but savored the temporary freedom from their academic rigors. After stops in Liverpool and Chester, they luxuriated in the refined atmosphere of London, even picking up tops hats and other gentlemanly accoutrements in Piccadilly. Crossing the Channel, they landed in Belgium but quickly moved up the Rhine by steamer to Baden-Baden. The reunited Dorr family then proceeded to Heidelberg, Dresden, Nuremberg, arriving at last in the heart of the Bavarian Alps. The family attended the famous Passion Play in Oberammergau, where they met the artist Augustus Hoppin. The peripatetic Dorrs next traveled to Ausberg, finally arriving in Switzerland where they spent a month. During this time, as the family headed south-into the Lake Como region- George Dorr increasingly fell under the spell of the rarified air of ice-capped mountains. He was enchanted by the high mountain passes, the craggy peaks, and the rural scenes that stood in such stark contrast to his familiar Harvard Yard and Commonwealth Avenue. In fact, he later stated in his memoirs that his experiences in this region awakened within him the desire to become a landscape painter. Dorr claimed that this feeling "stayed with me for years," yet he 8 never seriously pursued the discipline of painting. More importantly, "I became interested in nature, too, the development of life and the development of landscape interest first aroused to conscious life when my brother and I made our first trip together." " (19) At precisely the same time the Dorr family was happily imbibing the mountain culture of Europe, the Eliot family was sampling for the first time the charms of Mount Desert Island. Charles W. Eliot had recently purchased a sloop, Jessie, and on 8 July 1871 sailed with five acquaintances from Boston to Calf Island, where the group established camp on 14 July. Camping was a very novel activity in 1871 but Eliot, no less than Dorr, relished a brief period away from Harvard where he could immerse himself in the roles of "skipper, shore commander, housekeeper, host, and organizer of entertainments." (20) With a summer of memorable sights and impressions behind him, George Dorr was ready to begin his sophomore year. But the autumn of 1871 found William Dorr still in Europe. The latter had decided to withdraw from Harvard and remain on the Riviera, in the company of a maternal aunt and a cousin. Perhaps the most notable aspect of George's second year in college was his membership in the Institute of 1770. This sophomore society originated as a "speaking club," which emphasized student facility in "declamation, composition, and debate" (21) As 1871 wore on, Dorr's days were filled with his required courses. Dorr moved into the new five-story high Holyoke House which contained "forty-seven elegant suites of rooms that comprise a study, two bedrooms, bath room, and clothes closet. (22) Living alone in the new luxury accommodations on Harvard Street where he would remain until graduation, Dorr nightly read in subjects that included chemistry, physics, rhetoric, natural history, and modern and classical languages. 9 While George lived the life of the solitary scholar in Cambridge, his mother pursued her role as hostess for genteel gatherings of illustrious persons-both minor and major-a scant few miles away in Boston. Among the luminaries who appeared at the Dorr house was the novelist Henry James. (23) He recalled attending an enjoyable party in their Commonwealth Avenue home February, 1872, though he felt justified in repeating a description of Mrs. Dorr as arida nutrix leonum (the arid nurse of lions). This striking characterization was drawn from the Odes of Horace, and while it is open to diverse interpretations it is likely intended to convey Mary Gray Ward's talent for intellectual midwifery. As we shall see this aptitude for drawing out the superior thoughts of others will not be lost on William James, Josiah Royce, and others in the years ahead. Henry James also witnessed a more formal association of intellects during his winter visit. At Harvard a new informal gathering of academics-The Metaphysical Club-had just been constituted. Its members included Charles S. Pierce, John Fiske, Chauncey Wright, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. (24) The group met and discussed topics ranging from evolution to the nature of knowledge itself. Another club member, Henry's brother William James, participated in these discussions much to the seeming discomfiture of the novelist. Henry James wrote that these "long-bearded youths have combined to form a metaphysical club, where they wrangle grimly and stick to the question. It gives me a headache merely to know of it. (25) Whether or not President Eliot also knew of the club's existence was never factually determined. But given that Harvard's president looked favorably upon such extra-curricular developments, he may well have given the club his paternal-and tacit-approval. 10 George Dorr, meanwhile, conscientiously attended to his studies and, as a result, saw his class ranking improve to 69 out of 169 as his sophomore year came to a close. The spring of 1872 also witnessed the return of brother William from the Riviera. With William back in America, the entire Dorr family bid temporary farewell to Boston and Cambridge and headed to Bar Harbor for the summer. President Eliot had embarked upon his second summer there and with his newly acquired sloop, Sunshine, again basked in the vernal release afforded him by the rocky coasts, inlets, and forested tracts of Maine. In September of 1872, the Dorr brothers pursued their separate forays into the world. William and his father, Charles Hazen Dorr, embarked from the port of New York aboard the White Star line Baltic, for London. William's ultimate destination was Paris, where he planed to take up the study of architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. His reputed skill in drawing, combined with exceptional manual dexterity seemed perfectly matched for this endeavor. George Dorr later recalls that his father expressed concern about the effect of the work and climate upon his brother's health, and accordingly remained in Paris as well, enjoying the companionship of James Russell Lowell before returning to Boston. Charles' worries soon proved justified. William withdrew from the Ecole after a few months, ostensibly because he found the seclusion and other elements of the European educational system at odds with, as he termed it, "our American way of thought. Upon leaving the Ecole, William again donned the traveler's cloak and wended his way south along the Mediterranean coast to Genoa and eventually through Rome. He reappeared in the United States in spring, 1873 and, still casting about for a career, studied law in New York City under the mentorship of Lewis Delafield. 11 George, by contrast, dutifully returned to Harvard to begin his third year of study. With his solid grounding in arts and sciences, he now undertook more advanced courses in physics, political economy, and French and German. George also demonstrated a keen aptitude and interest in the logical rigor of both forensics and rhetoric. College life for Dorr and his fellow denizens of the Harvard campus moved placidly and predictably through the crisp autumn days and nights until the weekend evening of November 9th. Sparks from a failed steam boiler in a granite warehouse just south of Summer Street quickly ignited the piles of merchandise, spread to the adjacent Boston buildings, and quickly engulfed the surrounding neighborhoods. (26) The flames raged over two days and panic-stricken residents of Boston feared that the entire city could be lost. A Dorr family friend, eighteen year old Maud Howe-daughter of Julia Ward Howe and philanthropist Samuel G. owe--viewed the mounting destruction from a relatively safe vantage point and later recounted the scene. She "watched the terrible conflation from the window of the room in the Institution for the Blind, where eighteen years before I first saw the light. Hour after hour passed, as I sat at the open easement watching the flames devour whole blocks of the city...[and] the while spire of Park Street Church was often threatened. [when] I caught a glimpse of that white finger pointing heavenward, fresh hope sprang up; SO long as the steeple stood, we knew that the fire had not crossed the Common, and that Beacon Hill and the State House were safe. " (27) The Great Boston Fire of November, 1872, destroyed Trinity Church, much of the city's financial district, and left more than sixty-five acres smoldering in ruins. George Dorr had also been a witness to the fire's destructive fury, 12 albeit from a discreet distance. He documents in his memoirs how saddened he was at the devastation inflicted upon the neighborhood that he had known as a youth. As the citizens of Boston regrouped and rebuilt their city throughout the winter and spring of 1872-73, Dorr remained conscientiously committed to his studies. His parents and other family members were abroad. After traveling by ship in the company of James Russell Lowell, the poet sent Dorr's father a letter in which he remarked that "I trust we shall meet again in all good time on the other side and talk over the days of our exile. I wish I could make your voyage as pleasant for you as you had the journey to London for me. " (28) In the protracted absence of his parents, George immersed himself ever more strenuously in serious academic treatises. In fact, the rigor with which he was now subjecting himself to these long bouts of reading began to have a deleterious effect on his vision. When the spring term ended and George and his brother were set to sail to Liverpool, the visual problems that made reading very difficult George glossed over as merely "trouble with my eyes. But this "trouble" would recur periodically over the course of the many decades of Dorr's life. As an adult, he endured periods of episodic blindness that became longer and more persistent as he aged. But by the summer of 1873, these ocular difficulties had resolved, allowing George and William to journey to London and spend the summer ranging over the British countryside. The brothers toured Oxford and the Isle of Man. There, in what surely foreshadowed George's later adult regime of daily swims in Compass Harbor, the brothers assayed into the Isle's waters au natural. Having seriously miscalculated Victorian Britain's bathing standards, the two were 13 forced to scramble back to shore and, with some discomfiture, dress themselves in the presence of curious-and quite likely bemused-bystanders. Their trip continued and included homage to the town of Bangor, in which their maternal grandfather-William Ward of Salem-had been imprisoned after being captured at sea during the Revolutionary War. The brothers also paid their respects to certain of their most cherished literary landmarks. As their father before them had done, George and William climbed Mt. Snowdon. From there, they hiked through the Lake District, seeing first-hand the landscapes that had been impressed upon George as a boy, scenes "with whom my mother had made me familiar from childhood on. (29) George Dorr's utter infatuation with the natural beauty of Cumberland and its environs (he described it the region as "one of the loveliest in the world") was a natural reaction for a man who had already been "smitten" by the remote and unsoiled character of Bar Harbor. He may at this time have begun to feel a direct and personal sense of the role that a landscape of exceptional scenic splendor could play in the life of a man. Dorr was a self-described strong and excellent walker, and after a summer steeped in the literary associations and outdoor charms of England, he was poised to begin his final year as a collegian. In the weeks prior to the start of George Dorr's final year at Harvard, America's eighteenth president, Ulysses S. Grant, journeyed to Mount Desert Island. This trip by the architect of the Union Army's most critical victories in the Civil War represented the first time a sitting U.S. President visited the region. While the battles that Dorr would later fight for the heart and soul of the Island would be bloodless and benign compared to the military campaigns which Grant had waged, it was nonetheless ironic that the great warrior-now at 14 the start of the second half of his presidency-surveyed the battleground that would define George Dorr throughout the second half of his life. But for now, Dorr had one last academic season to negotiate. Advanced elective courses were now the order of the day: forensics (advanced logic), history, philosophy, and German. (30) By the end of the fall term, Dorr had received instruction from nearly two dozen individual members of the Harvard faculty, many just a few years older. This cadre of younger instructors was instrumental in advancing President Eliot's program of "academic reform." One striking exemplar of the effort was George Herbert Palmer, Instructor in Philosophy. The University of Tubingen- trained philosopher had been hired by Eliot originally to teach Greek in 1870. (31) By 1872, however, Palmer was appointed to the philosophy department. This change was significant, both for Harvard and for George Dorr. Palmer's appointment signaled the beginning of the shift away from philosophy as a domain primarily intended for ministers and for the purpose of spiritual and moral edification. Palmer departed from the traditional curriculum by employing an innovation that is taken for granted in the modern higher educational sphere. Instead of the nearly-exclusive reliance upon prepared textbook accounts of a philosopher's writings, students were encouraged to mine the original source material and formulate their criticisms through an appeal to the primary texts. It was later said of Palmer that, "Philosophy as an autonomous division of instruction in the university is largely the work of his thought and labor." (32) In its new secularized version, it paved the way for thinkers such as Johns Hopkins, and for Harvard to offer the discipline at a graduate level. 15 William James, the American philosopher who name is hearly-synonymous with "practicality" was appointed as Instructor in anatomy and physiology shortly after Palmer had accepted his new position. Josiah Royce also embraced the new philosophical platform. For Dorr, the influences of these men and the effects of this new orientation of philosophy away from the pulpit and toward more practical applications gradually took root. He began to ally himself intellectually with this new approach to openness and innovative thinking. Dorr was also uncharacteristically mindful of shaping his own education into something outward coherent. In an era when the concept of "college majors" had yet to gain wide- spread traction and recognition, Dorr clearly concentrated upon languages, both classical and modern. Dorr complemented his efforts on these subjects with equal ardor in elocution, oratory, and rhetoric. He received one of his highest overall grades in a course on "Themes" given by the later widely published Boylston professor of rhetoric, oratory, and elocution, Francis James Child, a Harvard wunderkind of 1846. While Dorr's academic progress in his senior year was steady and stable, the same could not be said for the United States' economy. Major financial reverses that had begun in Europe in the summer reached the shores of America by early fall and heralded the Grant Administration Panic of 1873. Unregulated post-Civil War industrial growth had led to, among other problems, the over- building of railroads. When the large investment banking firm Jay Cooke and Co. failed that autumn, a chain reaction of deleterious financial events plunged the country into a period of economic depression that lasted until 1878. For his final semester, Dorr opted to return to Europe with his father, having been granted permission to complete his studies abroad and to take his 16 final exams when he returned. The excursion abroad was not a mere pleasure idyll. In Paris, Dorr read extensively in history, including Macaulay's great opus of the History of England. According to Dorr's memoirs, the Harvard College Dean granted him permission for reasons of health to continue his studies abroad. (33) He again experienced bouts of what he later characterized as an "unexpected lack of muscular convergence of the two eyes." Toward the end of winter, 1874, Dorr spent some weeks at Nice on the Riviera. He alternated hours of reading with long walks, venturing into what he described as "the high, mountainous interior" of the region. (34) Shortly before returning to America, he felt fully prepared and eager to resume his last remaining classes and to consummate his college experience by the taking of his degree. Despite the disappointing weather on Senior Class Day, the tents proved adequate to sheltering the graduating class and their guests from the heavy rain. Appleton Chapel prayers, lunch at faculty residences, music, fellowship, and festive dancing continued throughout the evening hours. (35) Harvard's annual Commencement exercises were highly distinctive this year for it was the first occasion when Memorial Hall would serve as location for the annual rite of passage. On June 23rd Harvard College's Memorial Hall was dedicated. Hundreds of students, faculty, alumni, and military officers were involved in the procession to Memorial Hall which "was packed full of humanity. " (36) This was the first time that Harvard "physically and architecturally abandoned the limitations of a rural college or academy and attempted to express its coming status as a great university." (37) 17 The following day Dorr returned to Memorial Hall to line up with his classmates for the Commencement Day procession to the front of Appleton Chapel where the exercises were held and degrees conferred. Returning to Memorial Hall for dinner, the hall proved to be a failure for those who wished to hear the speeches by President Eliot and other Boston luminaries. (38) Having completed the full slate of academic requirements, George Bucknam Dorr graduated from Harvard College on 24 June 1874. The Harvard Class Book of 1874 contained Dorr's statement about his immediate post-baccalaureate plans. He wrote that he intended, "to study abroad for a couple of years, and after that, my plans are undecided." Dorr may have felt that now, with diploma in hand, he had a sufficiently recognized, as well as socially accepted, grounding to begin "his real education. " (39) 18 ENDNOTES 1. Rollo W. Brown. The Harvard Yard in the Golden Age. New York: A.A. Wyn, 1948. Pg. 24. 2. Samuel Eliot Morison. (Ed. ) The Development of Harvard University Since the Inauguration of President Eliot 1869-1929. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930. Pp. xixl-lxxviii. On Eliot's impact on faculty, see R.A. McCaughey, "The Transformation of Academic American Life: Harvard University 1821-1892," Perspectives in American History VIII (1974) : 239-332. 3. Eleanor M. Tilton (Ed.) The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Vol. 7. Pg. 84. 4. According to the foremost Emersonians of our day, contemporary reconstruction of Emerson's lectures is impossible. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Curators). Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Bicentennial Exhibition at Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library. Cambridge: Harvard College Library, 2003. Pg. 76. 5. John Langdon Sibley's Private Journal, 1846-1882. June 30, 1870 entry. Hul.harvard.edu/huarc/refshelf/Sibley.htm 6. Harvard University Archives. Admission Book, 1860-1873. Pgs. 63-64. 7. Harvard University Archives. Harvard Class Book of 1874. Dorr entry. 8. Quinquennial Catalogue of Officers and Graduates of Harvard University 1636- 1905. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1905. Dorr and Ward entries. 9. Edward S. Martin." Undergraduate Life at Harvard," Scribner's Magazine XXI, #5 (1897) 534. On Cambridge itself prior to Eliot's tenure, see Charles Eliot Norton, "Reminiscences of Old Cambridge," Cambridge Historical Society Publications I (1905-1906) : 11-23. 10. Harley P. Holden. "Student Records: The Harvard Experience," " The American Archivist 39, #4 (1976) : 461-467. 19 11. Robert Grant. "Harvard College in the Seventies," Scribner's Magazine 21, #5 (1897) 564. 12. Grant's "Harvard College in the Seventies" and his 1934 autobiography Fourscore (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. ) provide what is arguably the best personal perspective on "the beginnings of the reforms in the methods of government and instruction by means of which Harvard has become a University instead of a college." " 13. Sibley, op. cit., September 29, 1870. 14. Morison, op. cit., , chapter 38. A tally of the circulation statistics during Dorr's junior year reveals that roughly forty percent of his class did not borrow a title during the entire year, including Mr. Dorr. Harvard University Archives. Library Charging Records. 1870-1874. 15. M.A. DeWolfe Howe. Memories of a Hostess: a Chronicle of Eminent Friendships. Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1922. Pg. 215. 16. Dorr's fond memories of his boyhood summers at the Lenox home of his uncle, Francis F. Dorr, can be found in "Children of Samuel Dorr by his First Marriage," The Dorr Collection. New England Historic & Genealogical Society. 17. Harvard University Archives. Scales of Merit. 1848-1874. See also Faculty of Arts & Sciences. Absence Records. 1870-1874 and Absences from Recitations. 1870- 74. 18. A twenty-page description of the 1871 summer abroad can be found in The Dorr Papers. Bar Harbor Historical Society. B. 1. f. 13. 19. The Dorr Papers. op. cit., B. 1. f. 2. 20. Henry James. Charles W. Eliot: President of Harvard University 1869-1909. Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930. Pg. 321. 21. Cleveland Amory. The Proper Bostonians. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1947. Ch. 13. See also The First Catalogue of the Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770. Cambridge: Hasty Pudding Club, 1926. 20 22. Moses King. Harvard and its Surroundings. Cambridge: Moses King Publishers, 1882. Pg. 57. See also Education, Books and Mortar: Harvard Buildings and their Contribution to the Advancement of Learning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949. Pg. 72) and Samuel F. Batchelder's Bits of Harvard History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924. Pg. 153). Considerable insight into the culture and expenses of a Harvard undergraduate in the early 1870's can be found in the comprehensive documentation provided by Dorr's friend, Francis Randall Appleton (Class of 1875) The Appleton Papers. B4. f. 5. The Trustees of Reservations. The Crane Estate. Ipswich, MA 23. Henry James. Selected Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. February 4, 1872. 24. Louis Menand. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2002. 25. Selected Letters. Ibid. 26. R. H. Conwell. History of the Great Fire in Boston: November 9 and 10, 1872. Boston: B.B. Russell, 1873. Ch. 4. 27. Maud Howe Elliott. Three Generations. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., , 1923. Pp. 107-108. 28. James Russell Lowell Miscellaneous Letters. May 13, 1873. Harvard University. Houghton Library. 29. Dorr Papers. B. 1. f. 2. 30. Elbridge Gerry Kimball's Scrapbook of Harvard Undergraduate Life, 1873-1877 available only in the Harvard University Archives offers unrivaled documentation of Harvard College student culture during Dorr's senior year. 31. See George Herbert Palmer. The Autobiography of a Philosopher. New York: Greenwood Press reprint, 1968. 32. George Herbert Palmer 1842-1933: Memorial Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935. Pg. 50. 33. Dorr Papers. B. 1. f. 2. 21 34. Ibid. 35. John Langdon Sibley's Private Journal, 1846-1882. June 19, 1874. See also the fortnightly student publication, The Magenta (III #10. June 19, 1874) for essays on Class Day, 1874. 36. John Langdon Sibley's Private Journal, 1846-1882. June 23, 1874. See also The Boston Evening Transcript. June 23, 24, and 25th, 1874. 37. Walter M. Whitehill. Boston and the Civil War. Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1963. Pg. 12. 38. John Langdon Sibley's Private Journal, 1846-1882. June 24, 1874. 39. This is how Dorr's administrative successor at Acadia National Park characterized this transition. Benjamin L. Hadley to Robert W. Shankland. March 30, 1949. Acadia National Park. Sawtelle Archives. B. 2. f.1.