Williams College - Gulielmensian Yearbook (Williamstown, MA)

Page 29 text:

'Qlllilliamstown jfrcc School, 1791-'93. secondary Williams family were being born and ...., R GB?-4 , .3-5, 2 CL. EPHRAIM WILLIAMS was a bachelor. He T had encountered in his childhood some ofthe sin- isterinfluences usually derivable from the genus pi ,M b I step-mother. His own mother died April 12, 1718, but a few days after giving birth to her .-bi c onlyother child,Thomas,when Ephraim was just i' turned four years old. The father married again in thirteen months, and the maternal grand- . rw father, Abraham jackson, took the two boys to , his own home and brought them up, while a bred in the immediate neighborhood. There came to be seven children in the new family. The environment, accordingly, of the two boys was abnormal. The grandfather jackson was the son of the first permanent settler in what came to be called Newton, on the Charles river, Cambridge and Watertown being the adjoining and closely associated villages. He had a large family of his own, was much in the public business, and for twelve years certainly was a Selectman and also one the first School Committee in Newton. He made his will in january, 1739, and died eighteen months thereafter, being then eighty-tive years old, when Ephraim Williams was not quite twenty-five and Thomas not quite twenty-one, and he bequeathed .1-lzoo to these grandsons, saying in that connection in his will that he had already spent considerable sums upon their bringing up and education. Two important features of the childhood and youth of Ephraim Wil- liams are plainly enough to be discerned at this late day, even in the absence of all direct and contemporary testimony. First, his early school education, though considerable, was neither thorough nor extended. ' This is proven directly by his manuscripts still extant, mostly letters, of which there are twelve or fourteen of some length, besides muster-rolls and money-accounts with the Province of Massachusetts. These letters dis- play, without exception, unusual insight into personal character, good sense as to the then existing relations of things, more or less of humor, 9

Page 28 text:

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Page 30 text:

t! l '----'il' i and the firmest principles of Fair and Right throughout, but not a single one ot' them is well spelled, few, if any, of them come completely under the rules of common English Grammar, and there is additional proof in them of a fragmentary home and school training, many arithmetical mistalres creep into the successive muster-rolls, and few of the many-itemed bills are found to be strictly accurate. That he put, nevertheless, a high estimate upon that ofwhich he himself had been deprived, is clearly shown by a good many expressions in his last will and testament, and particularly by the essential clause of it establishing the Williamstown Free School, and condi- tionally also Haschoolin the EastTownship, where the fort now stands, and the same fact is st-rongly indicated by several concurrent lines of tradition, which was best gathered up 'by Mr. Fitch, the first preceptor of the Free School, forty-five years after the Colonel's death. ,He had a taste for books, and often lamented his want of a liberal education 5 he witnessed, with humane and painful sensations, the dangers and difficulties and hard- ships which the first settlers were obliged to encounter, and to encourage them he intimated his intention of doing something liberal and handsome for them. - It is nearly as plain, from a full survey of all the circumstances, in the second place that Ephraim Williams found his double and doubtful home re- lations disagreeable, if not intolerable. The best evidence of this is that he left home and went to sea when quite a youth, and no traces of the time when, or reason why, or manner how, have ever been discovered, although these were diligently soughtforfifty years ago by Dr. Stephen West Williams, agrandson of his younger brother, Thomas. It is certain, however, that his father was troubled by this sea-faring life of his motherless boy, that he earnestly tried to dissuade him from pursuing it, and that he ultimately succeeded in inducing him to abandon it. It is certain also that the boy or young man made many voyages to Europe, in some of which he visited Spain and Holland and England, but whether he went before the mast or as a supercargo, or as apetty officer, will never be known, though perhaps it may be fairly inferred that he personally profited by these opportunities as towards that agreeable companionship and social success and political influence of his later life, and it is certain further, that while ships of a con- siderable burden then sailed up the Charles River as far as Newton, none of his own immediate family on either side were then, or had been, sea-go- ing people, and too that there is a strange reticence both of record and of after-reference to this portion 'of the Colonel's life. The same year, 1739, in which his Grandfather Jackson made his last will and testament, his father, Williams, then forty-eight years Old, broke up his establishment in Newton, where he had been prominent both in church and civil affairs, sold the ancestral acres there, and moved his family IO .