Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/337

Rh as “ignorant, dominating, passionate, fearless,” was uniformly dignified — a well-informed, intellectual man, cultivated in mind and manners. He was called upon to do much business for his town, making out deeds, settling quarrels, and even acting as counsel in a lawsuit involving a question of pauperism between the towns of Loudon and Bow, N. H. Franklin Pierce, afterwards President of the United States, was the counsel for Loudon and Mark Baker for Bow. Both entered their pleas, and my father won the suit. After it was decided, Mr. Pierce bowed to my father and congratulated him. For several years father was chaplain of the New Hampshire State Militia, and as I recollect it, he was justice of the peace at one time. My father was a strong believer in States' rights, but slavery he regarded as a great sin.

Mark Baker was the youngest of his father's family, and inherited his father's real estate, an extensive farm situated in Bow and Concord, N. H. It is on record that Mark Baker's father paid the largest tax in the colony. McClure's Magazine says, describing the Baker homestead at Bow: “The house itself was a small, square box building of rudimentary architecture.” My father's house had a sloping roof, after the prevailing style of architecture at that date.

McClure's Magazine states: “Alone of the Bakers, he [Albert] received a liberal education. . . . Mary Baker passed her first fifteen years at the ancestral home at Bow. It was a lonely and unstimulating existence. The church supplied the only social diversions, the district school practically all the intellectual life.”

Let us see what were the fruits of this “lonely and