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��HON. EZEKIEL A. STRAW.

���HON. E. A. STRAW.

��ter Academy, where he devoted himself more especially to the study of mathe- matics, in the higher departments of which he became proficient. In the spring of 1838, being then under twenty years of age, he obtained a situation as Assistant Civil Engineer upon the Nashua and Lowell Railroad, which was then be- ing built, the last four miles of which was the initial work in the railway sys- tem of our State. Here he manifested a degree of practical attainment and skill which soon attracted attention, and in July following, Mr. Carter, the engineer of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Co. at Manchester, being taken ill, he was sent for, through the agency of Mr. Boyden, the consulting engineer, to perform tem- porarily the duties of the position. He at once responded to the call, going to Manchester thirty-nine years ago on the fourth of July last, for what he supposed was to be a few weeks of professional service, but what has proved a lifetime of arduous and efficient but well appre- ciated and generously remunerated labor. He has remained in the active service of the Amoskeag Corporation from that day to this. He commenced work for the company when it had scarcely entered upon the career of active development which has placed it at the head of the manufactnring corporations of the world, and the now important and prosperous city was a boarding-house village of

��some twenty-five hundred inhabitants. The first work in which he engaged was upon the dam and canals, then in pro- cess of construction, and in laying out the lots and streets where the business portion of the city now stands, the land occupied by which then being the prop- erty of the Amoskeag Co., to whose lib- erality, it may be said, the city is largely indebted for its parks and public grounds, and other substantial contributions. He remained in the company's service as en- gineer for thirteen years, being absent for a time in Europe, where he was sent in 1844, to secure the necessary informa- tion and machinery for the printing of muslin delaines, in the manufacture of which the company were already en- gaged to some extent in their mill at Hooksett, but which they were unable to print successfully. Having secured, through Mr. Straw's tact, ingenuity and powers of observation, the essentials for successful work in this line, a new mill was erected for the prosecution of this branch of industry, and what is now known as the Manchester Print Works commenced operation in 1846, under the dh-ection of a new company made up mainly of the same members as the Am; oskeag.

In 1851, Mr. Straw was appointed to the position of agent of the land and wa- ter power department of the Amoskeag Company. Five years later the machine

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