Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/336

 3o6 THE GRANITE MONTHLY.

twenty-seven years. In 1832 the district system was abolished, and he became principal in the first grammar school opened, — the same now known as the Edson school, — at a salary of $500 per annum. During his extended service as a teacher in the Lowell schools, Mr. Merrill had the training of a larger number of pupils than has fallen to the lot of any other teacher in the city. A large portion of the substantial business men of Lowell, and their wives, have been under his instruction for various periods, Gen. Butler and ex-Mayor Peabody among others. It is his boast that one Governor of New Hampshire (Straw), and the wives of two others (Cheney and Head), were among his pupils. He is also reported to have declared, in a speech on some public occasion, that, although regarded as one of the most quiet and inoffensive citizens, he had whipped more Lowell men, and held their wives upon his knee oftener, than any other man living, which declaration is undoubt- edly correct. Mr. Merrill discontinued his service as a teacher in 1845, ^^'^^ engaged in the book trade on Merrimack street, near the Post Office, where he has recently been succeeded in business by a son, although still more or less engaged in the store. He has served many years upon the school committee, was also a member of the Common Council, and a Representative in the Legislature of 1857.

New Hampshire has one excellent representative among the Lowell teachers at the present time in the person of Arthur K. VVhitcomb, a native of Littleton, subsequently of Bath, who graduated at Dartmouth in 1S73, and was for three years engaged in journalism in Lowell. He has been principal of the Varnum Grammar School for the last five years. The teacher of music in the Lowell schools is also a New Hampshire man by birth — George F. VVilley, a son of the Rev. Isaac Willey, now of Pembroke, who was born in Rochester in 1827. He was educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, and was a teacher of music in that institution at seventeen years of age. He taught music in the Lawrence schools for five years, and came to Lowell in 1851, where he has since resided. He has been teacher of music in the Lowell schools since 1866, and is director of the Lowell Conservatory of Music. He has been two years president of the Lowell Y. M. C. Association, and is superintendent of the Belvidere Mis- sion.

In the medical profession, also, New Hampshire men are preeminent in Lowell. Dr. Oilman Kimball, who enioys a national reputation as a surgeon, and who has been an active practitioner in that city for more than half a cen- tury, was born in the town of Hill, December 8, 1804. He graduated at the Dartmouth Medical School in 1827, and settled in practice in Chicopee, Mass., but soon went to Europe, and spent some time in attending surgical clinics in the hospitals of Paris. Returning to America he located in Lowell in 1830, where he has since resided, devoting his attention mainly to sur- gery. He has performed many difficult operations in all departments, but his specialty is ovariotomy, in which he has had no superior in the country. He was chosen Professor of Surgery in the Vermont Medical Col- lege at Woodstock, and in the Berkshire Medical College, but resigned to take charge of the Lowell Hospital, which was under his management for a long term of years. He has made numerous contributions to medical literature, and received the honorary degree of M. D. from Williams, and Yale, and that of A. M. from Dartmouth.

Dr. (ilharles A. Savory, though not a native of New Hampshire, was taken to Hopkinton in early childhood and was reared in that town. He attended school at Contoocook in youth, the late Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase being one of his teachers for a time in that place. He graduated from Dartmouth Medical College in 1836, practiced a number of years in Hopkinton and War-

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