Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 8.djvu/53

 Hon. Marshall P. Wilder, Ph.D.

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��lature, as a representative for the town of Dorchester. In i849,he was elected a member of Governor Briggs's Council, and the year following a member of the senate and its president, and he is the oldest ex-president of the senate living. In i860, he was the member for New England of the national committee of the " Constitutional Union Party," and attended, as chairman of the IMassa- chusetts delegation, the national con- vention in Baltimore, where John Bell and Edward Everett were nominated for President and Vice-President of the United States.

He was initiated in Charity Lodge, No. 18, in Troy, New Hampshire, at the age of twenty-five, exalted to the Royal Arch Chapter, Cheshire No. 4, and knighted in the Boston Encamp- ment. He was deputy grand master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, and was one of the six thousand Masons who signed, December 31, 1831, the cele- brated " Declaration of the Freemasons of Boston and Vicinity " ; and at the fiftieth anniversary of that event, which was celebrated in Boston t^vo years ago, Mr. Wilder responded for the survivors, six of the signers being present. He has received all the Masonic degrees, including the 33d, or highest and last honor of the fraternity. At the World's Masonic Convention, in 1867, at Paris, he was the only delegate from the United States who spoke at the banquet.

On the seventh of November, 1849, ^ festival of the Sons of New Hampshire was celebrated in Boston. The Honor- able Daniel Webster presided, and Mr. Wilder was the first vice-president. Fif- teen hundred sons of the Granite State were present. The association again met on the twenty-ninth of October, 1852, to participate in the obsequies of Mr. W^ebster at Faneuil Hall. On this occa-

��sion the legislature, and other citizens, of New Hampshire were received at the Lowell railway-station, and were addressed by Mr. Wilder in behalf of the sons of that StatQ resident in Boston. (

The Sons celebrated their second fes- tival, November 2,1853, 3.t which Mr. Wilder occupied the chair as president, and delivered one of his most eloquent speeches. They assembled again, on June 20, 1 86 1, to receive and welcome a New Hampshire regiment of volun- teers, and escort them to the Music Hall, where Mr. Wilder addressed them in a patriotic speech on their departure for the field of battle.

The two hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the settlement of Dor- chester was celebrated on the Fourth of July, 1855. The oration was by Edward Everett ; Mr. Wilder presided, and delivered an able address. On the central tablet of the great pavilion was this inscription : " Marshall P. Wilder, president of the day. Blessed is he that tumeth the waste places into a garden, and maketh the wilderness to blossom as a rose."

In January, 1868, he was solicited to take the office of president of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, vacated by the death of Governor An- drew. He was unanimously elected, and is now serving the seventeenth year of his presidency. At every annual meet- ing he has delivered an appropriate address. In his first address he urged the importance of procuring a suitable building for the society. In 1870, he said : "The time has now arrived when absolute necessity, public sentiment, and personal obligations, demand that this work be done, and done quickly." Feeling himself pledged by this ad- dress, he, as chairman of the committee

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