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 �THE

RANITE neNTHLY.

A NEW HAMPSHIRE MAGAZINE.

Tfrcoted to Literature, 'Biography, History, and State Progress. Vol. IX. SEPTEMBER, 1886. No. IX.

COL. CHARLES H. SAWYER.

By Hon. Charles H. Bell, LL.D.

The subject of this sketch does not Several of them, including Jonathan

owe the estimation in which he is held Sawyer, the youngest, became manufac-

to the doings of his ancestors. He has turers. Jonathan was fortunate in ob-

eamed his own position in the world, taining an education in the high school

Yet he cannot fail to feel an honorable of Lowell, and afterwards at the great

pride in the fact, that he is sprung from Methodist institution in VVilbraham,

a line of energetic and ingenious work- Mass. Then he learned the business

ers, who made themselves useful and of a dyer in a woollen-mill in Lowell,

respected in their generations. and subsequently had charge of a

Charles H. Sawyer is a lineal de- similar establishment in Watertown, scendant of John Sawyer, a farmer of N.Y. In 1850 he took up his abode Lincolnshire in England, three of whose in Dover in our own State, and entered sons emigrated to this country about into the manufacture of flannels. He the year 1636. One of them, Thomas, is still a principal and active pro- settled in 1647 ^t Lancaster, Mass.; prietor of the Sawyer Woollen Mills, where in 1708 he (or possibly a son in the enjoyment of health, compet- of his, bearing the same name) was ence, and the respect won by a life captured by the Indians and taken to of honorable exertion and spotless in- Canada, and purchased his deliverance, tegrity.

and that of several fellow-captives, by Charles H. Sawyer, the eldest son of

building for the French governor a Jonathan and Martha (Perkins) Sawyer,

saw-mill; the first, it is said, in that was born in Watertown, N.Y., March

region of country. 30, 1840. At the age of ten, he was

Phineas, the great-great-grandson of brought by his father to Dover, and

Thomas, and the grandfather of Charles acquired the basis of his education in

H. Sawyer, bought in Marlborough, the excellent public schools of that

Mass., a century later, a water privilege place. When he became seventeen,

and mills, to which he afterwards added his father, who designed him for the

a cotton factory ; a difiicult and hazard- hereditary calling of manufacturing,

ous undertaking at that early day. He placed him in the flannel-mill as an

operated it for some years, about the ordinary hand, to enable him to form

time of the last war with England, but a practical acquaintance with the vari-

probably with more public spirit than ous and complicated processes required

private advantage, and died in 1820, to transform the rough fleece into the

leaving a widow and twelve children, finished fabric. Here he supplemented

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