Chapter 44

ORIGIN OF THE GLAZIER FAMILY.

Lineage of Willard Glazier.--A good stock.--Oliver Glazier at the Battle of Bunker Hill.--The home of honest industry.--The Coronet of Pembroke.--The "Homestead Farm."--Mehitable Bolton.--Her New England home.--Her marriage to Ward Glazier.--The wild "North Woods."--The mother of the soldier-author.

Willard Glazier comes of the mixed blood of Saxon and of Celt. We first hear of his ancestors upon this side of the Atlantic at that period of our nation's history which intervened between the speck of war at Lexington and the cloud of war at Bunker Hill.

Massachusetts and the town of Boston had become marked objects of the displeasure of the British Parliament. Later, in 1775, Ethan Allen had startled Captain Delaplace by presenting his lank figure at the captain's bedside and demanding the surrender of Ticonderoga in the name of the "Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress." In the language of Daniel Webster, "A spirit pervaded all ranks, not transient, not boisterous, but deep, solemn, determined."

War on their own soil and at their own doors was indeed a strange work to the yeomanry of New England; but their consciences were convinced of its necessity, and when their country called them to her defense they did not withhold themselves from the perilous responsibility.

The statement of Quincy seemed to pervade all hearts. Said that distinguished son of genius and patriotism, "Blandishments will not fascinate us, nor will threats of a halter intimidate; for, under God, we are determined that, wheresoever, whensoever, and howsoever we shall be called to make our exit, we will die free men."

At such a time, and among such men, we find enrolled in the ranks of the patriot army Oliver Glazier, the great-grandfather of the subject of the present biography.

Oliver's father was John Glazier, a Massachusetts Lancastrian, born in 1739. John Glazier was the son of William Glazier, born about the year 1700, his ancestry being respectively of English and of Scotch extraction. Oliver himself, however, was born in the town of Lancaster, in the province or colony of Massachusetts, May twenty-third, 1763.

Hence the blood of Norman, of Saxon and of Celt, that had forgotten the animosities of race and mingled quietly in the veins of his ancestors, had become purely American in Oliver, and though but little over fourteen years of age, we find him doing yeoman service upon the ramparts of Bunker Hill.

That he performed well his part in the struggle for liberty, is evident from the fact that he appears upon the rolls as a pensioner, from the close of that memorable contest until the time of his death.

Mr. Frank Renehan, in a sketch contributed by him to an elaborate work which was published by the New York and Hartford Publishing Company in 1871, comments as follows upon the coincidence of Oliver Glazier in 1775 and Willard Glazier in 1861--both being at the time of entering service comparatively boys in age, enlisting for the defense of their country: "The former, though then but fourteen years of age, participated with the patriots in the battle of Bunker Hill, and to the last contributed his young enthusiasm and willing services to the cause he had espoused; thus giving early testimony of his devotion to the land of his adoption and of fealty to the principles of popular government involved in the struggle for American independence. So remarkable an instance of ancestral fidelity to the interests of civil liberty could not but exercise a marked influence upon those of the same blood to whom the tradition was handed down, and here we find our subject, a scion of the third generation, assisting in 1861 on the battlefields of the South, in maintenance of the liberty his progenitor had contributed to achieve in 1775 on the battlefields of the North! This is not mentioned as a singular fact--history is replete with just such coincidences,--but merely for the purpose of suggesting the moral that, in matters of patriotism, the son is only consistent when he imitates the example and emulates the virtues of his sires."

In this eloquent passage occurs an error of fact. Oliver Glazier while in the patriot army was _not_ fighting for the "land of his adoption." As we have seen, he was native here and "to the manor born." Indeed, in the light of historic proof and with the example of men descended from Washington and Light Horse Harry Lee before us, we are rather inclined to admire the paragraph as a fine specimen of rhetorical composition than to admit its accuracy as a deduction in philosophy.

Subsequent to his term of military service--an experience through which he had safely passed--Oliver Glazier became a resident of West Boylston, Massachusetts, where he married a Miss Hastings.

The name of Glazier, Lower tells us, is purely English, and is derived from the title given to the trade. However that may be, those who have borne it have always expressed a pride in having sprung from the great mass--the people--and have held with the philosopher of Sunnyside, that whether "hereditary rank be an illusion or not, hereditary virtue gives a patent of nobility beyond all the blazonry of the herald's college." The name of Hastings takes its rise from a nobler source; for Mrs. Oliver Glazier brought into the family as blue blood as any in all England. The great family which bears that name in Great Britain can show quarterings of an earlier date than the battle which gave a kingdom to William of Normandy. Macaulay says that one branch of their line, in the fourteenth century, "wore the coronet of Pembroke; that from another sprang the renowned Lord Chamberlain, the faithful adherent of the White Rose, whose fate has furnished so striking a theme both to the poet and historian," and while it is probable that this wife of an American patriot was many degrees removed from the powerful leaders whose name she bore, the same blood undoubtedly flowed in her veins that coursed through theirs.

Oliver, during the many years of a happy married life which terminated in his death at the ripe age of ninety-seven, became the father of eight children. His son Jabez left Boylston at an early age, and after considerable "prospecting" finally married a Miss Sarah Tucker and settled in the township of Fowler, St. Lawrence County, New York. Out of their union sprang three sons, George, Ward, and Henry, and four daughters, Elvira, Martha, Caroline and Lydia. During a visit he made to his "down East" relations, Ward married a young lady by the name of Mehitable Bolton, of West Boylston, Massachusetts.

This young lady was a true representative of the New England woman, who believes that work is the handmaid of religion. She entered a cotton factory at Worcester when only seventeen years of age, and worked perseveringly through long years of labor, often walking from her home in West Boylston to the factory at Worcester, a distance of seven miles. At the time of her marriage--which occurred when she was twenty-five--she had accumulated the snug little sum of five hundred dollars, besides possessing a handsome wardrobe, all of which was the fruit of her own untiring industry.

If it be true that the mothers of men of mark are always women of strong and noble characters, then we are not surprised to find in the mother of Willard Glazier those sterling qualities which made her young life successful.

The early married life of Ward Glazier was passed upon the farm first cleared and cultivated by his father, and which has since become known to the neighborhood as the "Old Glazier Homestead." This farm is situated in the township of Fowler, midway between the small villages of Little York and Fullersville.

The township is a tract of rugged land, containing only the little village of Hailesborough, besides those already named. Along its borders rushes and tumbles a turbulent stream which still retains its original Indian appellation--the Oswegatchie; a name no doubt conveying to the ear of its aboriginal sponsors some poetical conceit, just as another stream in far off Virginia is named the Shenandoah, or "Daughter of the Stars."

Those who are at all familiar with the scenery that prevails in what in other sections of the country are called the great North Woods, and in their own neighborhood the great South Woods, can readily imagine what were the geological and scenic peculiarities of Fowler township. Bare, sterile, famished-looking, as far as horticultural and herbaceous crops are concerned, yet rich in pasture and abounding in herds--with vast rocks crested and plumed with rich growths of black balsam, maple, and spruce timber, and with huge boulders scattered carelessly over its surface and margining its streams, St. Lawrence County presents to-day features of savage grandeur as wild and imposing as it did ere the foot of a trapper had profaned its primeval forests.

Yet its farms and its dwellings are numerous, its villages and towns possess all the accompaniments of modern civilization, the spires of its churches indicate that the gentle influences of religion are not forgotten, and there, as elsewhere, the indomitable will of man has won from the wilderness a living and a home.