ROBERT HALLOWELL GARDINER.

BY REV. ASA DALTON, D.D.

Read before the Maine Historical Society, February 9, 1888.

A DUE regard to the fitness of things requires us to put on record our sense of the loss we have sustained in the death of our late associate Mr. Robert Hallowell Gardiner.

Mr. Gardiner was endowed with those personal qualities which inspire the affection of friends, and compel the respect of all, and he belonged to a family long and closely connected with the interests and growth of this community. The family not only enjoy the distinction of giving their name to the city of Gardiner, but the higher satisfaction of having contributed largely and uninterruptedly to its prosperity and culture.

Doctor Sylvester Gardiner, the great-grandfather of the late Robert Hallowell, was a descendant in the fourth generation from Joseph Gardiner, who emigrated from England and settled in Rhode Island. Joseph was the father of Benoni, Benoni of William, and William of Sylvester, who, after studying medicine in Edinboro and Paris, became a physician of eminence in Boston, where he accumulated a fortune by the importation of drugs. He invested his money freely in eastern lands on the Kennebec river, and became the leading director, as well as president of the Kennebec Land Company, from which he subsequently purchased the tract on the west side which bears his

name.

His principles, tastes and prejudices inclined him to side with the English government in the Revolution, in consequence of which his real and personal property was confiscated. His furniture and library were sold and scattered. Happily for the family a flaw in the legal proceedings against the estate at Gardinerston caused a delay in the proceedings, and peace was proclaimed before a renewal of the action. After the war Doctor Gardiner removed to Newport, Rhode Island, where he for some years practiced his profession, and died the year before the adoption of the constitution, one hundred and two years ago.

Doctor Gardiner provided in his will that a part of his property should be sold and the proceeds be equally divided among his six surviving children, John excepted, whom he partly disinherited as a rebel in politics, and a radical in religion. William, the second son, inherited the bulk of the Gardiner estate on the Kennebec, but died unmarried. The remaining four children were daughters, all of whom married. By the terms of Doctor Gardiner's will Gardinerston fell next to his grandson, Robert Hallowell, whose father had married the doctor's daughter Hannah. Robert Hallowell jr., adding the name of his maternal grandfather to his own became Robert Hallowell Gardiner.

Graduating at IIarvard, class of 1801, he soon took up his residence at Gardiner, the name by which the town, which up to this date had been a part of Pittston, from this time was called, a great improvement upon Gardinerston. For more than threescore years Mr. Gardiner was the leading citizen of that community, to whose welfare he devoted himself with a conscientious zeal and steadfast purpose seldom seen. Beside improving his own estate and building the beautiful Elizabethan house upon it, he established the Gardiner Lyceum and erected the Episcopal church, whose Gothic style was at that time novel in New England. He also presented the town with the plot of ground known as the Common, now an elegant park adorned with shrubbery and shade trees.

His interest in the town continued to the day of his death in 1864, and in Robert Hallowell jr., his third child and eldest son, he had a worthy successor. Of nine children six survived him, as in the case of Doctor Sylvester Gardiner.

Robert Hallowell, the immediate subject of this paper, was born in Pittston, November 3, 1809. He died in Gardiner, September 12, 1886, having lived seventy-seven years—a long, useful, and honorable life. His boyhood was healthy and happy. He grew up in an atmosphere of refinement, knowledge, and piety. His mother was a Boston Tudor, a woman of unusual mental activity and superior culture. His early education was under the direction of private tutors, but he subsequently entered a class in the Lyceum, established at Gardiner by his father; a school similar to and anticipating the schools of technology of the present day, and afterward studied at the well-known Round Hil

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school, Northampton, Massachusetts, in which the historian Bancroft was a teacher. He was matriculated at Harvard as an advanced student in his sophomore year, and graduated with honor, class of 1830. Colonel Long, an engineer of the United States ordnance department, induced him to adopt that profession, which he practiced for several years in the state of Georgia. His early life there was in the Cherokee country, where he was employed by the state in making surveys of new roads to connect Georgia with the farther West.

In 1840 he returned to Maine. In 1842, he was married, at Newport, Rhode Island, to Sarah Fenwick, daughter of Noble Wymberly Jones of Savanah, Georgia, to whom he had become attached during his residence in that state. They lived in Gardiner until the care of his wife's property required them to remove to Augusta, Georgia, where he became one of its most active, enterprising and useful citizens.

Following the example of his father and grandfather, he was soon recognized as public spirited and responsive to every reasonable call upon his purse, his time, and his talents. His experience as a civil engineer enabled him to devise plans for the sanitary improvement of the city, also for the protection of the river banks from encroachment, and especially to promote a project to improve the river for manufacturing industry. He was chiefly instrumental in forming a company which gradually grew to be prosperous and paying, not indeed to Mr. Gardiner, but to those who succeed him. Mr. Gardiner labored and others entered into his labors, reaping the fruits of his sagacity and enterprise. But our friend did not limit his endeavors to the material interests of his adopted city. Like his father before him he built and en. dowed a church in a part of the city where it was much needed. When the Southern states seceded, Mr. Gardiner found himself in a difficult and delicate position. His wife was a southern lady, whose family was identified with the South. Mr. Gardiner himself had given good proof of his regard for Augusta and Georgia, but he could not raise his hand against the Union. With his wife he came North on the last train that was allowed to pass through Tennessee, and soon after went abroad, passing the greater part of the following four years on foreign soil.

On the return of peace and the death of his honored father,

Mr. Gardiner succeeded him at Oaklands, and from that time devoted himself to the care of this estate as well as to the general interests moral and material of the community, following his father not with unequal steps. Apparently, years of happiness lay before him; but a shadow soon fell upon his path, and darkened his household. His beloved wife was not long permitted to share with him the quiet and rest they had anticipated at Oaklands.

They had never had children. Mrs. Gardiner died in 1869, leaving her husband to pass his widowed life alone in the stately mansion. Ever afterward there was a tenderness in his manner, which but faintly indicated his sense of the great bereavement.

In addition to his home duties, however, Mr. Gardiner kept up to the last his interest in his native city and state, occupying himself with various useful and pleasant pursuits.

He was much interested in meteorology, and kept a record of the weather for the use of the United States government, which for many years he regularly transmitted to Washington.

He was a member of the Maine Pomological Society, and for several years its president. As a member of the Maine Historical Society he took an active part in its proceedings, and in many ways contributed to its usefulness and efficiency. As president of the Society he gave much time and attention to its affairs, and both personally and officially was held in the highest respect by all its members.

But the cause to which Mr. Gardiner was most attached was that of religion and the church of his fathers. To this he freely gave money and time, thought, talent, influence-all he had and all he was for it was the cause which commanded his hearty assent, his warmest affections, and was closely associated with all that was dearest to him on earth and in heaven. Of his own parish at Gardiner, he was, for many years and at the time of his death, the senior warden.

He had also been for a long time a lay-deputy to the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal church—at first from Georgia, and after his change of residence, from Maine- and at the time of his death was still a deputy to the convention on the eve of assembling. He was also treasurer of the Diocesan Missionary Society to the end, and held several other church trusts.

We cannot close this paper without recognizing that Mr.

Gardiner was singularly happy in the circumstances of his birth, education, temperament, and general environment.

His form was erect, his bearing graceful and friendly, his countenance amiable and gentle, his manners those of a cultivated scholar and gentleman. He was never haughty or assuming, arrogated nothing to himself, but bore himself modestly, even meekly. His opportunities were indeed superior to what falls to the common lot, and none can say that he abused them. In our democratic state, he was born to an affluence which might, and in many cases would, have proved the source of selfishness and pride on the one hand, and the occasion of envy and hatred on the other. But Mr. Gardiner bore his faculties so meekly, he was so considerate, modest, and gracious, that none but born Philistines could have cherished ill-will, envy, or malice toward one who evidently wished well to all, and daily did something to promote the happiness of his brethren of the church, the city, and the whole community.

What seems especially worthy of our approval and emulation is Mr. Gardiner's habit of identifying himself with the two cities and communities in which most of his active life was passed. Augusta, Georgia, and Gardiner, Maine, are both the better for his having lived in them. If our men of wealth and position are truly wise in their generation, they will not fail to discover that to identify themselves with the permanent interests and highest good of their respective cities, is the safest way in which they can walk, and the surest road to happiness for themselves and for the children who shall come after them