A History of the Hudson Family: Part III
Long before reports of his disappearance would pepper newspapers across the East Coast, Samuel Dana Hayes’ ancestors had spent the preceding two centuries leaving their mark on New England history.
On his father’s side, the Hayeses were among the oldest founding families of Norwalk, Connecticut. Nathaniel Hayes, Samuel’s third great-grandfather and the progenitor of the Hayes family in North America, was born in England in the late 1620s or early 1630s. His exact date of arrival in New England is unclear, though what is known is that on 15 February 1651, he was one of 14 signers of the Deed of Runckinheage, an indenture that legally created the physical boundaries of Norwalk, Connecticut in exchange for "Thirtie Fathum of Wampum [strung shell beads used as currency between Native Americans and early colonists], Tenn Kettles, Fifteen Coates, Tenn payr Stockings, Tenn Knifes, Tenn Hookes, Twenty Pipes [for tobaco consumption], Tenn Muckes [metal drill bits], Ten Needles, to them in hand paid”.
The family would remain firmly rooted in Norwalk over the following century, playing active roles in local government and religious leadership. When revolution came to the colonies in 1775, Nathaniel’s great-grandson, Thomas Allen Hayes, was just 18 years old. In the next year, he enlisted as a corporal in the Second Connecticut Regiment. The regiment marched to the defense of New York against the British forces under General William Howe, who would go on to capture and occupy the city for the rest of the war. Undeterred, Thomas Allen and the regiment pressed on, fighting in subsequent campaigns at Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth.
Whatever hardships he endured during the war, Thomas Allen survived and would go on to enjoy a prosperous civilian life. He would also bring a close to more than 150 years of the Hayes family’s prominence in Norwalk for himself and his descendants. Around 1800, Thomas Allen arrived in Windsor, Vermont, where he would enter into partnership with I. W. Hubbard for what would become a “thriving mercantile” career.
According to city chronicles, Sophia West, whose father Elijah owned the tavern where the Constitution for the “Free and Independent State of Vermont” was adopted (thus becoming known as “Constitution House”)[1], would one night take a “brief” and “rather unexpected walk with a mature bachelor of some forty years, to the parson’s residence at the north end of the village, and returned as the bride of her escort, Mr. [Thomas] Allen Hayes.” Not long after, Sophia gave birth to their son Augustus Allen Hayes in 1806. Augustus would spend his youth in Vermont, studying at the Norwich Military Academy before leaving to study at Dartmouth in New Hampshire.
Only in his late 20s did he leave Vermont for good, ending the brief but prominent chapter of the Hayes family in the Green Mountain State. Today, 80 miles south of Windsor you can visit the Bennington Museum and view early daguerreotype photographs of Augustus, his mother Sophia, and even the family’s Sheraton chest of drawers.
Boston proved to be the next landing point for the Hayes family, and in 1836 in the quaint coastal town of Marblehead, on the North Shore outside of Boston, Augustus married Henrietta Bridge Dana. Over the next half century, he would establish himself as a highly reputable chemist, including election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and serving as state assayer of Massachusetts. In this capacity, he was charged with certifying the chemical composition of ores and metals submitted to him. This included testing ores or metals for purity or quality, though it later broadened to ensuring the quality of items like liquor and other consumables. He even testified in murder trials involving alleged poisonings.
His later obituary would note that in addition to occupying a “high place among the scientific men of this country,” he was also well known in Europe. Such praise owed in part to his impressive list of scientific contributions. In 1838, for example, he engineered a highly efficient arrangement for steam boilers to optimize fuel use and improve the economical generation of steam, quickly adopted across the country.
With another of Augustus Hayes’ innovations, an argument could be made that he played a small but significant role in the Union war effort. As the country fell into Civil War in 1861, Augustus began drawing public attention to the uncertainty of the supply of saltpeter and the necessity of securing a reliable domestic production. At the time, saltpeter was the principal ingredient used in gunpowder production. Both sides of the conflict therefore were pressed to find new ways of producing or sourcing the commodity, particularly in the aftermath of a temporary British embargo on all exports of saltpeter to the U.S. Thanks to his advocacy, as well as his development of a novel chemical method to generate saltpeter through a reaction of sodium nitrate and potassium hydroxide, his efforts “resulted in the manufacture of a very pure product for the [Union] navy.”[2]
Around 1870, while Augustus was traveling Europe, he was suddenly stricken with a “dangerous illness.” While he would live another 12 years, his life would never be the same. Apparently a debilitating illness, he was forced to retire from professional activities and gradually withdrew from society as a whole, spending his final years suffering until he was released from the pain at the age of 76.
Although the Hayeses were undoubtedly among the “old families” of New England, with particularly strong roots in nearby Connecticut and no lack of venerable means, Augustus would very much have been an outsider in Boston high society. For most of its history, Boston’s upper class was often considered America’s closest equivalent to a hereditary aristocracy. Its families were notoriously insular, highly educated, and most often (but not always) wealthy Protestants. They prized culture, intellect, pedigree, and moral duty above all else. In reference to the highest priestly caste in India, writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. coined the name “Boston Brahmins” for this social class in 1860.
It was not a simple “club” to join, with financial means alone hardly a ticket in. There is no set list of entry requirements, though members of the class would almost invariably be of old English stock, descending directly from the original 17th century Puritan colonists in Massachusetts. They hailed from famous clans characterized by an interconnected web of historic family names that have produced presidents, writers, and tycoons, including the Adamses, Lowells, Cabots, and Forbeses. Their sons would flow through a predictable pipeline of elite prep schools, such as Phillips Exeter, then to Harvard University, so much so that it was treated almost as a private family institution.[3] With their wealth, they preferred more conservative displays rather than ostentatious consumption, and heavily funded social and cultural causes, for instance founding and sustaining many of Boston’s defining cultural institutions, like the Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
We have no way of knowing whether Augustus had any desire to join their ilk or if he was entirely indifferent. And although he possessed of the majority of “credentials” needed, it is probable that he remained an outsider, considered as “the gentleman from Connecticut” despite otherwise being granted entry into the finest drawing rooms and social clubhouses. However, the same would not be true for his children, thanks to the power of his wife’s lineage.
The Danas were manifestly among the “First Families” of Boston. Its patriarch, Richard Dana, was born around the same time as Nathaniel Hayes in the 1620s and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts by 1640. Ensuing members of the Dana family would include Richard Dana (b. 1700), who investigated the Boston Massacre and was a founding member of the Sons of Liberty; Francis Dana, Richard’s son, delegate to the Continental Congress and Minister to Russia; and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, author and grandson of renowned poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (who might have guessed?).
Henrietta Bridge Dana descended from a long line of Protestant ministers and church officials. Before the Revolutionary War, men of these roles were unofficially seen as the leaders of New England towns. As the 19th century progressed, lawyers, judges, and merchants would also gradually become sources of authority within the communities. In this tripartite union of law, capital, and spirituality, reverends and ministers would provide the moral blueprints to which the Boston Brahmins adhered to. They also lived comfortably alongside their more commercially-minded counterparts.
Samuel Dana (b. 1778), Henrietta’s father, fits this mold perfectly. Graduating from Harvard in 1796, he was ordained as the minister of Old North Church in Marblehead, Massachusetts on 7 October 1801. He would become a pillar of the community during his faithful service over the next 36 years. For instance, in 1817, he helped to establish the church’s Sunday school “for the instruction of poor children,” which remains one of the oldest Sunday Schools in the country. In 1824, he oversaw the construction of the new stone church building which continues host services today. He also possessed a unique skill that brought a degree of celebrity. As the Clements Library at the University of Michigan notes:
“Some writers developed a habit or style of writing in a miniature hand as part of their everyday practice. Rev. Samuel Dana (1778–1864) of the Old North Church in Marblehead, Massachusetts, had famously small handwriting that he would use in his private writings as well as in service of his ministry. One of his routines was to take half dimes or three-cent coins, trace them with pencil, write the complete Lord’s Prayer in ink within the boundaries, erase the pencil, and give the results to friends or parishioners as keepsakes.”
Samuel had not fallen far from the proverbial tree, as his father, the Reverend Joseph Dana, had also dedicated his life to the church in Ipswich, around 30 miles outside of Boston. The latter did, however, commit one notable act of rebellion against Boston orthodoxy: he was a Yale man. Through the marriage of his daughter, Sarah Ann Dana, he was also father-in-law of Israel Thorndike, the Federalist tycoon who became one of the wealthiest men in early 19th century New England, and 4th great-grandfather of John Kerry (albeit through his first wife, Mercy Trask).
By the time the Hayes and Dana families were joined through the marriage of Augustus and Henrietta, they carried with them nearly four centuries of accumulated family history firmly rooted in New England’s shores. And thus emerge the full origins of the name Samuel Dana Hayes, together with a portrait of the society and life into which he was born and would one day abandon.
[1] This constitution was the first to prohibit slavery and establish universal manhood suffrage. Vermont would remain an independent republic until 1791, when it was admitted into the Union as the 14th state.
[2] As a long time resident of Geneva, Switzerland, I feel it worth noting that Augustus also authored a famous piece featured in the American Journal of Science on the distinct color properties of the water in Lake Leman, Geneva.
[3] Harvard has been a mainstay in the city of Boston and in the lives of its privileged class since its founding in 1636, while the elite prep schools like Phillips Exeter and Groton were more characteristic of the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century establishment.
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