Joseph Palmer’s wife before her first marriage was Nancy Thompson. She was a third cousin to Count Rumford, who was Benjamin Thompson, of Woburn, in Colonial days, but who returned to England after the evacuation of the British, and on account of services rendered to the Government was knighted by George III, and afterward given the title of Count Rumford by the reigning king of Bavaria, and was well known throughout Europe as a scientist, philosopher, and savant. * * * * * A reporter of the _Boston Daily Globe_ in 1884 interviewed Joseph Palmer’s son, Dr. Palmer, of Fitchburg, and herein are inserted extracts from the interview:— “The older inhabitants of Harvard, Sterling, Leominster, Fitchburg, and other neighboring towns can remember ‘Old Jew Palmer,’ who fifty years ago was persecuted, despised, jeered at, regarded almost as a fiend incarnate; who was known far and wide as a human monster, and with whose name mothers used to frighten their children when they were unruly. “‘Old Jew Palmer,’ as he was universally called, was the most abused and persecuted man these parts ever knew, and all because he insisted upon wearing a beard. But many who in those days looked upon the subject of this sketch as a social outcast have lived to see whiskers common and fashionable. “With a view of getting at the facts of the persecution of Mr. Palmer but fifty years ago, his only son, Dr. Thomas Palmer, a well-known dentist of Fitchburg, was interviewed, and the doctor talked earnestly and vigorously about his father’s career, for he had seen the time when his schoolmates shunned him and made his boyhood days miserable, railing at him because his father wore a beard. But now the doctor looks back upon those days proudly, as he realizes that his sire was right and that the world has indorsed the ways and ideas of the old man, instead of the old man bowing to the absurd whim of the world.” [Illustration: JOSEPH PALMER ] [Illustration: NANCY PALMER ] Said Dr. Palmer:—