Harlow Niles Higinbotham: A memoir with brief autobiography and extracts from speeches and lettersMonroe, Harriet
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Harlow Niles Higinbotham: A memoir with brief autobiography and extracts from speeches and letters
Monroe, Harriet
Businessmen -- Illinois -- Chicago -- Biography; Higinbotham, Harlow N. (Harlow Niles), 1838-1919
“He took the phrase ‘walking-trip’ very seriously, and would not accept
any invitation to ride an inch. At one place, for example, where we had
to cross an unfordable stream, he refused to ferry over, and ordered a
local carpenter to make a pair of stilts on which he stumbled and
splashed, and fell down and got up, and tumbled again, finally arriving,
drenched but triumphant, on the opposite bank.”
An incident of another walking-trip began at the grave of General
Pettigrew, who had been fatally wounded while in command of the rear
guard of Lee’s army on its retreat from Gettysburg. It was in 1897, in
North Carolina, that Mr. Higinbotham found a moss-green grave-stone,
which told how General Pettigrew had died at the house of a man named
Boyd, near Martinsburg, West Virginia. As it was in Martinsburg that Mr.
Higinbotham, while a young Union officer, had been stationed during
1864, and as he had there “received many courtesies from the people of
the South both during and after the war,” he was much interested. But it
was not until 1918 that he could learn anything about the General’s
family. A few letters then passed between him and Miss Mary Johnstone
Pettigrew of Tryon, North Carolina, in one of which he says:
“You mention the mysterious way in which peoples’ lives cross or touch,
and inform me that the General’s great-great-grandmother was Rachel
Higinbotham. You will, I am sure, feel that truth is stranger than
fiction when I tell you that my wife’s name was also Rachel
Higinbotham.”
And he tells of a quite recent trip on the James River, during which he
had met, at Hampton, a cousin of Robert E. Lee who had known the Boyd
family, in whose house General Pettigrew died.
He always emphasized the necessity of human sympathy and service, and we
have plenty of testimony showing the quick response of his big heart to
appeals public and private. A poet once wrote to him, after he had held
out his hand at a crisis:
“Who cares for the burden, the night and the rain,
And the long steep lonesome road,
When at last through the darkness a light shines plain,
When a voice calls hail, and a friend draws rein
With an arm for the heavy load!
“For life is the chance of a friend or two
This side the journey’s goal.
Though the world be a desert the long night through,
Yet the gay flowers bloom and the sky grows blue
When a soul salutes a soul.”
In religious matters he was extremely liberal, feeling that “It is what
we do, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, more than what we believe, that
will be important in the final round-up.” In June, 1893, he said, in his
address of welcome at the opening of the World’s First Parliament of
Religions:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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