The first-born, President Timothy Dwight, S.T.D., LL.D., born 1752, was one of the most eminent of Americans. He learned his alphabet at a single sitting while a mere child, and at four knew the catechism by heart. He graduated from Yale at seventeen; taught the Hopkins school in New Haven at seventeen and eighteen; was tutor in Yale from nineteen to twenty-five years of age; wrote the "Conquest of Canada," which was reprinted in London, at nineteen. This work was dedicated to George Washington by permission. At twenty-three, he was in the fore front of the advocates of independence. At twenty-two, General Washington appointed him a chaplain in the army, and personally requested that he accept. His widow received $350 a year pension because of this service. He was a member of the Massachusetts legislature and secured an important grant to Harvard university. He was offered a professorship at Harvard and could have gone to Congress without opposition, but he declined both, and at thirty-two accepted a country pastorate at Greenfield Hill, Connecticut. He remained there twenty-two years. His salary was $750. He also had a gift of $1,500 for accepting the call, a parish lot of six acres, and twenty cords of wood annually. This was said to be the largest ministerial salary in New England. At forty-three he was called from the country parish to the presidency of Yale. His salary as president was $334. Later he had $500, from which he paid $150 for two amanuenses which he required because his sight had failed him. He published fourteen important works. He was largely instrumental in organizing the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions; the American Missionary Society and the American Bible Society. To him is largely due the establishment of theological seminaries in the country. For forty-six years he taught every year either in a public or private school or college, and all but one year of that time he preached every week and almost invariably he prepared a new sermon. When he died, from a cancer at sixty-five, the children insisted that the estate should be for the mother during her lifetime, and when she died there was found to be $26,000 although his salary had always been ridiculously small.