The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1884Various
History
The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1884
Various
Massachusetts -- Periodicals; New England -- Periodicals
In this work of teaching, one man stands out in the history of New
England who should be better known to the present generation. He was a
benefactor in the colonial days when education was striving to keep her
lamp burning in the midst of the necessary practical work which engaged
the attention of most of the people of that time. His name was Ezekiel
Cheever. When a young man of twenty-three years, he came from
London--where he was born January 25, 1614--to Boston, seven years after
its settlement. The following spring he went to New Haven, where he soon
married, and became actively engaged in founding the colony there. Among
the men who went there the same year was a Mr. Wigglesworth, whose son,
in later years, as the Reverend Michael Wigglesworth, gave an account of
Mr. Cheever's success in the work of teaching, which he began soon after
reaching the place. "I was sent to school to Mr. Ezekiel Cheever, who at
that time taught school in his own house, and under him in a year or two
I profited so much through y'e blessing of God, that I began to make
Latin & to get forward apace."
Mr. Cheever received as a salary for two or three years twenty pounds;
and in 1643, while receiving this salary, his name is sixth in the list
of planters and their estates, his estate being valued only at twenty
pounds. In the year following, his salary was raised to thirty pounds
a year. This probably was an actual necessity, for his family now
consisted, besides himself and wife, of a son Samuel, five years old,
and a daughter Mary of four years. Ezekiel, born two years before, had
died. This son, Samuel, it may be said in passing, was graduated at
Harvard College in 1659, and was settled as a clergyman at Marblehead,
Massachusetts, where he died at the age of eighty-five, having been
universally esteemed during his long life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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