l62
��THE GRANITE MONTHLY,
��were born, John C. and Daniel. It was a true home in which the boys lived. The father was a man of ster- ling qualities, strong in mind and will, but commanding love as well as re- spect. He was trusted with legisla- tion and with places which required fidelity and strength. The mother was a woman of outward beauty and beauty of soul alike ; with high ideals and reverent conscientiousness. Her influence over her boys was life-long. The home was a centre of intelligent intercourse, a sample of the simplicity but earnestness of many of our best New Hampshire homesteads. The mother lived until just after the eldest. James, had come of age ; the father survived for manv vears.
Daniel Lothrop, senior, the father, while owning a farm, was a mason by occupation, and hence, in an exten- sive business, necessarily came to be much away from home. As James grew, he had a position of responsi- bility as the eldest of the three boys. But his early life was the usual life of a boy at that time on a New Hamp- shire farm. He was sturdy and self- reliant. He attended school in the district school-house winters, and worked on the farm summers. For several summers, in his father's neces- sary absence, the boy did a man's full work upon the farm. When he was nine years of age, he walked from Rochester to Dover, purchased a large Latin lexicon for his own use, and walked home the same day with his prize. When he was ten years of age, he used to take a load of wood to Dover, and sell it before seven o'clock in the morning, and it is noticeable that the open market-place was Frank- lin Square, where his extensive prop- erty interests were to be largely situ- ated, and where he looks out daily from his principal place of business upon the spot where, a boy of ten years, he used to sell his wood.
His attendance on district schools was not sufficient, and he obtained instruction of a higher grade, partly at an academy in Rochester village, and
��partly at Strafford Academy, of which Rev. Orin B. Cheney was then princi- pal, now President of Bates College. In the winter of 1842-3, when he was sixteen years of age, he taught the winter school in upper Rochester dis- trict, following with a private school in the same place.
At that time he had so far progressed in study, that he was ready to enter college, that summer, a year in ad- vance. But in the spring before he would have entered college, in 1843, he followed the advice of his maternal uncle, Jeremiah Home, m. d., a suc- cessful practitioner of medicine then in Fall River ; went to Fall River, commenced the study of that profes- sion in the office and under the in- struction of his uncle, and learned also the drug business in his uncle's drug store.
He remained with Dr. Home two years, and then, in 1845, returned home. He had fifteen dollars, made by a little traffic allowed him in the drug store of his uncle.
In the fall of that year, Mr. Loth- rop, with three hundred dollars loaned him by his father, with the knowledge and experience acquired in the drug store of his uncle at Fall River, opened such a store in Dover. He was but nineteen years of age. But years are not necessary to pluck and ability. From that simple beginning by a boy, and with that little borrowed capital, has grown a business rapidly approach- ing, and soon to surpass, a million of dollars annually.
Itwas the same year in which Morrill's brick block was finished. Mr. Loth- rop did not then know that this then elegant building would by-and-by come under his care. He opened his drug store in a little wooden building, a little north. The store in which is the Lothrop clothing house occupies almost exactly the same spot. It was one of a group of wooden buildings, which were afterwards to be pulled down to make place for the lofty and elegant Morrill's new block, which completes the whole distance on
�� �
