DEXTER A. HAWKINS, AND PUBLIC SERVICE IN UNOFFICIAL WAYS. MEMOIR. DEXTER A. HAWKINS, who, in the midst of a lucrative practice as a lawyer in New York City, has found time and energy to do a large work in the field of popular education and political reform, is a native of Canton, Maine. His progenitor, on the father's side, was Admiral Sir John Hawkins. His grandfather, Dexter Hawkins, of Providence, R. I., in 1777, at sixteen, volunteered in the 4th Bat. R. I. Troops, and served during the Revolutionary war. His father, the late Rev. Henry Hawkins, of Norway, Maine, was, in 1806, sent from Providence at the age of nineteen as missionary preacher to the then province of Maine; he was for sixty years an effective advocate of public education, and a vigorous champion of the abolition and the temperance causes when in their infancy. His mother, Nabby Fuller, was of New England Revolutionary stock, her father, John Fuller, being one of the famous crew of the Bon Homme Richard, when Admiral John Paul Jones captured the British frigate, Serapis, off Flamborough Head, in a contest that raged with almost demoniac fury till near midnight of the 23rd of September, 1779. He was afterwards taken prisoner, but escaped from the British manof-war by leaping overboard in the night, and swimming two miles to the shore. The subject of this memoir was born June 24, 1825, and to the advantages of an ordinary district school, had the instructions of his father. At the age of sixteen, as civil engineer, he surveyed and laid out, to the satisfaction of the Court, in midwinter, a public road and expensive bridge, respecting which there was litigation between two adjacent counties. In 1842 he became teacher of mathematics in the Academy at Bethel, and subsequently at Bridgeton, where he completed, under Moses Soule, his preparation for college. He entered Bowdoin College in 1844, and graduated with honor in 1848-meeting the entire expense of his college education by teaching school and attending to business in the long winter vacations. In the fall of 1848 he was employed by Maine State Board of Education to lecture at the Teachers' Institutes; and in that and the three subsequent years |