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HAWES joined our Class at the beginning of its college life, in 1859, and was with us
three years, to the close of Junior year, 1862. He was forceful and masterly from the start
in our Class life. As we say of some men that they are born poets or orators, of Hawes it
is safe to say he was born a lawyer. He went to sea, but he couldn't escape his destiny.
Hence his advent to our Class. He left us to enter the army and to fight the battles of our
country as did his grandfather. His destiny was a panoply of safety round about him. So
he returned to college to finish his course with '64. But that is a minor incident. He is
through and through a '63 man. No one acquainted with his career while with us classifies
him anywhere else. His story, told below, proves this. How lonesome he must have been
during his last college year after we were all gone!
His loss to our Class, technical only he is our own brother born and bred; to '64
only a quarter brother was due to the disturbance caused to college men by the war. Our
Class suffered as much, perhaps, as any other class during the undergraduate years, if not
more. The same cause that drew away Hawes at the end of Junior year deprived us of
Halley, who also returned to graduate with '64, in the winter or early spring of our Senior
year, and, at earlier dates, took from us such good and strong men as Buxton,
Feary, Kinney, Newberry, Sill, Van Slyck, Wickes, and Myron Winslow. But for the war a majority
of these men, most likely, would have graduated with us.
Hawes, during his three years with us, was a member of the 'Logian Literary Society,
and was therein, as Hazlewood testifies, "a prince of disputation." He was one of the
orators in the Adelphic Union Debate, July, 1862, president of the Biennial Celebration,
member of the Greylock Baseball Club, and the leader of our Class in its football match
games with the Sophomores in 1859, and with the Freshmen in 1860. For the rest let our
classmate tell his own story, as he does most interestingly and amusingly in a letter to your
Historian.
CHICAGO, October 20, 1902.
MY DEAR DUDLEY: To your demand for a history of my life, with information
concerning the stock from which I sprang, I would respectfully make report.
I am the son of Preston and Fannie Hawes, my mother's name being Fannie Olds
before marriage. Of my grandfather on my mother's side I know little. He died many years
before I was born. Of my grandfather on my father's side I have a little knowledge. I learn
from the Revolutionary Records at Boston, that he was one of the Minute Men who made
old Major Pitcairn think it was not expedient to prolong his visit at Concord at the time he
went out to make that early morning call on John Hancock and Sam. Adams. I don't know
but he was the very man who "Fired the shot heard round the world." Probably not, as he
was a blacksmith, I am told, and Emerson says that the shot was fired by "embattled
farmers." The old gentleman, however, undoubtedly took several squints at those redcoats
"Under the trees at the turn of the road,
Only pausing to fire and load."
He served two or three years in the army, according to the record, and I assume did his
work well. My father was a steady, Calvinistic, church-going New England farmer, and I
first saw the light in Brookfield, Massachusetts. My father died when I was ten years of age,
and at fourteen I took to the sea for a number of years. Then turning landsman, I went to
Monson Academy, and after a year or so at that institution made up my mind to fit for
college, which I did, entering Williams with you and the other good fellows in the fall of
1859.
My first really brilliant achievement after entering college was the upsetting of one
of my own classmates, supposing him to be a Sophomore. It was at the time the Sophomores tried to break up our Class meeting in Kellogg Hall, the second or third day
in college. You remember it, I dare say. Doug was doing valiant work in the hallway,
where we had joined issues, and supposing him to be a Sophomore, and not able to get at
him well there, I pulled him out of the hall and ran him backwards over the benches in the
classroom. Some one cried out that he was one of our own men, and I at once apologized
for the accident, of course, and went back onto the main battle ground in the hall, where
I tried to make amends for the mistake I had made. Those Sophomores, in making war on
our Class, discovered that they had run up against something very like a buzz saw, and
thereafter entertained for us a wholesome respect.
You refer in your personal letter to our football games down on the banks of the
Hoosac River. Well, we had all learned who was who at the time we had that brush with
the Sophomores, and there were no more mistakes made of the kind I just referred to. And
what a kicking match that was! It was a battle royal; express clear through. We had no
occasion for umpires or referees. There were no "touchdowns," "half-backs," "quarter-backs," "full stops," or any stops at all, after the ball was first kicked off, until it
was driven beyond the Sophomore line. The whole Class went in with a rush and was met
by the whole force of the Sophomores, some eighty men, if I remember correctly. No one
wore trousers made out of a hair mattress or quilted comforter on that field. That first
game with '62 lasted over an hour, desperate work, and when I came out at the end I still
had my trousers, a pair of boots, and a small piece of shirt around my neck. I remember
that a number of our Class needed the services of a tailor badly. The second time around,
you remember, was not much of a game. The enemy had lost heart, and we had it very
much our own way. And how we did shout and cheer! Our contest with the next Freshman
class, when we were Sophomores, was not much of a battle. We easily disposed of them.
When I recall these college contests I almost wish I could try them over again, in spite of
a little lameness in the back, a little rheumatism in the ankle, and a little shortness of breath
when I chase a grip car. I enjoyed college life, in spite of Greek prose and one or two other
minor annoyances, and though I am now past meridian and getting along towards sundown,
I feel as young as ever, and in thus calling up memories of the past my "spirit rises to the
occasion," and I am almost sure that I could again do good work on the ball ground and not
come out lower than second best in a wrestling match on the college campus. I did not
graduate in '63, but left at the end of my Junior year for the army, graduating later with
another class. Having spent three years with '63, however, I feel as though I belong to that
Class.
My life since graduating has been rather a quiet one, and I have not accomplished
very much. After graduation at Williams I studied law one year in Worcester, Massachusetts, and then came to Chicago. Served two years as a clerk in a law office, and
then formed a partnership with an old practitioner who wanted some one to attend to court
business, and from that time on had money enough to pay all laundry bills and did not
tremble any longer at the sight of the tailor or boarding mistress. In the spring of 1871
formed a partnership with an old classmate in the academy, bought out the business and
library of an attorney who was retiring from the profession, married Miss Helen E. Dunham,
went off on my wedding trip, and returned just in time to see my office, all the business
portion of the city and a large part of the residence portion as well, destroyed by the great
fire of October 9, 1871. A fine outlook for a young man! I was in one respect the most
fortunate attorney in the city, however, for I saved my newly purchased library of about two
thousand volumes by piling the books into a large brick vault that extended up through my
suite of rooms from the bank below the only law library that was saved entire in the city.
After the fire rented some rooms in another part of the city, and continued in the practice
of law until 1880, when I thought it would be a good thing to hold a judicial office, and was
elected judge of our superior court. This office I held twelve years, during two of which I
was chief justice of the court. By the death of my father-in-law it became necessary for me
to take charge of his estate, and during the last eight or ten years I have been devoting
myself to the care of the same, trying to get money enough to pay taxes and assessments and
keep out of the poorhouse, and in this laudable work I am still busily engaged.
As to your inquiries concerning my connection with clubs, churches, etc., I have been
a member of the Second Presbyterian Church for some thirty years; have never held an
office therein. I never had much use for clubs or other social organizations. Have been a
member of the Union League Club of Chicago fifteen or twenty years. Am president of Les
Cheneaux Club, a summer resort on Marquette Island, at the head of Lake Huron, where
I spend my summers with my family. Am a director and was president for nine years of the
Grand Army Hall and Memorial Association of this State, and have been secretary and
treasurer of several commercial organizations. Have written and published three or four
pamphlets on various subjects, such as currency, taxation, public improvements by special
assessments, etc., but no books. I don't think this generation will be much wiser or better
by reason of any of my publications. I have four children one boy, who is a graduate of
Yale, and three girls, Florence and Lavanche, graduates of Byrn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and Fannie, at school in Boston, Massachusetts. I now have good health, and
get as much enjoyment out of life, on the whole, as can be expected under the circumstances. I have not accomplished very much in life, to be sure, but I am not fretting
because I have not. I believe I have done the best I could under all the circumstances, and
am not worrying very much about the future. I have never wrongfully shut the sunlight out
of any man's path or unjustly deprived him of his property, so far as I can now recall. I am
Republican in national politics, and for the best man in local, without regard to his brand
of politics or the ownership stamped on his collar. I believe in the goodness of God, but
not very much in the badness of my fellowmen, and am not as firm a believer, as when we
sat together in the College Chapel at Williams, in the old doctrine of eternal punishment
of the character, for instance, handed down from his pulpit to the good people of Hartford
fifty years ago by my old uncle, Dr. Joel Hawes. I don't look at this world as an old
water-logged hulk on which we must be constantly working the pumps and preparing rafts
with which to escape into heaven. I rather like this world, and am ready to admit that I
have been treated reasonably well thus far.
And now, my dear Dudley, having answered all your interrogatories and told you
what I think about things in general, I throw myself upon the mercy of the court and ask
for as light a sentence as possible.
From your old friend and classmate,
KIRK HAWES.
Source:
Class of Sixty-Three Williams College Fortieth Year Report, by
the Class Historian, Thomas Todd Printer, Boston, 1903
Related:
Hawes
Surname Genealogy Resources
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