Biographical.
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the first President of Radcliffe College and its constant benefactress, is destined, through the scholarship that bears her name and the hall which is to be erected in her honor on the college grounds, to be held in grateful, lasting remembrance as a pioneer advocate and promoter in the nineteenth century of the higher education of women. In former years, as the wife and helpmeet of a naturalist of world-wide reputation, and later as the editor of his Life and Correspondence, she was well known in literary and scientific circles. Her subsequent work as an educational leader brought her name more directly before the public; and the celebration in December, 1902, in Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, of the eightieth anniversary of her birth was widely reported in the papers as an occasion of general interest.
Born in Boston, December 5, 1822, daughter of Thomas Graves and Mary (Perkins) Cary, she comes of long lines of New England ancestry, and personally bears witness to gentle blood and breeding. Her father, Thomas Graves Cary, A.M. (Harv. Coll. 1811), was son of Samuel5 and Sarah (Gray) Cary and grandson of Samuel4 and Margaret (Graves) Cary, all of Chelsea, Mass. His grandfather, Samuel4 Cary, was descended from James1 Cary, of Charlestown, through Jonathan2 and Samuel.3 James1 Cary came from England and settled in Charlestown in 1639. He was the seventh son of William Cary, who was Mayor of the city of Bristol, England, in 1611.
Samuel Cary, A.M., born in 1713, was graduated at Harvard College in 1731. He became a sea-captain, making long voyages. He married in 1741 Margaret Graves, daughter of Thomas3 Graves, of Charlestown (Harv. Coll. 1703), Judge of the Superior Court; grand-daughter of Dr. Thomas2 Graves (Harv. Coll. 1656); and great-grand-daughter of Thomas1 Graves, who settled in Gharlestown about 1637, was master of various vessels, and at the time of his death, in 1653, was a Rear-Admiral in the English navy.
Mary Perkins, wife of Thomas G. Cary and mother of Elizabeth, was a daughter of Colonel Thomas Handasyd Perkins, merchant and philanthropist of Boston (born 1764, died 1854), who in 1833 gave his estate on Pearl Street to be the seat of the school for the blind taught by Dr. Samuel G. Howe. This act of public-spirited generosity is commemorated in the name which the school—now in South Boston, marvellously increased in size and equipment—bears to this day, "The Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind." Colonel Perkins was also a liberal contributor to the funds of the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Mercantile Library Association, and the Boston Athenæum, and a helper of many other worthy causes. One of his sisters was the wife of Benjamin Abbot, LL.D., for fifty years principal of Phillips Exeter Academy; another, Margaret, wife of Ralph Bennett Forbes and mother of the late Hon. John Murray Forbes, of Milton. They were children of James and Elizabeth (Peck) Perkins, and doubtless inherited some of their sterling traits of character from their mother, who, early left a widow, showed herself a woman of "great capacity in business matters" and a friend to the needy. Colonel Perkins was named for his maternal grandfather, Thomas Handasyd Peck. His paternal grandparents were Edmund and
