Early Years
Gail Borden, Jr. was born in Norwich, New York on 9 November 1801 to Gail Borden, a pioneer and landowner, and Philadelphia Wheeler. The details of his childhood are unclear but he did move twice with his family while growing up, first to Kennedy’s Ferry, Kentucky, which became Covington in 1814, and then, in 1816, to New London, Indiana. It was in Indiana where Borden received his only formal schooling, attending school during 1816 and 1817 learning the art of surveying. In 1822 Borden set out with his brother, Thomas. They originally intended to move to New Orleans but instead, somehow ended up in Amite County, Mississippi. Borden stayed in Mississippi for seven years, working as the county surveyor and as a schoolteacher in Bates and Zion Hill. He was well known around town for running rather than walking to school every morning. While living in Mississippi, Borden met his first wife, Penelope Mercer, whom he married in 1828. The couple had five children during their sixteen-year marriage. Borden left Mississippi in 1829 and moved to Texas after his brother and father. As a surveyor, he plotted the towns of Houston and Galveston, and was also involved with creating the first topographical map of Texas in 1835.
Read more about this topic: Gail Borden
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“Parents ... are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfil the promise of their early years.”
—Anthony Powell (b. 1905)
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a “winged cat” in one of the farmhouses.... This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poet’s cat be winged as well as his horse?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)