Nathan Francis Mossell - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Nathan Mossell was born in Hamilton, Canada in 1856, the fourth of six children. Both his parents, Eliza Bowers (1824 – ?) and Aaron Albert Mossell I (1824 – ?), were descended from freed slaves. According to Mossell's autobiography, his mother's stories of the discrimination and hardship their families faced strengthened her own children's determination to succeed. Mossell's maternal grandfather had resisted all attempts by his owner to make him work and was eventually freed. He married and settled in Baltimore, but the entire family, including Mossell's mother, who was a child at the time, were deported to Trinidad. Mossell's paternal grandfather, who had been transported from the coast of West Africa, managed to buy his freedom and that of his wife. He too settled in Baltimore, where Mossell's father was born.

Nathan Mossell's parents met and married in Baltimore after his mother's family returne from Trinidad. His father learned the brickmaking trade and saved enough money to buy a house. After the birth of their third child, the couple decided to move to Canada, as their children could not receive an education in Maryland. They sold their house in Baltimore and settled in Hamilton, Ontario, where his father bought a tract of clay-bearing land and set up his own brickworks.

Nathan's siblings were the following::

• May (1848 - ?) born in Maryland.
• Charles (1850 - ) born in Maryland. He graduated from Lincoln University and studied theology in Boston, later becoming a missionary in Haiti.
• Boy, (c. 1853 – c. 1870), born in Maryland and died in Lockport, New York.
• Alvarilla (b. 1857 – ?), born in Hamilton, Canada. She worked with her brother Charles as a missionary in Haiti.
• Aaron Albert Mossell II (1863–1951) born in Hamilton, Canada. He was the first African American to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania law school. He married Louisa Tanner (1866 – ?). In 1921 their daughter Sadie Tanner Mossell (1898–1989) became the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in the United States.

During the Civil War, the family moved back to the United States, settling in Lockport, New York, where Mossell's father again wned his own brickmaking business. Along with his siblings, Mosell attended the local public school in Lockport, but his schooling became erratic once he started working part time at age nine for his father. He eventually joined his elder brother Charles at Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania, where he studied Natural Science, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1879.