Origins in Civil War Prison Camp
Robert Hanneman Avery (16 January 1840, Galesburg, Illinois - 13 September 1892, Peoria, Illinois) was heavily influenced during his childhood by his great-uncle Riley Root, who invented a rotary fan blower to clear railroad tracks of snow. Robert attended the Knox College and after finishing school, worked part time at the Brown Manufacturing Company, who built a line of corn planters.
After graduating from college, Robert Avery taught school before enlisting in 1862 as a Union Soldier in the American Civil War, in Company A, 77th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Robert was captured in 1864 and spent a number of months in various prisoner-of-war camps, before being sent to the now infamous Confederate Andersonville Prison for about eight months. There he passed the time devising an improved seed drill by sketching a design in the sand.
After the war he worked on a 160-acre (0.65 km2) farm his brother John had bought for the two of them. Robert continued to work on several inventions, and during the winters when the farm was idle, he worked in a Galesburg, Illinois machine shop. He used that money and the experience to design and develop patterns and castings for a riding cultivator.
Read more about this topic: Avery Company
Famous quotes containing the words origins in, origins, civil, war, prison and/or camp:
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“... one of the blind spots of most Negroes is their failure to realize that small overtures from whites have a large significance ... I now realize that this feeling inevitably takes possession of one in the bitter struggle for equality. Indeed, I share it. Yet I wonder how we can expect total acceptance to step full grown from the womb of prejudice, with no embryo or infancy or childhood stages.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
“That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Whensoever any affliction assails me, me thinks I have the keyes of my prison in mine owne hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword. Often meditation of this hath wonne me to a charitable interpretation of their action, who dy so: and provoked me a little to watch and exagitate their reasons, which pronounce so peremptory judgements upon them.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)
“Usually the scenery about them is drear and savage enough; and the logger’s camp is as completely in the woods as a fungus at the foot of a pine in a swamp; no outlook but to the sky overhead; no more clearing than is made by cutting down the trees of which it is built, and those which are necessary for fuel.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)