Civic Activities and Family Life
On June 6, 1865, Cheney married Elizabeth Stickney Clapp, daughter of Asahel and Elizabeth Searle (Whiting) Clapp of Dorchester, Massachusetts. The Cheneys had a son, Benjamin Pierce Cheney, Jr., and three daughters, Alice Steele, Mary and Elizabeth.
Cheney was a member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. He donated $50,000 to Dartmouth College, and in 1886 he presented a bronze statue by Thomas Ball of his friend Daniel Webster to the people of New Hampshire; today it is located in front of the New Hampshire State House. He also helped develop the eastern part of Washington state with a railroad line. As a result, Cheney, Washington, is named in his honor, and with a $10,000 grant he helped establish a school there in 1882 that evolved into Eastern Washington University.
Cheney was also one of the most generous supporters of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, after becoming a member in 1864. His property in Wellesley, Massachusetts is now protected as Elm Bank Reservation.
Read more about this topic: Benjamin Pierce Cheney
Famous quotes containing the words family life, civic, activities, family and/or life:
“Family life is not a computer program that runs on its own; it needs continual input from everyone.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable tentacular oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“Juggling produces both practical and psychological benefits.... A woman’s involvement in one role can enhance her functioning in another. Being a wife can make it easier to work outside the home. Being a mother can facilitate the activities and foster the skills of the efficient wife or of the effective worker. And employment outside the home can contribute in substantial, practical ways to how one works within the home, as a spouse and as a parent.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)
“A family on the throne is an interesting idea.... It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“Why is light given to one in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death, but it does not come, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures; who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they find the grave?”
—Bible: Hebrew, Job 3:20-22.