Life
He was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the son of a prominent lawyer David Watts, and the grandson of a Brigadier General in the American Revolution, also named Frederick Watts. The young Frederick entered Dickinson College in Carlisle in 1815, but did not graduate because of the temporary closing of the school.
He practiced law and held positions in the local courts starting in the 1820s. In 1849 he was appointed as president judge of Pennsylvania’s Ninth Judicial District Court.
In 1827 Watts married Eliza Cranston, who bore three daughters before her death in 1832. In 1835 he married Henrietta Ege in 1835, who bore five sons and one daughter. He was a Whig and a member of St. John's Episcopal Church in Carlisle. He organized the Carlisle Gas and Water Company in 1854, and served as a member of the Dickinson College Board of Trustees (1828-1833, 1841-1844).
In 1838, he and a partner bought the Pine Grove Iron Works on South Mountain near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
In 1840, with the help of Cyrus McCormick he demonstrated the operation of McCormick’s reaper for the first time in Pennsylvania.
In 1851 he was elected the first President of the Pennsylvania Agricultural Society.
He lobbied for the passage of the Morrill Act, which became law in 1862 and founded land-grant universities.
Read more about this topic: Frederick Watts
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be a hand, not a mouth; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (18151902)
“Oh! what a poor thing is human life in its best enjoyments!subjected to imaginary evils when it has no real ones to disturb it! and that can be made as effectually unhappy by its apprehensions of remote contingencies as if it was struggling with the pains of a present distress!”
—Samuel Richardson (16891761)
“San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilledor would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? Did we anticipate the ways in which, vivid and continuous, they would unsuit us for the business of daily life? Or should our notion of daily life itself be transformed?”
—Edmund White (b. 1940)