Early Life and Education
Stevens was born in St. Albans, Vermont to a family with deep ties to the state. His great-grandfather Stephen Fairchild had fought with the Vermont Milita during the American Revolutionary War. His father, also Hiram Fairchild Stevens, was a well-regarded doctor who had served as a state legislator and president of the Vermont State Medical Society. When the elder Stevens died prematurely from an illness contracted during his service with the Union Army in the U.S. Civil War, the family's loss of income forced the son to work to support his mother and three siblings. Despite the hardship, Stevens eventually graduated from the University of Vermont in 1872, and then Columbia Law School in 1874. During that time he also read law with former Judge John K. Porter of the New York Court of Appeals in the offices of Porter, Lowrey, Soren and Stone.
Read more about this topic: Hiram F. Stevens
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers’ hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day’s demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)