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 and/or education:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“My dream of politics all my life has been that it is the common business, that it is something we owe to each other to understand and ... discuss with absolute frankness.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)