Biography
After his graduation he lived in New York and Philadelphia for a time, as a merchant. For several years he was in Ohio and Indiana as an engineer. In 1843, he published Historical Collections of the State of Pennsylvania. He came to California in 1849, and engaged in civil and mining engineering at San Jose, New Almaden, Folsom and Oakland.
In 1855 he made for the state a survey of wagon-road routes across the Sierra Nevada; California State Senate, 1855-56; United States Surveyor General, California, 1868-71; original trustees, University of California, Professor, Mine Construction and Surveying.
Sherman Day's Historical Collections of Pennsylvania is considered one of the most important documentations of early histories of Pennsylvania, mostly because it included individual histories for all the counties within the Keystone State. As well, it contained a series of wonderful images (produced by Sherman as well) of all parts of the Keystone State.
- "We are more familiar with the history of England, Rome or Greece' and with the career of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon than with the events that have occurred in our own vicinity. Yes, even in the very fields that we ourselves are tilling."
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Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)