Horace Greeley House, Amherst, New Hampshire - Weathervane Wednesday

 This weathervane was photographed over the barn at the historic Horace Greeley house in Amhert, New Hampshire on Horace Greeley Road.  There is another Horace Greeley house in Chappaqua, New York, built in 1820, where he lived from 1864 until his death in 1872. 

Horace Greeley was born in this house in Amherst, New Hampshire on 3 February 1811.  He grew up on the farm and was apprenticed to a printer, where his interest in publishing and newspaper got its start.  In 1841 he started the Tribune in New York City, which was the highest circulating newspaper in the United States at the time.  Greeley is often credited for the quote "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country" but he probably did not originate this saying.  

The Greeley family was from Hudson, New Hampshire (originally from Haverhill, Massachusetts) and Horace's mother, Mary Woodburn, was born in Londonderry of Scots Irish ancestry (Woodburn, Clark, Taggart, Fulton).  Horace Greeley used to spend summers at his grandparents' home in Londonderry, and wrote about this in his autobiography.  (See below for a link to a blog post about this Londonderry/Nutfield connection) 

Greeley was a big supporter of President Lincoln, and of the north during the Civil War.  He wrote a letter to Lincoln proposing the abolition of slavery that was printed in the Tribune as "The Prayer of Twenty Millions".  In 1862 Greeley went to Canada under Lincoln's request to mediate a settlement of the war, but the meeting failed.  Greeley did not support Lincoln for nomination in 1864 until the fall of Atlanta, when he became a fervent supporter again. He was disillusioned by Andrew Johnson's reconstruction plans, and supported his removal when he was impeached in 1868.  

Greely ran for congress in 1866, but lost.  In 1867 he ran for Senate and lost again.  In 1868 he tried to run for New York governor, but lost again.  He ran for the House in 1870, and again was unsuccessful. In 1872 the Democrats nominated Greeley as a presidential candidate.  Greeley resigned from the Tribune, but his campaign was disrupted when his wife became ill that fall, and died on October 30th.  Greeley lost the election. 

Greeley went back to the Tribune, but found that the board wanted to remove him from the editorship.  He had a medical and nervous breakdown, and died on November 29th.  

This green New Hampshire state historic marker is located on Route 101, at the corner of Horace Greeley Road in Amherst, New Hampshire.  It's about a mile from the birthplace.  There is a Horace Greeley room of artifacts inside the Wigwam Museum operated by the Amherst Historical Society on the corner of Middle and Cross Streets.

For the truly curious:

2010 Blog Post "Horace Greeley Remembers Londonderry"    https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2010/03/horace-greeley-remembers-londonderry.html  

Recollections of a Busy Life, by Horace Greeley and Robert Dale Owen, Boston: H. A. Brown & Co., 1868.

The Life of Horace Greeley, Editor of the New York Tribune, by James Parton, New York: Mason Brothers, 1855.

The website for the Amherst Historical Society:  http://www.hsanh.org/  

To see 450 more weathervane blog posts inside and outside of New England, click on this link:

https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/search/label/Weathervane%20Wednesday  

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To Cite/Link to this blog post:  Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "Horace Greeley House, Amherst, New Hampshire - Weathervane Wednesday", Nutfield Genealogy, posted November 24, 2021, ( https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2021/11/horace-greeley-house-amherst-new.html: accessed [access date]).