Seventy Years Of The Worcester Polytechnic Institute: Page 79

positions in the city government. He served for two years, being succeeded in 1882 by Elijah B. Stoddard, graduate of Brown, lawyer, one-time district attorney and member of the Governor's Council.

Rev. Hiram K. Pervear resigned his Worcester pastorate to go to Cambridge in 1873. His successor in the First Baptist church, and on the Institute board, was Rev. Dr. Benjamin D. Marshall, graduate of Rochester Theological School, a vigorous man of forty-seven. In the succeeding fifteen years he contributed much to the good of the Institute.

The board lost another of its pioneer members when D. Waldo Lincoln, who had so actively advanced the building project, resigned in 1876. Elected to fill the vacancy, in 1877, was P. Emory Aldrich. judge Aldrich had been prominent in the legal profession and in the politics of Worcester County for many years. He was mayor of Worcester in 1862, one Of the most difficult of the war years. He served in the State Legislature for two years, and in 1873, was appointed justice of the Superior Court, a position which he held until his death.

The most profound sorrow experienced by the Institute was the loss of its revered co-founder, Seth Sweetser, who died March 24, 1878. About seven years before, Dr. Sweetser had sustained an injury to the spine, which had become increasingly troublesome. He was forced to give up his active pastorate, and for nearly six months prior to his death had been confined to bed. The entire city mourned his passing, and there were many to testify to his kindly and constructive acts. At a special meeting of the trustees, resolutions were adopted, a paragraph of which records the esteem in which he was held.

In the death of Dr. Sweetser the Institute loses a friend, to whose rare wisdom and thorough knowledge of the educational needs of the hour it owes, more than to any other source, the character which it assumed at the outset, and the exact methods and aims which it has pursued; a friend to whose sagacious counsels it has been indebted hour by hour for its steady progress in the path which it has chosen, and whose watchful care it has felt through the whole period of its existence.

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Last Modified: Fri Jul 30 11:15:25 EDT 1999