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CHARLES PHELPS NOYES

In the death of Charles Phelps Noyes on April 30, 1921, the Minnesota Historical Society lost a former president and one of the most valuable members of its executive committee and the community lost a very useful citizen. A sketch of his life cannot fail to be of interest, for his career was in many ways typical of a large number of men who, after the pioneer period in Minnesota history, came from the East, and more particularly from New England, and by their lives and activities did much to transform a frontier commonwealth into the present fully developed American state.

Mr. Noyes was born on April 24, 1842, at Lyme, Connecticut, and came of the soundest New England stock. His emigrant ancestor, the Reverend James Noyes (1608-56), son of the Reverend William Noyes of University College, Oxford, later rector of Cholderton, Wiltshire, England, was matriculated at Brazenose College, Oxford, but did not graduate. Later he emigrated to New England because he could not comply with the ceremonies of the Church of England. Accompanied by his wife, he took passage on the "Mary and John" and arrived in Boston in 1634. Shortly afterwards he settled at Newbury, Massachusetts, as pastor. Here he resided for the remainder of his life. He was an active member of his order, which at that time contained the educated and ruling members of the community. He was " dearly loved" by the Reverend John Wilson of Boston, the opponent of Anne Hutchinson, and he published various religious pamphlets, such as A Catechism for Children, The Temple Measured, and Moses and Aaron. His son, the Reverend James Noyes (1640–1719), also was a man of prominence. He graduated from Harvard College in 1659 and then became pastor at Stonington, Connecticut, for the remaining fifty-five years of his life. He took a leading part in the founding of Yale College, his name ap

pearing first in the list of ministers who founded the college and who became its first trustees.

The intermediate ancestors of Mr. Noyes were farmers about Stonington. They held militia commissions and fought in the various Indian wars. His grandfather, Thomas Noyes, served as lieutenant in the Trenton and Princeton campaign in the Revolution. Later he was for years president of the bank at Westerly, Rhode Island, which then was a position of much dignity. He served the last twenty years of his life, first as deputy, and then as senator, in the Rhode Island legislature, and he was also a member of the famous Hartford Convention. Among the prominent ancestors of Mr. Noyes were the famous Anne Hutchinson of Boston, Governors Coddington and Sanford of Rhode Island, and Deputy Governor Willoughby of Massachusetts. The others lived mainly in Rhode Island where they had located on account of sympathy with the opinions of Anne Hutchinson, who had been driven out of Massachusetts.

Mr. Noyes himself was deeply interested in and rightly proud of his ancestors, and one cannot help believing that their worthy example deeply influenced his conduct through life. He spent much time in tracing the various branches of his family, and in 1907 he published the results of his labors in a finely illustrated and most interesting book, the Noyes-Gilman Ancestry, on which the foregoing sketch has been based and to which the reader is directed for a fuller account of the Noyes family.

In this volume too is preserved a most interesting picture of the home at Lyme in which Mr. Noyes grew up and which seems to have been of the best New England type. His father, Daniel Rogers Noyes (1793-1877), after some wanderings finally settled in Lyme in 1820 and opened a general store. The business was never satisfactory, owing to the limited possibilities of so small a place. Soon after settling in Lyme, in 1827, he married Phoebe Griffin Lord and bought an old house

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next to the village church, the congregation of which they both joined during a revival in 1831. Later he led in the singing, and became superintendent of the Sunday school and a deacon; his home was a stopping-place for all ministers, missionaries, and lecturers who passed through the town. His wife was a remarkable woman. She had spent much of her girlhood in New York where she had studied French and taken up miniature painting. The charming frontispiece in the Noyes-Gilman Ancestry is a reproduction of a painting which she made of her children. With her wider experience she was able to make her new home in Lyme a center of social life for the young people. She was fond of tableaux, charades, rhyming games, even of dancing, which at that period was not at all approved, and was the intellectual leader of the village.

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It was in such a home that Mr. Noyes, the youngest of seven children, was brought up. "Our Sundays," he wrote in later years, were strictly observed, though not made an unpleasant memory by too rigid rules. There was never the question, 'Who is going to church?' matter of course that all would go. After morning service my aunts and other friends came to our house, were given homemade currant wine and cake or other refreshments, and spent a little time talking over family affairs. After the afternoon service, we had family prayers, reading and prayer, and then singing for an hour or more. Usually after singing, if it was pleasant father took us for a walk to the buryingground. Sometimes before the lights were lit, mother had us recite the Shorter Catechism. She knew it by heart, questions as well as answers, and never needed to refer to the text." At that time Sunday in New England began at six o'clock on Saturday evening; and Mr. Noyes used to tell with some amusement how the boys in the boarding-school he afterwards attended kept either Saturday or Sunday evening, according to their invitations, and often got in arrears and were obliged to keep them both for a week or two.

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As a boy Mr. Noyes attended the village school. When he was fifteen he left Lyme to take a temporary job on some United States Army work at Springfield, Massachusetts. When this work was completed he attended the Springfield High School, but after one winter he returned to Lyme to attend school and to work on his father's books. In the fall of 1858 he went to Williston Seminary, Easthampton, Massachusetts, to prepare for Yale. Among the students at this time there was a craze for chess, in which he joined. But what was of more importance was the beginning of his coin and autograph collections, in which he took great interest throughout his life. The former was started largely through the interest of Professor Hitchcock, who gave him a general letter of introduction, which enabled him at odd times to examine the kegs of old copper coins of the neighboring tollgate keepers. It was in this way that he obtained his very complete collection of old United States copper cents and other minor coins. This entire collection with his later accumulations has now come by the gift of Mrs. Noyes, made in accordance with her husband's original wish, into the permanent possession of the Minnesota Historical Society.

Pecuniary considerations forced Mr. Noyes to leave Williston Seminary in the spring of 1860, and, though he spent some time studying French in a French family, he was finally forced to give up any idea of going to Yale. Accordingly in the fall of 1860, at the age of eighteen, Mr. Noyes became a bookkeeper with Gilman, Son, and Company, a banking house in New York, at an annual salary of $150. During the course of the following year this salary was raised by gradual steps to $400 a year, but with all his New England thrift his year's expenses amounted to $444.17; and, notwithstanding an offer of $800 a year if he would remain, he accepted a loan of $1,000 from his elder brother to buy a part interest in his father's business at Lyme, to which town he returned.

Though pecuniarly unremunerative, his work at bookkeeping had by no means been a failure. He received during this

period valuable training that was to stand him in good stead throughout a long business career. Here he acquired a thorough knowledge of bookkeeping in its various branches. He always wrote a very handsome and perfectly legible hand, and his figures were clear. He would not tolerate slovenly work in others, and he carried through life an accountant's idea of the importance of a proper attention to detail in all practical undertakings.

During his life in New York, Mr. Noyes joined the City Cadets, afterward called the Union Greys, which later became Company G of the Twenty-second New York Volunteer Infantry. In June, 1863, when Lee invaded Pennsylvania, this regiment was called out for the protection of Harrisburg. Mr. Noyes joined his company there, but after thirty days the regiment was recalled on account of the draft riots in New York. For this military service Mr. Noyes records that he received eleven dollars and one cent.

Shortly after his return to Lyme, in the fall of 1863, Mr. Noyes sold his interest in his father's general store and went west as far as Dubuque, Iowa, in search of a location where he might open a dry goods store, choosing this line because his brother-in-law was a wholesale dry goods merchant in New York. Finally he leased a store in Saginaw, Michigan, but almost immediately gave it up and removed to Port Huron, Michigan, where early in 1864 he opened a general merchandise store under the name of C. P. Noyes and Company.

Mr. Noyes remained in Port Huron for four years. This was the time of the oil craze, and Michigan as well as other regions had hopes. Consequently, Mr. Noyes, for himself as well as for Eastern friends, devoted some of his time to investigation of oil prospects of which nothing came. Finally he wound up the Port Huron business, intending to accept an offer to buy a third interest in an established wholesale grocery business in Detroit, Michigan. But his older brother, Daniel R. Noyes, had already moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, and had acquired control of Vawter, Pett, and Moulton, a small whole

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