BENJAMIN PIERCE CHENEY. "Honor and shame from no condition rise; BENJAMIN PIERCE CHENEY, to whose munificence his native state of New Hampshire is indebted for the possession of a statue of Daniel Webster, equal if not superior as a work of art to any similar memorial of her great statesman, traces his lineage back to Tristram Cheney, who was born in Roxbury, Mass., in 1720, and who after several removals finally died at Barnet, Vt., in 1815, at the age of ninety-five years. The subject of this sketch was the eldest of eight children, and was born August 12, 1815, in the town of Hillsborough, N. H. His father, Jesse Cheney, was by trade and occupation a blacksmith, and became embarrassed in his circumstances as the result of being surety for a neighbor on an official bond. The maiden name of his mother was Alice Steele. His parents were married November 25, 1813. His father was born in the town of Antrim, N. H., October 3, 1788, and died in the city of Manchester, N. H., June 22, 1863. His mother was born in Antrim, N. H., August 12, 1791, and died at Manchester, July 28, 1849. Mr. Cheney was named in honor of his father's neighbor, Gov. Benjamin Pierce, father of President Franklin Pierce. The early part of the current century was a primitive period in the history of the Granite State. New Hampshire was then almost purely an agricultural community. The railroad was not, nor the electric telegraph. The cotton mill was unknown in her borders. The state was largely a rural district, but her inland towns were as a whole quite as populous then as now. Gov. Pierce presented his young namesake with three cosset sheep for his name. Such a gift was specially appropriate in a pastoral community. The embarrassed circumstances of his father made it necessary for the boy to exert himself for his own and the family's support. At the early age of ten years he was employed in his father's shop; then in a tavern in Francestown, N. H.; and later in a store in the same town. But indoor life proving destructive to his health, he purchased his time from his father, and commencing at the age of sixteen he drove the stage from Keene to Nashua and Exeter, driving fifty miles a day without the loss of a trip for six consecutive years. Among the passengers in his stage-coach was Daniel Webster, who saw in Mr. Cheney "the promise and potency" of the highly successful, energetic, and public-spirited business man and citizen which he ultimately became. Mr. Webster took so much interest in young Cheney that upon his going into the express business he wrote out and presented to him, in his own handwriting, the laws relating to common carriers. Mr. Cheney always held his illustrious friend in grateful remembrance, and finally deter mined to give to his native state a statue of him, which purpose and intention were so happily fulfilled on the seventeenth day of June of the current year (1886). While Mr. Cheney was engaged as a stage-driver the Boston & Lowell Railroad was opened. This was one of the initial railroads, and helped to inaugurate the railroad system of the country. In 1842 railroads were extended to Concord, N. H. Then it was that Mr. Cheney embarked upon this recently opened railroad line in the express business, of which he was the principal pioneer and founder, and which under his direction and management has been expanded from a merely local into a continental business. The various express companies inaugurated and managed by Mr. Cheney, commencing with the local express between Boston and Concord, N. H., and subsequently extending over this route to Canada and the West, have now been consolidated with the American Express Company, of which Mr. Cheney is still one of the executive officers. It is in connection with these enterprises that his name is most familiar to the business men of New England, but he has been specially prominent throughout the country in the inauguration and management of the Overland Mail, Wells & Fargo's Express, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, Northern Pacific, Mexican Central, and Vermont Central railroads, and he is to-day a director in nearly all of these corporations, as well as of the Northern (N. H.) Railroad. Mr. Cheney's career embraces the commencement and development of the railroad system in this country. It extends back to the days of the old stage-coach and the freight wagon. During his active life the California gold mines were discovered, and the electric telegraph was invented. He has been connected with and taken advantage of many of the wonderful improvements which characterize the world of to-day. He has lived in an age of wonderful opportunities, and has availed himself of them. Beside his gift of the Webster statue and of fifty thousand dollars to Dartmouth College, he has manifested in many ways privately a beneficence even more honorable to him as a man than any instances of his public munificence. Mr. Cheney was married June 6, 1865, to Elizabeth S., daughter of Asahel Clapp, a former well-known merchant of Concord, N. H. Three daughters and two sons are the fruits of this marriage. Mr. Cheney has a large and elegant farm in Wellesley, Mass., where he and his devoted wife make their happy summer home specially attractive in dispensing a free and constant hospitality. His private and public acts of liberality have endeared him to hosts of friends, and no man, either in his native state or the state of his adoption, can boast of more general rejoicing at his prosperity, or a more sincere desire that a long and happy life may be vouchsafed to him. |