Because it’s the 300th anniversary of our church, I’m in the process of researching interesting people from the church’s past. It’s easy to track down past ministers, but after a while they all blur together. So I’ve been trying to identify members and friends of the church who led interesting lives.
Today I turned up Captain Edward Merrill, “an attendant” at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. He was born in Durham, Maine, in 1800, and his family moved to Portland when he was two. He ran away to sea when he was eleven years old. He didn’t return home until more than twenty-five years had gone by, and he had become a ship’s master. I haven’t found out much about his sailing career, and perhaps there is very little extant documentation. I don’t even know what kinds of ships he sailed on — whaling ships? merchant ships? — I just don’t know. He married Mary Converse of Durham in 1825, and they had six children together.
After he retired from the sea to live here in New Bedford, Merrill became an inventor, developer, and manufacturer. He was a partner in a business that refined oil and manufactured candles from whale oil, and at one point he and some others got a contract to supply whale oil for U.S. lighthouses, a contract which resulted in litigation. On March 28, 1838, he was awarded U. S. Patent number 626 for his design for a “hydrostatic press.” This press was “a new and Improved Mode of Pressing Oil by the Help of the Common Hydrostatic Cylinder and Piston.” What exactly was the improvment that he claimed? — “The advantages that my presses possess over any others are that they cost only about one-half as much as the hydrostatic presses now in use inasmuch as it requires about four thousand pounds less iron to make one and obviates the necessity of more than one pump for several presses and takes up less room and answers a better purpose.” The patent is online courtesy the U. S. Patent Office here.
He built the 826-foot-long Merrill’s Wharf between 1841 and 1849, and then erected a three-and-a-half story stone counting house at the head of the wharf. He also built Coal Pocket Pier. These structures still stand today, and are part of the Merrill’s Wharf Historic District — you can find pictures and more info here.
Beyond his business interests, even though he had little formal education he seems to have been a man of some learning and cultivation. He was known as a “wide and careful reader.” He was a painter of some minor talent. You can see one of his paintings, which depicts a gorge in Mexico, here — I imagine that he must have seen the actual gorge on one of his sea voyages. Later in life, he purchased Nasahwena Island, one of the Elizabeth Islands lying southwest of New Bedford across Buzzard’s Bay. He went off to the island with friends and reportedly “indulged his love of nature.” When he died in 1884, his children had a hard time selling the island — no one wanted it until members of the Forbes family (yes, that Forbes family, the rich ones) bought it to add to their holdings of Buzzard’s Bay islands. They still own it, and no, you aren’t allowed to visit unless you’re one of their relatives.
You can find a photograph of Merrill here.
For what it’s worth, the Forbeses were Unitarians too, and many of them still are. The patriarch John Murray Forbes, another sea captain, married his son to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughter Edith. One of their descendants was until recently the chair of my church’s Board of Trustees.
(“That” Forbes family, by the way, is the one that produced John Forbes Kerry. The Forbes Magazine Forbeses are also rich, but a different family.)
Fausto — I knew about the Emerson connection, but I didn’t know some of the Forbes descendants were still Unitarian Universalists — the ones I knew about were not. And who knew that there were two wealthy Forbes families?