Standing to It: Everett Peabody, Part I
companion at social entertainments," remembered a former classmate. On one occasion though, a bit too much fun earned the young Peabody a brief suspension for an undisclosed infraction. But by 1849 he had graduated with a degree in engineering, and quickly found employment in his chosen field, first in Massachusetts and soon thereafter in far-off Ohio.
It was exactly what the nineteen-year-old college graduate was looking for. "Thank Heaven, I can support myself now," he wrote home in early 1850, "and if it is a pittance I live on, it is at least earned by my own right arm, which does not snarl and tell me I am extravagant, whenever I ask it therefor."
The work was hard, but for Peabody it all possessed a certain, almost indefinable charm. "Well, it is glorious," he wrote, "going about in these old woods, with trees which seem to have borne the brunt of the tempests for a thousand years...Though our feet are wet and our hands cold, though we anticipate the sun and work like hodmen, there's a luxury in it which I can feel, but not analyze. You might not think it poetry, but it is,- this wading through the swamps watching the clouds."
Everett would spend most of the next decade helping to build railroads, as the country around him began to drift ever closer toward the war that would transform his life.
Continue to Part II of this series
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