History of Northampton, Massachusetts, from its settlement in 1654;

CHAPTER XXXVII.
MAJOR JOSEPH HAWLEY.
Birth and Ancestry. JOSEPH HaWLEY WES bom ill Nortliamp-
ton, Oct. 8"\ 1723. He was the son of
Lieut. Joseph. Hawley, and Rebecca, daughter of Rev. Solomon
Stoddard, second minister of Northampton. His
grandfather, the first Joseph Hawley, married Lydia,
daughter of the famous Capt. Samuel Marshall, who lost
his life at the memorable assault upon the Narragansett
Fort, in 1676. His father was a farmer and a trader, a man
highl}^ respected, and much employed in public affairs, but
subject to periods of depression and melancholy, and during
one of them he took his own life.
Early Education. Major Hawley^ was indebted to the schools
of his native town for his early education,
and throughout life he manifested a strong interest in
them, donating by will a portion of his estate for their
maintenance. Dr. Samuel Mather, with whom he was
afterwards associated in the transaction of much town
business, taught the town school for about ten years after
1729, and to him undoubtedly, young Hawley was indebted
for the rudiments of his education. The standard of the
town schools had ere this been raised to a grade that rendered
them competent to fit students for college. It is not
certain whether Mr. Hawley depended wholly upon the
town schoolmaster for his preparation for college, or supplemented
those studies by the aid of his grandfather Stod-
dard. Certain it is, however, that he was an apt scholar,
and entered Yale College in 1739, when sixteen years of
age, graduating three years afterwards.
1 See p. 79.
3 The following facts concerning the life of Major Hawley have been compiled
from the Judd MSS. ; from the Address to the Hampshire Bar by Geo. Bliss in 1836;
from the Works of John Adams; from original papers in the possession of Mr. C. L.
Shaw of Astoria, L. I.; and from the Hawley papers in the Bancroft collection, in
the Lenox Library, N. Y.
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