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een such as to accentuate the encouragement
the narration of his early days of
trial and the causes responsible for his
ultimate success will afford would-be in-
ventors who labor under similar handi-
caps.
Benjamin Myrrick Des Jardins was
born in the town of Tyre, Michigan, on
October 10, 1858, son of Gregoir and
Marie (Trudeau) Des Jardins, and grandson
of Zacharie Des Jardins, who was
one of the early settlers of the Province
of Quebec, Canada. Historical records
authenticate the statement that the Des
Jardins family was of French extraction,
and of titled lineage. The activities of the
progenitor of the American branches of
the family were confined to Canadian soil,
and many of his descendants have found
prominent place in Canadian history.
Zacharie Des Jardins, the grand-ancestor
of the American branches of the line, was
a successful and highly regarded farmer
and community leader at St. Therese de
Blainville, a village about seventeen miles
distant from Montreal. He was a man of
strong personality and superior intellect,
and took an active part in the Canadian
Rebellion, aligning his sympathies with
the public movement which sought to
revolutionize administrative balance, so
as to secure the inauguration of remedial
measures to counteract the effect of past
governmental abuses.
His son, Gregoir Des Jardins, father of
Benjamin M. Des Jardins, was, however,
of different disposition to that which
characterized his father; he was a man of
profound thought on matters of religion,
and of strong conviction, independently
manifested by his secession from the
church of his forbears and adoption of
Protestantism. The activities and promi-
nence of the Des Jardins within the
Church of Rome had been so historic, that
the severance of allegiance by one of its
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BIOGRAPHY
364
scions accentuated the act, and eventually
wrought disaster to the business affairs of
Gregoir Des Jardins. Gregoir Des Jar-
dins was forced to leave the home of his
father, and the companionship of people
of his own native tongue, and he sought a
less perturbed environment within the
United States, entering what was virtu-
ally the wilderness when he settled in the
vicinity of Tyre, Huron county, Michigan.
He no doubt experienced difficulties simi-
lar to those encountered by most other
pioneers of civilization and early settlers,
and no doubt his efforts and example produced
an effect in creating within his son,
Benjamin M., the admirable qualities of
resistance he later exhibited. Also his
son's mechanical ability may be attributed
in some measure to the mechanical in-
genuity developed in his father by the
necessities of the primitive conditions un-
der which they lived. It has been au-
thenticated that Gregoir Des Jardins pos-
sessed considerable mechanical ability,
and that the humble frontier home of his
family was equipped with many original
labor-saving devices of his invention. He
married thrice, his third wife having been
Marie Trudeau, a French-Canadian,
whose forbears were of the French nobil-
ity. She bore him thirteen children, one
of the younger being the distinguished
inventor to record whose achievements is
the main purpose of this article. Gregoir
Des Jardins was seventy-seven years of
age when he died at Tyre in 1888. His
third wife, nee Marie Trudeau, lived to
attain the age of eighty-four, her death
occurring in 1903. At the time of her
death, all her many children yet lived, as
also did forty-seven of her fifty grandchil-
dren.
It can be imagined that the educational
facilities open to her son, Benjamin Myr-
rick Des Jardins, in the vicinity of their
frontier home, were meagre. He absorbed