Arthur Wellesley Williams

Born June 22, 1853 in Blithewood, a suburb of Worcester, Massachuetts.

Married in New Haven, Connecticut 25 November 1879 to Harriette Hawley Stow, born 30 March 1848, daughter of Henry Stow and Susan Beach Folliett.

Arthur Williams died in Hartford, CT on 30 January 1920. He was a principal and one of the founding teachers of the Dwight Preparatory School for Boys in New York City. They resided in Mount Vernon, New York.

From Anne R. Dick:

My grandfather, Arthur Wellesley Williams, had been born in the 1854 39 years after the battle of Waterloo, featuring Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo and saved civilization (although the French have a different view). Arthur Wellesley Williams had four brothers, Nehemiah, Nathan, Ezekial, and John, and all had Biblical names except him.

Grandfather Williams, a graduate of Yale University, knew Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Hebrew. He was principal of a boy’s school in Mt. Vernon, New York, The New York School of Languages which later moved to New York City. In a subsequent reincarnation it was called the Dwight School for Boys and still exists in New Jersey as the Dwight-Edgewood boarding school for boys from the ages of nine to thirteen. It still specializes in languages and diplomats send their children there.

Everybody loved Grandfather Williams but he was absent-minded. One day when he came home from teaching he took off his school clothes to change into leisure clothes and instead put on his pajamas and went to bed. I was glad to hear this story because I am absent minded too. One of his sayings was, “Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after.” He used to go fishing with the Williams’s black gardener. Nana reproached him because she thought this was bad for their social standing but he told her not to worry, that Joseph was a good fisherman, a good man, and his friend.

He made up rhymes and songs. My younger brother, Robert, was a big eater and Grandfather Williams’ rhyme for Robert went, “Robert, the Bobert, the big-bellied man . . .” Grandfather Williams would frequently quote Lewis Carroll’s poem from Alice in Wonderland: “You are old father William the young man said, and your bones are no stronger than suet . . .”

“ . . . yet you ate the whole goose, both the bones and the beak
pray how did you manage to do it?

The last of many verses is:

In the days of my youth I took to the law
and argued each case with my wife
and the muscular strength that it gave my jaw
has lasted the rest of my life.”

Grandfather Williams died of pneumonia at 63 years of age. No one understood why he died so young since the rest of his family was so long lived. He is buried in the Williams family lot in the Milford cemetery next to his wife, Nana, Harriet Stow Williams.