Rev. Lewis Wilder Hicks

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Full text of "The biographical record of the class of 1870, Yale College, 1870-1911"

WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE CLASS

REV. L. W. HICKS,

Secretary WELLESLEY, MASSACHUSETTS

LEWIS WILDER HICKS

(g^^gpiCKS. Bom in CWlton, Massachusetts, November 20, J845. Son of Samuel Prescott and Abigail (Phillips) Hicks. He is a descendant, on his father's side, of Thomas Hicks, who was in Massachusetts in J 644; of the Greens, Champneys, and Sills, of Cambridge? of Nathan Fiske, Isaac Steams, Isaac Learned, Abraham Brown, Edward Garfield, and other early settlers of Watertown; and of Henry Leland, of Sherburne. On his mother's side he is descended from Rev. George Phillips, the first pastor in Watertown, who came over with Govemor Winthrop in J 630 and was the progenitor of the Phillips family, which included Wendell Phillips and the men who established the Phillips academies at Andover, Massachusetts, and Exeter, New Hampshire. He is also a descendant of Rev. Ralph Wheelock, one of the early settlers of Dedham, Massa- chusetts, and the ancestor of the first two presidents of Dartmouth College; of Francis Peabody, Reginald Foster, and William Towne, of Salem; of Samuel Chapin, of Springfield; and of numerous other early settlers of towns near Boston. He numbers more than twenty-five ancestors who were in the Colonial service and several who were in the Revolutionary War.

Lewis Wilder Hicks was prepared for college in the Worcester, Massachusetts, High School and under a private tutor, Charles A. Chase, Esq., of the same city, and entered with the Class. He was a member of Linonia, Kappa Sigma Epsilon, Delta Beta Xi, and Delta Kappa Epsilon, He was one of the editors of the ** College Courant" and graduated with a Colloquy stand. In 1873 he received the degree of A,M. He is a member of Wolfs Head.

After graduation he entered the Hartford Theological Seminary, from which he was graduated in J 874, having been compelled to give up his studies for a year on account of ill health. On September JO, 1874, he was ordained to the Christian ministry and installed over the First Congregational Church in Woodstock, Ver- mont, where he remained until 1 88 J, when he accepted a call to become the pastor of the historic First Church of Christ in Wcthersfield, Connecticut. Here, too, he remained seven years, until a throat affection necessitated a change of residence. By the recommendation of a friend in Colorado, he was called by the First Con- gregational Church of Pueblo to be their pastor. He went there in October, 1888, where he regained his health. But the altitude so seriously affected the health of Mrs. Hicks that, in 1890, he was obliged to leave his charge, but not before he had been instrumental in building a new and tasteful stone edifice. After leaving Colo- rado they spent about one and one-half years in Denison, Texas, where Hicks took charge of a young Congregational church and erected a chapel for the growing congregation. In the spring of J 892 he retumed to New England, and in the foflowing December was installed over the First Congregational Church of Wefles- ky, Massachusetts. Here he remained until the summer of J 896, when, partly owing to his poor health, brought on by an attack of the grip, and partly to an invi- tation from an aged uncle to care for him during his declining years, he resigned his Wellesley pastorate and took up his residence in Hartford, Connecticut. He remained there until the death of Mr. Phillips, and then returned to Wellesley, in September, J 903, with the idea of making it his permanent home.

While in Hartford, besides attending to his uncle's affairs, he supplied pulpits in and about the city, acted as a trustee of the Hartford Theological Seminary, was for three years associate editor of the "Hartford Seminary Record," the Hartford correspondent of "The Congregationalist," and a writer for other publications.

During his ministerial career he has published several sermons and addresses by request, and has written articles for magazines, among them one on "The First Qvil Settlement of Connecticut," in the "Connecticut Magazine" of December, 1902. He has also published in book form an address on "Mr. Ralph Wheelock, Puritan," that was delivered before the Connecticut Historic Society in 1899.

On the J 9th of June, 1909, he delivered an address at Valley Forge, Pennsyl- vania, on the occasion of the dedication of a bay in the Cloister of the Colonies, in connection with the Washington Memorial Chapel that was given by the Massachu- setts Society, Sons of the American Revolution, which address has been published in the year-book of this society. His other literary work that has gone into print is in the shape of the two Biographical Records of the Class of Seventy, including this one, and the two Reports of the Anniversaries of the Class that were celebrated in New Haven in J905 and J9I0.

He is a member of the Connecticut Historical Society, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the Massachusetts Society of the Sons of the American Revo- lution, of which he has been chaplain for several years, the Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Wars, and the Bunker Hill Monument Association.

In the autumn of 1906 he went abroad with Mrs. Hicks and visited England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, and France. They spent three months of the time in Dresden.

He has been married three times: (J) July 2, 1874, to Miss Kate, daughter of J. S. Curtis, MD., of Hartford, Connecticut, and a descendant of John and Priscilla Alden. She died of consumption in Woodstock, Vermont, November 3, 1876. He married (2) Elizabeth Hibbard, daughter of Honorable James Barrett, of the Supreme Court of Vermont, and a descendant, on her mother's side, of Governors Haynes and Wyllys, Colonial governors of Connecticut. She died of consumption in Hartford, Connecticut, May 18, t902. He was married (3) September 19, 1906, in Barre, Massachusetts, to Miss Hannah Louise Roper, a descendant of John Roper, one of the early settlers of Dedham, Massachusetts.

"Hicks has one son, Edward Phillips Hicks, who was bom in Woodstock, Ver- mont, Augfust 3, J875, and who married Miss Maud Leighton Gatchell, in Boston, September 10, 1902. She is an instructor in the Emerson G)IIege of Oratory* He is engaged in business in Providence.

Address: Wellesley, Massachusetts.