Rev Sylvester Hovey

FAG #46960440 provided the following:

YALE COLLEGE, CLASS OF 1819

SYLVESTER HOVEY, son of Joseph and Mary (or Polly) Hovey, of Mansfield, Connecticut, was born on June 17, 1797. His father died in 1800, and his mother, a daughter of the Rev. John Storrs (Yale 1756), next married Deacon Elisha Billings (Yale 1772), of Conway, Massachusetts. He entered College in 1816, and at graduation delivered the Valedictory Oration.

As his health was not firm, he spent two or three years in rest and travel. For four years from the fall of 1822 he filled a tutorship at Yale, in the meantime also studying theology; during the last year of his service he took the duties of Professor Goodrich, of the chair of Rhetoric and English Literature, who was absent in Europe.

In 1827 he was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in Williams College; but after two years’ service, he resigned to accept a like position in Amherst College. In 1831 he visited Europe, partly for health and incidentally to procure for Amherst necessary books and apparatus, and remained for about eighteen months.

In the fall of 1833 he was compelled by threatening consumption to resign his professorship. On November 25, he married Mary Jane, third daughter of the late Thomas Chester (Yale 1780), of Hartford, and with her he spent two winters (1835-36 and 1836-37) in Santa Cruz and the British West Indies, and while there investigated the workings of negro emancipation. On his return he published, in 1838, a volume of “Letters from the West Indies,” which won general approval from its candid temper and sound judgment. While in the West Indies he also gave much time to natural history, especially conchology and geology.

For the rest of his life he was a confirmed invalid. His wife died of consumption in Hartford on January 11, 1840, in her 36th year; and his own death followed, in the same city, on May 6, 1840, at the age of nearly 43. Their two children died in infancy or early childhood.

— Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Notices of Graduates of Yale College (New Haven, Connecticut, 1913), p. 51. Inscription: aged 43 - son-in-law of Thomas & Esther M. Bull Chester

Note: see John Chester for more pictures

• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Jan 29 2018, 9:00:21 UTC