WALLACE CLEMENT WARE SABINE 

 1868-1919 



By Edwin H. Hall ' 



Our colleague, Wallace Clement Ware Sabine, was born in Richwood, Ohio, June 13, 

 1868. According to family tradition, four racial strains were joined in him, each of his four 

 names representing some family of his ancestors, one Scotch, one Dutch, one English, and one 

 French. 



The most remote ancestor of whom we have knowledge was William Sabine, or Sabin, who 

 was living in the town of Rehoboth, near Plymouth, Mass., in 1643. He is supposed to have 

 been of Huguenot stock, though conclusive evidence of this derivation is not found. It seems 

 clear that he was a man of substance and of good standing in his community. His will, written 

 in 1685, probated in Boston and, I think, still to be seen there, mentions by name "sixteen of his 

 twenty children." 



From him the line of descent runs through Benjamin, four Nehemiahs in succession, John 

 Fletcher, and Hylas, to WaUace Clement. Early in the nineteenth century the fourth Nehemiah 

 Sabine went from Massachusetts to Ohio, "with a family of eleven children." " He was a pioneer 

 preacher, with a circuit of fifty miles radius. Leather saddle-bags on his horse carried the Bible 

 and his doctrine of eternal rewards and punishments." His son, John Fletcher, "became a 

 Universalist, gentle and generous." "He [John Fletcher] died at the age of eighty-nine, with 

 mind as vigorous and clear as in youth, and with a remarkably retentive memory. His wife 

 was Euphemia Clement, a gentle, industrious, reliable woman. Hylas Sabine was their oldest 

 son." Of Wallace Sabine's maternal grandfather, Jacob Reed Ware, who was of English 

 Quaker stock, it is written, "He was one of the early, ardent abolitionists and lived on the 

 most direct line from southern slavery to freedom in Canada." "Untiring of body, alert of 

 mind, and exceedingly strong of purpose, he lived in perfect health, with such simple habits 

 that at the age of ninety-eight, without disease, he fell asleep." "J. R. Ware married Almira 

 Wallace, a woman of force and uprightness. Anna Ware was their first daughter." 



To those who knew Sabine well this brief family history is deeply significant. Gentleness, 

 courtesy, rectitude, untiring energy, fixity of purpose that was like the polarity of a magnet, 

 all these traits we find in him. It is interesting and impressive to see how the individualism 

 and stern conscience that made his ancestors on the one side Quakers in England and, probably, 

 on the other side Protestants in France, found expression in him, under changed intellectual 

 conditions. He was of the very stuff of which martyrs are made; in fact, he died a martyr to 

 his sense of duty, but, with an austerity of morals and a capacity for devotion which none of his 

 conspicuously religious forefathers could have surpassed, he held aloof, silently but absolutely, 

 from all public profession of religious creed, and he took small part in religious observances. 



Hylas Sabine, the father of Wallace, was Railway Commissioner of Ohio, and it is said that 

 he was the first commissioner in the country to establish and adequately enforce State super- 

 vision of railways through State inspection and compulsory returns. One of his maxims, quoted 

 to me by his son, was substantially this: Treat everyone with courtesy, and especially yourself. 

 He had "esthetic sense and ability to design and draw," which qualities both his children 

 inherited. 



In mental and physical energy, intensity of feeling, and bent for exact science, Wallace 

 resembled his mother, whose vigorous yet delicate personality charmed everyone who met her. 2 



The blended inheritance from the parents is perhaps shown in the fact that the daughter, 

 now the wife of Prof. Wilbur Siebert, of Columbus, Ohio, once engaged in research on the 



> In this memoir I shall draw freely, usually without quotation marks, from two papers written by me soon after Professor Sabine's death, one 

 for the Harvard Graduates' Magazine, the other for the records of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In many cases what appears to be 

 a continuous quotation from Sabine's papers is made up of selected passages. E. H. H. 



1 She died in March, 1923, aged 88 years. Most of the genealogical matter contained in this paper was furnished by her, and a considerable part 

 of it is here given in her own telling words. 1 



