10 Boyhood, Early Schooling, and Teaching 



when out-of-doors. His parents had gone to the county seat on 

 business matters and left him with no special work. He, therefore, 

 gave himself over to searching for natural objects to add to his 

 collections of Indian relics, plants, stones, and animals. After he 

 had explored the three and one-half mile area to the village, he 

 went to the drug store where was located also the post office.' 

 Probably on this journey he became acquainted for the first time 

 with Charles F. Wheeler, the village druggist and postmaster 

 who, for the next sixteen years, would be one of his closest 

 friends. 



Erwin was attracted to him " first because he was very congenial 

 and one of the few distinctly intellectual people of the village, 

 and because he was a born teacher and a man who rapidly and 

 effectively got hold of young people for their improvement. Next 

 to the church and perhaps more so than the church, the drug 

 store in that village was the intellectual center." ^ At least two 

 obvious reasons account for Wheeler's and young Smith's im- 

 mediate interest in each other. Wheeler also had been born in 

 New York State. Educated in the famous Mexico Academy 

 located in the town of his birth and bearing the same name, he 

 had journeyed westward and entered the University of Michigan 

 where he completed one year but left to enlist during the Civil 

 War on the Union side. Contracting pneumonia, he had been 

 rendered unfit for further active service. He then married and 

 settled at Hubbardston where in the drug business in partnership 

 with a cousin, Henry Wheeler, he remained for twenty years. 



It is not improbable that when on April 16 Erwin walked to 

 the village drug store to obtain the family mail he had in his 

 pocket his copy of Gray's Field, Forest, and Garden Botany, the 

 second edition of which had been published that year. He had 

 heard of " a man in the village by the name of Wheeler who was 

 interested in botany." Quite likely, therefore, he inquired for him, 

 made his acquaintance, and "from that time on" they "got 

 together frequently to compare notes and specimens." As the 

 spring enlivened the earth with greenness and blossoms, they 

 began to collect together and separately. Erwin studied botany 

 that year from spring through autumn and by December he was 



" Quotations are taken from a memorandum prepared by Smith many years later, 

 but left undated and unsigned. 



