people who later were involved with astronomy and Clark instruments. 

 He probably called on the family of Edward Hitchcock, since his future 

 bride, Maria Pease, was boarding with them at that time. Hitchcock, 

 then pastor of the Congregational Church in Conway, Massachusetts, 

 was a vocal amateur astronomer. Under his presidency Amherst College 

 acquired an early Clark telescope. The nearby Sanderson Academy in 

 Ashfield attracted Elijah Burritt, author of the popular Geography of 

 the Heavens, and Mary Lyon, who went on to found Mount Holyoke 

 Seminary and there instituted astronomy in the first course of study. A 

 Clark telescope was added to the Mount Holyoke observatory in 1880. 



New England textile towns were then just getting under way and 

 attracting young people from the surrounding countryside. In the 

 autumn of 1825 Alvan Clark answered an advertisement in a Boston paper 

 and was hired by Mason & Baldwin, subcontractors to the Merrimac 

 Manufacturing Company of East Chelmsford. He worked nine hours a 

 day in winter, ten in summer, and earned eight dollars a week while he 

 learned the art of engraving the mills and cylinders used to print calico 

 patterns. In his spare time he could attend the popular astronomy 

 lectures given by Warren Colburn, superintendent of the Merrimac 

 Company. 



In the first wedding ceremony performed in the town of Lowell, as 

 the incorporated East Chelmsford was called, Alvan Clark married Maria 

 Pease on 25 March 1826. They soon became the parents of four chil- 

 dren : Maria Louisa and Caroline Amelia, as well as George Bassett and 

 Alvan Graham. The Clarks lived to celebrate their sixtieth wedding an- 

 niversary, an event noted by Science magazine. 4 



In 1826 working conditions in the engraving shop were far from har- 

 monious: problems arose when the English-born master engravers jeal- 

 ously guarded their techniques from the American employees; also, David 

 Mason strenuously disagreed with Matthias W. Baldwin over Baldwin's 

 steam engine experiments. Clark was glad to be placed in charge of a 

 branch shop opened in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1827, and to move 

 to New York City to open another shop the following year. In the spring 

 of 1832 he accepted a position with Andrew Robeson's print works in 

 Fall River, Massachusetts. 



While working as an engraver Alvan Clark continued to paint as an 

 avocation, and during his four years in New York he found excellent 



* Science, vol. 7 (1886), pp. 303-304. 



