ELISHA MITCHELL. 



A MONUMENT of modest size and style, standing in Yancey 

 County, North Carolina, on the highest point of land in the 

 eastern United States, marks the grave of the man who first 

 determined, by measurement, the culminating point of the Ap- 

 palachian range a man, too, whose local fame as a student of 

 natural history, a hardy explorer, and a teacher, was pre-emi- 

 nent. Not the little obelisk of bronze that only shows the 

 exact spot where his body lies but the mountain on which it 

 stands, whose supremacy over all the peaks east of the Rocky 

 Mountains he established, and in the exploration of which he 

 lost his life, is the true monument of Prof. Elisha Mitchell. 



Elisha Mitchell was born in Washington, Conn., August 19, 

 1793. His father, Abner Mitchell, was a farmer; and his 

 mother, Phebe Eliot, was a descendant, in the fifth generation, 

 from John Eliot, the Apostle to the Indians. His great-grand- 

 father, the Rev. Jared Eliot, M. D. and D. D., for many years 

 minister at Killingworth, Conn., was distinguished for his 

 knowledge of history, natural philosophy, botany, and min- 

 eralogy, no less than as a sturdily orthodox theologian ; was a 

 correspondent of Dr. Franklin and Bishop Berkeley, and was 

 awarded a gold medal by the Royal Society for a discovery in 

 the manufacture of iron. Young Mitchell inherited many of 

 the qualities of the Eliots, and particularly of this ancestor. 

 At four years of age he acquitted himself with credit in a 

 school exhibition. At a little latter age he was" fond of col- 

 lecting his playmates in a group and telling them what he had 

 read in his books, or explaining the pictures to them. He was 

 prepared for college at the classical school, in Bethlehem, of the 

 Rev. Azel Backus, D. D., afterward President of Hamilton Col- 

 lege. He was graduated from Yale College in 1813, in the 

 same class with Denison Olmsted, afterward his associate in 



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