174 THE RETROSPECT OF THE YEAR. 



EICHARD PALMER WATERS, the youngest child of Robert 

 andLydia (Gellison) Waters, was born at Salem, Septem- 

 ber 29, 1807. He died at Cherry Hill, North Beverly, 

 May 19, 1887. He was never married. His fourscore 

 years were marked by more than the ordinary vicissitudes 

 likely to attend the lives of men of distinct originality and 

 force of character like himself. 



He was fortunate in his birth. His parents were emi- 

 nently worthy persons of limited means but of the sturdy 

 old colonial type which gave so strong a local coloring to 

 life in Salem at the time. He derived his given names, and 

 probably some strain of blood, from the old pioneer ship- 

 builder of Knocker's Hole, Richard Palmer, who had grants 

 among the first of those that wrought so lustily in the noisy 

 ship-yards about Creek Street, and the family possessions 

 have been kept in memory there until recently by a sub- 

 stantial old homestead on High Street Court, 1 known as the 

 Palmer House, but now demolished. He lost his father 

 young. 



From early boyhood he found himself thrown upon his 

 own resources, and throughout the battle of life he asked 

 no odds of any body. Such an education as he had after 

 leaving the Hacker school he picked up in a desultory 

 way, in the counting-rooms of Salem, and in this he saw 

 no mean opportunity, but made the most of it, pushing 

 on with such sagacity and courage that his twenty-fifth 

 year found him master of a little shop kept in the build- 

 iusf which stood on Essex near Cambridge street west of 

 the old Carnes House. This was a section of the town 

 where much retail trade centred in the days before the rail- 

 road when the traffic of northern and eastern New England 

 found its way through Salem to Boston over Essex Bridge 



1 Formerly called Roast Mt^at Hill. 



