MEMOIR. 



A NDREW JACKSON DOWNING was born at New- 

 -IJL burgh, upon the Hudson, on the spot where he always 

 lived, and which he always loved more than any other, on 

 the 30th of October, 1815. His father and mother were 

 both natives of Lexington, Massachusetts, and, upon their 

 marriage, removed to Orange County, New- York, where 

 they settled, some thirty or forty miles from Newburgh. 

 Presently, however, they came from the interior of the 

 county to the banks of the river. The father built a cot- 

 tage upon the highlands of Newburgh, on the skirts of 

 the ttwn, and there his five children were born. He had 

 begun life as a wheelwright, but abandoned the trade 

 to become a nurseryman, and after working prosperously 

 in his garden for twenty-one years, died in 1822. 



Andrew was born many years after the other children. 

 He was the child of his parents' age, and, for that reason, 

 very dear. He began to talk before he could walk, when 

 he was only nine months old, and the wise village gossips 

 shook their heads in his mother's little cottage, and pro- 

 phesied a bright career for the precocious child. At eleven 

 months that career manifestly began, in the gossips' eyes, 

 by his walking bravely about the room : a handsome, 



