34 GARDINER GREENE HUBBARD 



Admitted to the bar in 1843, he entered the office of Benjamin 

 R. Curtis and remained with that eminent-firm until its head 

 came to this city to take his seat upon the Supreme Bench of the 

 United States. For twenty years he practiced his profession in 

 Boston and for five years longer in this capital, to which he was 

 drawn by considerations of health and by our salubrious climate. 

 It is so long since Mr Hubbard laid down his profession (almost 

 twemVy years) and he has since become so eminent in so many 

 other activities that his real greatness as a lawyer has become ob- 

 scured ; but he was thorough in this as in all else. He was asso- 

 ciated with Webster and other great men in many notable cases. 

 Both Dartmouth College and Columbian University gave him a 

 doctorate of laws. Had he devoted himself till life's close to his 

 . first pursuit he would have made and held a place among the 

 leaders of the American bar. 



Mr Hubbard very early evinced the far-sighted enterprise and 

 the broad and active public spirit that characterized him to the 

 last. Fixing his residence in Cambridge, he threw himself at 

 once into all its municipal interests. He became president of 

 the company that built the first street railroad in this country 

 outside of New York city — that, namely, between Cambridge and 

 Boston. He was for some ten years a member of the State Board 

 of Education of Massachusetts. In 1860 he was led hy the re- 

 sult of serious sickness in one of his own children to carefully 

 investigate the possibility of teaching deaf mutes to speak. The 

 idea had originated in Germany and been successfully applied 

 in a few cases ; but it remained for Mr Hubbard to make this, 

 like several other things lying dormant or inefficient, widely or 

 universally available. Convinced by personal study of what 

 might be accomplished, and with an object-lesson before him in 

 his own household, he gathered a half dozen pupils, employed a 

 teacher, and opened a school in Chelmsford, near Boston, to which 

 he was a most generous contributor for several years. Meanwhile 

 he applied to the legislature for a charter only to be met with 

 doubts, and discouraged as a visionary. But he persevered ; took 

 the pupils of his school, and even his own little daughter, before 

 a legislative committee to demonstrate his success; and finally 

 secured the founding of the Clarke school at Northampton, the 

 best of its kind in the world, which he organized, of whose board 

 of trustees he was the first president and a member till his death, 

 and which, in telegraphing its condolence, says it " recognizes an 

 immeasurable loss." In this great achievement Mr Hubbard 

 opened the benefits and delights of language and of association, 

 on practically equal terms with their fellowmen to a multitude 



