—39— 



ELLSWORTH JEROME HILL 



Albert E. Hill 



Ellsworth Jerome Hill was born December i, 1833, in LeRoy, New York, 

 a prosperous and charming town in the rich valley of the Genesee. His father, a 

 thrifty farmer, sprang from English stock that emigrated to Guilford, Connecti- 

 cut, in the middle of the seventeenth century. His mother was descended on 

 the maternal side from the Dutch of the Mohawk and Hudson River valleys. 



His early education was for the most part of the primitive country-school 

 sort. From the age of four to twelve he went, summer and winter, to a cross- 

 roads school. Afterwards, when his help was needed on the farm in summer, 

 his attendance was limited to the winter term. Three winters in the academy 

 at Le Roy, in which he began the classics and took up such other studies as 

 would be of help in teaching, completed his formal preparatory work. There 

 was, however, another kind of education he pursued with increasing fervor 

 almost from childhood to the end of his life — the education derived from the 

 constant and thorough reading of good books. As a young man he became con- 

 vinced, in his own words, "that where one had gone before it was possible for 

 another to follow, with or without a teacher, if every step was mastered as one 

 went along." No man was ever more faithful than he in mastering each step, 

 or more thoroughly in command, as he was till his last hour, of the wide range 

 of facts that his reading covered. 



What seemed at the time a fatal handicap came to him when he was twenty. 

 For a year he was almost helpless from an affection of the knee. Yet there was 

 an element of good fortune in his affliction, since it led him to the study that 

 later became his passion. To get out of doors he began, on the advice of his 

 physician and with the aid of Wood's text-book, the study of Botany. Crawl- 

 ing painfully on crutches to the edge of the orchard he secured a few flowers 

 and these he succeeded in identifying. When next year he went to Mississippi 

 to escape the rigor of a northern winter, he pursued the study as constantly as 

 his preparatory teaching of boys and girls would permit. A camp stool strapped 

 on his back, for use when he must rest, and with two canes to support his weak 

 steps, he would make such excursions as he could to the woods and fields in 

 search of specimens. These he classified with a high degree of accuracy, con- 

 sidering the meagerness of the available material on the subject. 



After three years in Mississippi he returned to Le Roy where he continued 

 to prepare himself for college and to study Botany. In i860 he entered Union 

 Theological Seminary in New York City from which he graduated in 1863. 



From 1863 to 1869 he was a pastor of the Presbyterian church in the district 

 of eastern Illinois. A return of his old trouble, this time affecting his hip-joint, 

 compelled him to lay aside his pastoral work. He never actively resumed it, 

 though he continued to be a member of the Chicago Presbytery for the rest of 

 his life. 



These were hard days. But for the courage and helpfulness of his wife to 

 support his own determination to achieve something of worth it is difficult to 

 vsee how he could have survived the trial. He returned to teaching when his 



