{"id":1046,"date":"2023-11-27T18:57:59","date_gmt":"2023-11-27T18:57:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sca.bowdoin.edu\/class-of-1825\/?page_id=1046"},"modified":"2023-11-27T18:58:00","modified_gmt":"2023-11-27T18:58:00","slug":"horatio-bridge","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sca.bowdoin.edu\/class-of-1825\/students\/horatio-bridge\/","title":{"rendered":"Horatio Bridge"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Navy Man with a Penchant for Trouble<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Horatio Bridge was born at Augusta, Maine, in 1806. The Bridge family was considered one of the \u201cchoicest\u201d of Kennebec County. Horatio\u2019s father, James, was an Augusta judge, and his brother Edmund Theodore was a Bowdoin graduate and public servant. Horatio grew up in Augusta and may have been familiar with Joseph Jenkins Eveleth and Edward Joseph Vose, who also claimed the city as a hometown. In 1821, at the age of 15, Bridge took a carriage to Brunswick to begin his Bowdoin career. In that carriage he met Alfred Mason, Johnathan Cilley and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The latter two men would become his best friends at Bowdoin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bridge\u2019s first year at Bowdoin he boarded at Captain R. Toppan\u2019s, but was not close with any of his roommates. Instead, he preferred to spend his time with Hawthorne, walking along the Androscoggin River, shooting squirrels and gathering blueberries. Bridge\u2019s love of frolicking in the wilderness had an impact on his schoolwork. He wasted no time arousing the ire of the Executive Government by missing prayers and neglecting his work. Bridge also joined the Athenean Society and founded a society of his own: the Androscoggin Club, consisting of Bridge, Hawthorne, Cilley, Cyrus Coolidge, and William Hale and principally functioning as a secret card-playing group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sophomore year, Bridge began boarding at Mr. A. Dunning\u2019s along with William Hale and John Dafforne Kinsman. He also started to ratchet up his troublemaking tendencies. He racked up a laundry list of fines, including one for reading in the middle of prayers. In the summer of 1823 he committed his most egregious act against the college. First, on Saturday night Bridge was caught drinking at a tavern and disciplined by a college officer. Three days later an \u201cact of violence\u201d was committed against the room of that same officer. Bridge\u2019s alibi was disproved by the rest of his house and the college suspended him until January. Bridge, however, found some way to get out of his punishment as he was reported as living in Winthrop Hall with Hale the fall of his junior year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even, after his close brush with suspension, Bridge did not quit misbehaving. In later years he reflected fondly about, \u201cdoing a hundred things that the Faculty never heard of, or else it would have been the worse for us.\u201d What the faculty did hear about is rather representative of Bridge\u2019s actions. In May of 1824 he was cited for \u201cwalking unnecessarily on the Sabbath\u201d with Hawthorne and Patrick Henry Greenleaf. That November had missed so many recitations and prayers that he was admonished before the government. A month later he snuck out of Mrs. Adam\u2019s boarding house and into Stephen Longfellow\u2019s Winthrop room where he participated in a raucous bonfire. Just a few months before graduating, Bridge was admonished for \u201cirregularity and whispering at prayers.\u201d In another notable anecdote from senior year, Bridge refused to get his silhouette cut when the rest of the class did. Years later in his published memories of Hawthorne, Bridge recalled that Hawthorne had also skipped the event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of the sheer extent of Bridge\u2019s misbehavior, it makes sense that he was not awarded a class rank nor asked to speak at Commencement. He took the snub in stride though, instead choosing to create the Navy Club, made up of all seniors not asked to speak at Commencement. Its members were given fun naval titles and they spent their time gathering and drinking at Miss Ward\u2019s while the rest of the class had to practice their speeches. When ranked members of the class begged to join the group, they were rejected for being \u201csuperior scholars.\u201d Even to the end, Bridge was a rebel.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After graduating Bridge went on to study law in Northampton, Massachusetts, and then opened an Augusta practice with classmate James Ware Bradbury in 1833. The attorney invested much of his wealth in the Kennebec Dam Project, but this proved to be a failure and Bridge found himself \u201cfinancially ruined\u201d in the late 1830\u2019s. Suddenly the \u201cNaval Club\u201d of his youth looked like a prophecy, as Bridge decided to rebuild his career by joining the Navy as a paymaster. Bridge spent the 1840\u2019s sailing along the coast of Africa protecting American commerce and trying to suppress the slave trade. He later published a book on the experience titled, Journal of an African Cruiser. <\/em>In a break from one of these voyages, Bridge married Charlotte Marshall of Boston. The couple had one child, but she died at just five years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1853, Franklin Pierce, one of Bridge\u2019s closest friends at Bowdoin, became President of the United States. He appointed Bridge as the Chief of the Bureau of Provisions and Clothing for the Navy. Bridge remained in this role through the Civil War and was responsible for provisioning the Union as it expanded sevenfold. In 1869 he became Chief Inspector of this bureau and he retired as a Commodore in 1873. After exiting military life, Bridge moved to Athens, Pennsylvania, where he worked on writing a book about Hawthorne. The two had remained close friends all their lives and Bridge played an instrumental role in getting Hawthorne\u2019s early works published. Bridge also remained connected to Bowdoin by attending the 50th<\/sup> class reunion in 1875. He was one of only thirteen class members still living. Bridge passed away in 1893, right after he published his Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Navy Man with a Penchant for Trouble Horatio Bridge was born at Augusta, Maine, in 1806. The Bridge family was considered one of the \u201cchoicest\u201d of Kennebec County. Horatio\u2019s father, James, was an Augusta judge, and his brother Edmund Theodore was a Bowdoin graduate and public servant. Horatio grew up in Augusta and may […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":828,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":{"0":"post-1046","1":"page","2":"type-page","3":"status-publish","5":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sca.bowdoin.edu\/class-of-1825\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sca.bowdoin.edu\/class-of-1825\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sca.bowdoin.edu\/class-of-1825\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sca.bowdoin.edu\/class-of-1825\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sca.bowdoin.edu\/class-of-1825\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sca.bowdoin.edu\/class-of-1825\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1047,"href":"https:\/\/sca.bowdoin.edu\/class-of-1825\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1046\/revisions\/1047"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sca.bowdoin.edu\/class-of-1825\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sca.bowdoin.edu\/class-of-1825\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}