Edmund Beecher Wilson, 1856 - 1939

Edmund Beecher Wilson was born 19 October 1856 at Geneva, Illinois. The first sixteen years of his life were passed there. He has written “it would not be easy to imagine a happier environment for a boy who somehow managed to combine an early passion for natural history with an almost equal love for music; who grew up in an atmosphere of warm affection and sympathetic understanding at home, and was surrounded by a circle of intelligent and cultivated people”. When only two and a half years of age, Eddy, as he was called, was adopted by his mother’s sister, Mrs Charles Patten, who also lived in Geneva, “with the result that hence forward I had in effect two homes and four parents between whom I hardly distinguished in point of love and loyalty”. His foster parents encouraged his interest in birds, snakes, insects, toads and all living creatures, even to the extent of setting aside a room for his treasures. In 1872, when Wilson was not quite sixteen, his uncle David suggested that he take over the “little country district school that his brother Charles had taught the year before. The offer was thirty dollars a month and board (with his aunt and uncle). . . . At the end of the winter a farmer, the father of three of his pupils, said to my aunt, ‘He’s young, but his age don’t hurt him none’.