Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies

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[486] family were often ignorant of where he was and what he was doing. He seems, however, to have resumed almost immediately his old business of teaching. In 1845-46 he taught in an academy then recently established at Westbrook, Maine; in 1847 a school was opened by him at Norway, in the same State, under the title of the Norway Liberal Institute; and in 1848 he became principal of the Oxford Normal Institute at South Paris, Oxford County, Maine, where his success as a teacher was very great, and drew to the new institution at one time as many as two hundred students. Here he taught all the higher branches to pupils of both sexes, and fitted a great number of young men for Bowdoin College, where it was said that no candidates for admission came so well prepared as Mr. Hinds's scholars. He was an enthusiastic teacher, sparing no pains or expense to perfect his methods of instruction,—hiring assistants and purchasing, apparatus with reckless prodigality, while, at the same time, he was careless of his personal comforts, and negligent in the matter of dress.

The results were not remunerative; and at the end of two years, disheartened by the pecuniary embarrassments into which he had fallen, he suddenly disappeared, and, with only five dollars in his pocket, made his way to the West, where, for a time, he found employment as surveyor and civil engineer, and was on the point of setting out across the plains for California, when he was taken ill, and returned to Massachusetts, where he taught school for a while at Barnstable. It was about this time also, it is supposed, that he went on a fishing-voyage to the Banks of Newfoundland. After he had been absent more than a year from South Paris, his friends there having removed the causes which had led to his abrupt departure, gladly welcomed him back; and he resumed his position at the head of the Oxford Normal Institute, which he continued to hold for nearly five years longer, but, failing still to make it profitable, finally abandoned it in 1856.

During the next three years he taught a school at Livermore Falls, and afterward went to Aroostook County, Maine, where, in local phraseology, he ‘took up wild land and made himself a farm,’—still teaching at intervals.