[
7]
Biographical Sketch and Memorial Exercises.
Elbridge Streeter Brooks, the subject of this memorial, was born in
Lowell April 14, 1846.
His father,
Elbridge Gerry Brooks, was a prominent minister in the Universalist church, and one of the organizing spirits of that denomination.
Later he became the first
general secretary of the Universalist general convention.
The elder
Brooks, who had the reputation of being a fearless, upright, earnest, and eloquent preacher, received the degree of doctor of divinity from Tufts College.
The mother,
Martha Fowle (
Munroe)
Brooks, was a cultivated and homemaking Christian gentlewoman, descended from the Munroes, who fought so bravely at
Lexington, and whose farm lands and grist mills were near the site of
General Putnam's earthworks on
Prospect hill.
The Rev. Anson Titus, in an appreciative article, printed in the
Somerville Journal, February 21, 1902, thus speaks of
Mr. Brooks' ancestors:—
Mr. Brooks was of rugged Puritan ancestry.
His paternal family was of the best of ancient Kittery on the coast of Maine; his maternal ancestry was of Charlestown and Lexington stock.
His father was a man forceful and eminent in the ministry of the
Universalist church. His grandfather, Oliver Brooks, was of Eliot, Me., but who, with his wife, Susan Home, resided in Portsmouth, N. H. The great-grandfather was William Brooks, who was among the first to respond to the alarm from Lexington, and
