Excerpt from Augustine Heard and His Friends The most precious and inspiring heritage of any community is the memory of the lives of the good and great men and women who were born there. Ipswich is particularly fortunate in her inheritance. Some of her citizens won high rewn in the early days of the Colony as statesmen and soldiers; some have attained eminence in the learned professions or in mercantile life; many have left the impress of their strong, clean lives. Singularly eugh three sons of Ipswich of the finest eminence are scarcely kwn today, save their names and a few great deeds. Augustine Heard is remembered gratefully as the founder of the Public Library. Joseph Green Cogswell is kwn only as the teacher of the Round Hill School. Daniel Treadwell, whose generous bequest has secured to the Library an ample endowment, is only a name. For many years, it has seemed to me a public misfortune that these men should have so little horable recognition, and equally unfortunate that way was open to secure to them their just due. Happily, by the kindness of the Heard family, the opportunity has been afforded me recently of making a careful study of their family papers. Such wealth of material was discovered that the hitherto unkwn Augustine Heard stood forth an imposing figure, brave, winsome, generous, beloved and hored by the men of his own time, and worthy of the admiration of future generations. Naught remained to me but to tell the story of this fine life, and to repeat the narratives of his two contemporaries. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.