Edison, His Life and Inventions | Page 9

with well-kept homes,
mostly of frame construction, and flagged streets crossing each other at
right angles. There are no poor--at least, everybody is apparently
well-to-do. While a leisurely atmosphere pervades the town, few idlers
are seen. Some of the residents are engaged in local business; some are
occupied in farming and grape culture; others are employed in the
iron-works near-by, at Norwalk. The stores and places of public resort
are gathered about the square, where there is plenty of room for
hitching when the Saturday trading is done at that point, at which
periods the fitful bustle recalls the old wheat days when young Edison
ran with curiosity among the six and eight horse teams that had brought
in grain. This square is still covered with fine primeval forest trees, and
has at its centre a handsome soldiers' monument of the Civil War, to
which four paved walks converge. It is an altogether pleasant and
unpretentious town, which cherishes with no small amount of pride its
association with the name of Thomas Alva Edison.
In view of Edison's Dutch descent, it is rather singular to find him with

the name of Alva, for the Spanish Duke of Alva was notoriously the
worst tyrant ever known to the Low Countries, and his evil deeds
occupy many stirring pages in Motley's famous history. As a matter of
fact, Edison was named after Capt. Alva Bradley, an old friend of his
father, and a celebrated ship-owner on the Lakes. Captain Bradley died
a few years ago in wealth, while his old associate, with equal ability for
making money, was never able long to keep it (differing again from the
Revolutionary New York banker from whom his son's other name,
"Thomas," was taken).
CHAPTER III
BOYHOOD AT PORT HURON, MICHIGAN
THE new home found by the Edison family at Port Huron, where Alva
spent his brief boyhood before he became a telegraph operator and
roamed the whole middle West of that period, was unfortunately
destroyed by fire just after the close of the Civil War. A smaller but
perhaps more comfortable home was then built by Edison's father on
some property he had bought at the near-by village of Gratiot, and there
his mother spent the remainder of her life in confirmed invalidism,
dying in 1871. Hence the pictures and postal cards sold largely to
souvenir-hunters as the Port Huron home do not actually show that in
or around which the events now referred to took place.
It has been a romance of popular biographers, based upon the fact that
Edison began his career as a newsboy, to assume that these earlier years
were spent in poverty and privation, as indeed they usually are by the
"newsies" who swarm and shout their papers in our large cities. While
it seems a pity to destroy this erroneous idea, suggestive of a heroic
climb from the depths to the heights, nothing could be further from the
truth. Socially the Edison family stood high in Port Huron at a time
when there was relatively more wealth and general activity than to-day.
The town in its pristine prime was a great lumber centre, and hummed
with the industry of numerous sawmills. An incredible quantity of
lumber was made there yearly until the forests near-by vanished and the
industry with them. The wealth of the community, invested largely in

this business and in allied transportation companies, was accumulated
rapidly and as freely spent during those days of prosperity in St. Clair
County, bringing with it a high standard of domestic comfort. In all this
the Edisons shared on equal terms.
Thus, contrary to the stories that have been so widely published, the
Edisons, while not rich by any means, were in comfortable
circumstances, with a well-stocked farm and large orchard to draw
upon also for sustenance. Samuel Edison, on moving to Port Huron,
became a dealer in grain and feed, and gave attention to that business
for many years. But he was also active in the lumber industry in the
Saginaw district and several other things. It was difficult for a man of
such mercurial, restless temperament to stay constant to any one
occupation; in fact, had he been less visionary he would have been
more prosperous, but might not have had a son so gifted with insight
and imagination. One instance of the optimistic vagaries which led him
incessantly to spend time and money on projects that would not have
appealed to a man less sanguine was the construction on his property of
a wooden observation tower over a hundred feet high, the top of which
was reached toilsomely by winding stairs, after the payment of
twenty-five cents. It is true that the tower commanded a pretty view by
land and water, but Colonel Sellers himself might have projected this