History of Kingston, (Rockingham County) New Hampshire United States of America

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Biographies:

Josiah Bartlett, signer of the Declaration of Independence, was born at Amesbury, Mass., Nov. 21, 1729. He received an academic education and a thorough course in medicine, and in 1750 began practice in Kingston, N.H. His methods of medical treatment were original, and largely acquired while doctoring himself through a protracted fever. His experience being in direct opposition to the usages of the profession, he departed from the "old school," and his success won him a large practice. He introduced Peruvian bark into use in 1754. In 1765 he became a member of the colonial legislature of New Hampshire and held the office by annual re-election until the revolution. While in the legislature he opposed the royalists, and the governor made an unsuccessful attempt to win him over to his support by appointing him a magistrate and commissioned him a lieutenant-colonel of militia. His zeal in the cause of the colonies was not abated, however, and in 1775 he was deposed from both offices. He was a member of the committee of safety which conducted the affairs of government after the departure of Governor Wentworth from the colony in 1775, and he was a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1775 and 1776, being the first to cast a vote for the Declaration of Independence and the second to sign it. He resigned as delegate to Congress shortly after he was appointed general naval agent, and later accompanied General Stark to Bennington, having been charged with the medical supplies of the New Hampshire troops. In 1778-'79 he was again a delegate to Congress, and in November, 1779, resigned his seat to accept the office of chief justice of the court of common pleas of New Hampshire. He became muster-master in 1780; justice of the superior court of the state in 1782; chief justice in 1788, and in the latter year served as a delegate to the convention called to ratify the federal constitution. Though declining an election to the first United States Congress as a senator in 1789 on the plea of age, he accepted the presidency of the state when it was offered him by the legislature in 1790, and after serving for three years, being re-elected by popular vote each year, he became in 1793 the first governor of the state under its new constitution. He received the honorary degree of A.M. and M.D. from Dartmouth college, and was for many years the president of the New Hampshire medical society. He died at Kingston, N.H., May 19, 1795.

From: Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, Johnson, Rossiter, editor

George Bartlett Prescott, electrician, was born in Kingston, N.H., Sept. 16, 1830; son of Mark Hollis and Priscilla (Bartlett) Prescott; grandson of Mark and Polly (Bean) Prescott, and of David Bartlett, anal a descendant of James, the immigrant, and Mary (Boulter) Prescott. He received a private school education in Portland, Me., made a special study of electricity and telegraphy, and was connected with several telegraph offices in Connecticut and Massachusetts, 1847-58. He was married, Dec. 9, 1857, to Eliza Curtis, daughter of Israel M. Parsons of Springfield, Mass. He was superintendent of the American telegraph company, 1858-66; of the Western Union telegraph company, 1866-69, and electrician of the latter in 1869. He was associated with Thomas A. Edison in the duplex and quadruplex telegraphic inventions; introduced them in 1870 and 1874; invented an improvement in telegraph insulators in 1872, and in the quadruplex telegraph in 1876. He was electrician of the International Ocean telegraph company, 1878-83; and in 1883 was sent to Europe by the Western Union telegraph company to study foreign methods of telegraphy. On his return he introduced many improvements, among them the pneumatic tube system, which was adopted in New York city in 1876. He was vice-president, director and member of the executive and finance committees of the Gold and Stock telegraph company, 1873-81; one of the incorporators and directors of the Metropolitan telephone and telegraph company, 1879-82; president of the Manhattan telegraph company and of the American Speaking telephone company, 1879-82, and a director and member of the executive committee of the Bell telephone company of Philadelphia. He published an account of his discovery of the electrical origin of the Aurora Borealis, and his experiments thereon in the Boston Journal, February, 1852, and in the Atlantic Monthly, 1859, and is the author of: History, Theory and Practice of the Electric Telegraph (1860); The Proposed Union of the Telegraph and Postal Systems (1869); The Government and the Telegraph (1872); Electricity and the Electric Telegraph (1877); The Speaking Telephone, Talking Phonograph and Other Novelties (1878); The Speaking Telephone, Electric Light, and other Recent Electrical Inventions (1879); Dynamo-Electricity; its Generation, Application, Transmission, Storage and Measurement (1884); Bell's Electric Speaking Telephone;its Invention, Construction, Application, Modification and History (1884), and The Electric'Telephone (1890). He died in New York city, Jan. 18, 1894.

From: Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, Johnson, Rossiter, editor