14 Facts About Nathan Appleton

Nathan Appleton was an American merchant and politician and a member of "The Boston Associates".

Appleton's father was a church deacon, and Nathan was brought up in the "strictest form of Calvinistic Congregationalism".

Nathan Appleton then entered Dartmouth College in 1794 that same year he left college to begin mercantile life in Boston, Massachusetts, working for his brother Samuel, a successful and benevolent man of business, with whom he was in partnership from 1800 to 1809.

In 1813, Appleton co-operated with Francis Cabot Lowell, Patrick T Jackson, Paul Moody and others in introducing the power loom and the manufacture of cotton on a large scale into the United States, establishing a factory at Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814.

The settlement that grew around these factories developed into the city of Lowell, of which in 1821 Nathan Appleton was one of the three founders.

In 1818, Nathan Appleton purchased 300 shares of the Suffolk Bank, a clearinghouse bank on State Street in Boston.

Nathan Appleton was a member of the general court of Massachusetts in 1816,1821,1822,1824 and 1827.

Nathan Appleton was a member of the Academy of Science and Arts, and of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Nathan Appleton was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1842, and elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1854.

Nathan Appleton married Maria Theresa Gold on April 13,1806.

Nathan Appleton remarried on January 8,1839, to Harriot Coffin Sumner, the daughter of Jesse Sumner, a Boston merchant, and Harriot Coffin of Portland, Maine.

Nathan Appleton gave his daughter Fanny, who married Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1843, a house in which her husband had rented rooms as a wedding gift.

Fanny Nathan Appleton died on July 10,1861, after accidentally catching fire; her father was too sick to attend her funeral.

Nathan Appleton died the next day in Boston on July 14,1861.