Dickson White. His grandfather, Asa White, a migrant from southern Massachusetts in 3798, was long the well-to-do miller of the little community, but in 1815 a conflagration brought him in a day to poverty; and his eldest son Horace, the father of Andrew, was forced, though but a lad of thirteen, to turn from the education of the schools to that of business. So well he learned its lessons that before the age of thirty he had not only won a reputation for unusual mercantile sagacity and enterprise, but had already amassed a moderate fortune when in 1831 he married Clara Dickson, only daughter of a village magnate. Her father, the Hon. Andrew Dickson, like the Whites of Massachusetts birth, had come a young man to Homer and was, in the year of his grandson's advent, the representative of his county in the Legislature of the State.
The fortunes of Horace White still prospered, and in 1839 he took advantage of the new banking law of the State to establish himself as one of the earliest bankers at Syracuse, the rising metropolis of central New York, then a town of some five thousand people. There his energy found a worthier field; identified with all the interests of his city, he rapidly amassed wealth, and all the advantages his own youth had missed he could well afford his son.
The earliest tastes of the boy were, however, not bookish; all his love was for machinery and for the wonders of out of doors; and, though he early picked up the power to read, it was not until after the removal to Syracuse that he was first put into school. Of his education he has himself told the story:
"After much time lost in various poor schools, I was sent to the preparatory department of the Syracuse Academy, and there, by good luck, found Joseph A. Allen, the best teacher of English branches I have ever known. . . . He seemed to divine the character and enter into the purpose of every boy." There young White perfected himself in spelling, in arithmetic, in geometry, the only mathematical study he ever loved, in grammar, of which he thinks there was too much; there he gained the rudiments of natural science and even of music, becoming "proficient enough to play the organ occasionally in church." There, too, literature was first opened to him. "Great attention was given to reading aloud from a book made up of selections from the best authors, and to recitals from these. Thus I stored up not only some of the best things in the older English writers, but inspiring poems of Whittier, Longfellow, and other moderns," and the treasures thus gained were never lost. "As to the moral side, Mr. Allen influenced many of us strongly by liberalizing and broadening our horizon. He was a disciple at that time of Channing, and an abolitionist; but he. . . never made the slightest attempt ta
