Author: Devens, Richard
Biography:
DEVENS, Richard (b 1749: ancestry.com)
Born on 23 Oct. 1749 in Charlestown MA to Richard and Mary Devens, he graduated from Princeton in 1767. After three years as a schoolmaster in New York and New Jersey, he returned to Princeton as a tutor in mathematics, but in 1774 he had a mental breakdown and the trustees dismissed him. He returned to Charlestown and lived there until his death, "an affecting, living monument to parents and near connexions" who might invest all their hopes in one brilliant youth, according to the relative quoted in the preface to the 1795 edition of A Paraphrase. His year of death is unconfirmed: Hollis gives 1835 but that seems improbable. (ancestry.com 9 Oct. 2025; S. D. Alexander, Princeton College during the Eighteenth Century [1872], 118; James McLachlan, Princetonians 1748-1786 [1976]) HJ