Author: Holmes, Abiel
Biography:
HOLMES, Abiel (1763-1837: DAB)
He was born in Woodstock CT, son of Captain David Holmes (who had been an army surgeon during the Revolutionary War) and his second wife Temperance Bishop. He graduated from Yale in 1783 and began work as a Congregational minister even before he was ordained in 1785, serving first at a church in Georgia. In 1790 he married Mary (Polly) Stiles (q.v.), daughter of Ezra Stiles, then President of Yale. From 1792 to 1829 he was the minister of the First Church in Cambridge MA. But his wife suffered from ill health. In 1795 both she and her father died. A Family Tablet (1796), which Holmes edited and to which he contributed as "Myron," was a tribute to the Stiles family, as was his biography of President Stiles (1798). In 1801 he married Sarah Wendell, with whom he had five children, one of them the writer Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes was a trustee of Andover Theological Seminary from 1809 till his death, and Corresponding Secretary of the Massachusetts Historical Society from 1813 to 1833. As a writer he is remembered chiefly for his historical work, notably American Annals (1805, 2nd edn. 1829). He died in Cambridge. (DAB; Dexter) HJ