Author: Sprague, Charles
Biography:
SPRAGUE, Charles (1791-1875: findagrave.com)
He was born and died in Boston, one of the seven sons of Samuel and Joanna (Thayer) Sprague. He lost the sight of one eye by an accident when he was ten and left school at thirteen, at which point he was apprenticed in a dry goods business connected with his mother's family. In 1814 he married Elizabeth Rand, with whom he had four children, three of whom lived to be adults. After some false starts, he went to work as a teller in the State Bank in 1819. When the Globe Bank was established in 1824 he became its Cashier, a respected position that he held until his retirement in 1865 and passed on to his son Charles James Sprague (1823-1903), who also wrote poetry. Sprague's work was largely occasional; several broadsides, short celebratory poems, and contributions to periodicals are not included in this bibliography. But his work was popular enough to be anthologized and then collected in 1841, with further reprintings in his lifetime. Sprague himself supervised a revised edition, Poetical and Prose Writings, in 1850 according to the engraved title-page, or 1851 according to the printed one. His wife died in 1862; two children survived both of them. He is buried in the Central Burying Ground in Boston. (findagrave.com 15 Oct. 2020; DAB; Appleton)