The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, issue 1 | Page 5

oration was
by Edward Everett; Mr. Wilder presided, and delivered an able address.
On the central tablet of the great pavilion was this inscription:
"Marshall P. Wilder, president of the day. Blessed is he that turneth the
waste places into a garden, and maketh the wilderness to blossom as a
rose."
In January, 1868, he was solicited to take the office of president of the
New England Historic Genealogical Society, vacated by the death of
Governor Andrew. He was unanimously elected, and is now serving the
seventeenth year of his presidency. At every annual meeting he has
delivered an appropriate address. In his first address he urged the
importance of procuring a suitable building for the society. In 1870, he
said: "The time has now arrived when absolute necessity, public
sentiment, and personal obligations, demand that this work be done,
and done quickly." Feeling himself pledged by this address, he, as
chairman of the committee then appointed, devoted three months
entirely to the object of soliciting funds, during which time more than
forty thousand dollars was generously contributed by friends of the
association; and thus the handsome edifice at No. 18 Somerset Street
was procured. This building was dedicated to the use of the society,
March 18, 1871. He has since obtained donations, amounting to
upward of twelve thousand dollars, as a fund for paying the salary of
the librarian.
In 1859, he presided at the first public meeting called in Boston, in
regard to the collocation of institutions on the Back Bay lands, where
the splendid edifices of the Boston Society of Natural History and the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology now stand. Of the latter
institution he has been a vice-president, and the chairman of its Society
of Arts, and a director from the beginning. General Francis A. Walker,
the present president of the Institute, bore this testimony to his efforts
in its behalf at the in banquet to Mr. Wilder on his eighty-fifth
anniversary: "Through all the early efforts to attract the attention of the
legislature and the people to the importance of industrial and art
education, and through the severe struggles which so painfully tried the
courage and the faith even of those who most strongly and ardently
believed in the mission of the Institute, as well as through the happier
years of fruition, while the efforts put forth in the days of darkness and
despondency were bearing their harvest of success and fame, Colonel
Wilder was through all one of the most constant of the members of the
government in his attendance; one of the most hopeful in his views of
the future of the school; ever a wise counsellor and a steadfast ally."
He was one of the twelve representative men appointed to receive the
Prince of Wales in 1860, at the banquet given him in Boston, Edward
Everett being chairman of the committee; also one of the
commissioners in behalf of the Universal Exposition in Paris, 1867,
when he was placed at the head of the committee on horticulture and
the cultivation and products of the vine, the report of which was
published by act of Congress.
In 1869, he made a trip to the South, for the purpose of examining its
resources; and in 1870, with a large party, he visited California. The
result of Mr. Wilder's observations has been given to the public in a
lecture before the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, which was
repeated before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, Amherst
College, the Massachusetts Agricultural College, Dartmouth College,
the Horticultural Society, the merchants of Philadelphia, and bodies in
other places.
His published speeches and writings now amount to nearly one hundred
in number. A list to the year 1873 is printed in the Cyclopaedia of
American Literature. Dartmouth College, as a testimonial to his
services in science and literature, conferred upon him, in the year 1877,

the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
The Honorable Paul A. Chadbourne, LL.D., late president of Williams
College in a recent Memoir of Mr. Wilder remarks: "The interest which
Colonel Wilder has always manifested in the progress of education, as
well as the value and felicitous style of his numerous writings, would
lead one to infer at once that his varied knowledge and culture are the
results of college education. But he is only another illustrious example
of the men who, with only small indebtedness to schools, have proved
to the world that real men can make themselves known as such without
the aid of the college, as we have abundantly learned that the college
can never make a man of one who has not in him the elements of noble
manhood before he enters its halls."
In 1820, Mr. Wilder married Miss Tryphosa Jewett, daughter of Dr.
Stephen Jewett, of Rindge, a lady of great personal