Early Life
James Black was born in Hackensack, New Jersey on 1 May 1800. James' mother died when he was very young and he had difficulty getting along with his stepmother. Black ran away from home to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at age 8 and was apprenticed to a silversmith. At age 18 he migrated westward and took jobs on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. About 1820 Black spent some time at Bayou Sara in Louisiana working as a ferryman and as a steamboat deckhand on the Red River which took him upstream to Fulton, Arkansas. Black left the boat and settled at a crossroads 14 miles northeast of Fulton that would later become Washington, Arkansas and Black's permanent home.
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Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)