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.
Read more about this topic: James Black (blacksmith)
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)