Birth and Early Years
Tower was born at Cohasset, Massachusetts to a family settled at adjacent Hingham since its founding. He graduated with first honors at West Point in 1841. He served under General Scott in the Mexican War, led the storming column at Contreras, and was wounded at Chapultepec. After the war, Tower served as an engineer. He was responsible for the initial construction of the Federal facilities on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and Fort Point, San Francisco.
Read more about this topic: Zealous Bates Tower
Famous quotes containing the words birth and, birth, early and/or years:
“But pale despair and cold tranquillity,
Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition.”
—Helen Hayes (1900–1993)
“The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“They will tell you tough stories of sharks all over the Cape, which I do not presume to doubt utterly,—how they will sometimes upset a boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. I can easily believe in the undertow, but I have no doubt that one shark in a dozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach a hundred miles long.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)