The Horace Greeley Foundation

Greeley was born on a farm near Amherst, New Hampshire, on February 3, 1811. He nearly died at birth and was a sickly child.

His mother, Mary (Woodburn) Greeley, raised him with great love. “I was her companion and confidant about as early as I could talk; and her abundant store of ballads, stories, anecdotes, and traditions was daily poured into my willing ears. I learned to read at her knee,” he wrote. He became an avid reader, and could actually read print upside down and sideways.

The Greeleys were a poor family. Horace’s father, Zaccheus, struggled to make a living, moving from farm to farm. At age five Horace was already working in the fields. In 1816 – the Year Without a Summer – Horace had the job of digging open the hills of corn to kill the wireworms and grubs. Later he rode the horse that guided the oxen in plowing and tilling. Sometimes he would be up all night watching a fire pit as green wood was reduced to ash for potash.

Horace received only a common school education, but made the most of it. He remembered his schoolmasters with affection throughout his life. “The capital start given me by mother enabled me to make rapid progress in school – a progress monstrously exaggerated by gossip and tradition,” he wrote in his autobiography. When wealthy neighbors offered to send him to Phillips Academy in Exeter, Zaccheus refused to receive what he saw as charity.

By 1821, Zaccheus was bankrupt and, fearing arrest, moved from New Hampshire for a fresh start in West Haven, Vermont. “We had been farmers of the poorer class in New Hampshire; we took rank with the day-laborers in Vermont,” Horace remembered.