Class of 1857

Edward Watson Denny died of Bright's disease at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Boston, July 26, after a brief illness.

He was the son of George and Charlotte Sophia (Parkman) Denny, and was born in Westboro, Mass., November 12, 1836. The late James H. Denny '59 was a brother. He fitted for college at Leicester Academy.

From graduation until 1862 he was engaged in mercantile and manufacturing pursuits in Keokuk, lowa, and near Worcester, Mass. He enlisted as private in the Fifth Massachusetts Volunteers September 19, 1862, and was mustered in as first sergeant. With this regiment he served in the 18th Army Corps in North Carolina, and was mustered out July 2, 1863. He was commissioned first lieutenant in the Second Massachusetts Heavy Artillery August IS, 1863, and brevetted captain of volunteers March 13, 1865, for meritorious service. While in this regiment he served as provost marshal on the staff of Brigadier General Pierce at Readville, Mass., for a time, and was later acting assistant inspector general on the staff of General Israel Vogdes at Portsmouth, Va., and aide-de-camp on his staff in Florida. While in Florida, he personally captured many of the personal effects of Jefferson Davis. He was finally mustered out September 3, 1865.

After leaving- the army, he was engaged in banking, steamboat, and railroad enterprises, living mostly at Jacksonville, Fla., to 1877. In 1878 he located in New York, and was for a time connected with the Manhattan Beach Improvement Company. He then retired from business aside from occasional operations in stocks, and traveled much, both in this country and in Europe. For several years prior to 1914 he lived in Geneva, Switzerland. Since his return in that year to America, he had divided his time among Washington, New York, and Boston and vicinity.

Captain Denny was a member of the University Club of Washington, the Army and Navy Club of New York, the Delta Kappa Epsilon Club of New York, and the military order of the Loyal Legion of the United States.

March 15, 1871, he was married to Kate M., daughter of Edwin L. Brown of New York, who died in 1906. They had no children.

Nicholas Smith died August 15 at the summer home of his daughter at Fort Salonga, Long Island.

The son of Nicholas and Mary Brackett. (Fore) Smith, he was born at Shelbyville, Ky., December 25, 1836. He was a member of his Dartmouth class only for a part of senior year, his home being then in Leavenworth, Kansas. What college he attended before coming to Dartmouth has not been ascertained.

In 1858-60 he attended Harvard Law School, graduating therefrom in 1859. He began practice in Leavenworth. May 14, 1861, he was commissioned captain in the Nineteenth United States Infantry, and served for some time as mustering officer at Louisville, Ky. In 1863 he was appointed with the rank of colonel to the staff of Major General James H. Lane, who had organized an expedition against Texas. Owing to a change of command, he did not go, and resigned from the army July 16, 1863.

He then returned to Leavenworth, and was in Lawrence for a time as editor and proprietor of the Republican. In the spring of 1865 he went to New York, and in the fall of that year opened a law office there. President Johnson offered him the appointment of minister to Greece, but he declined to accept, his wife having recently died. She was Lucinda, daughter of Col. William Pope of Louisville, Ky., whom he had married in 1865.

He soon gave up practice, and entered upon farming at Chappaqua, N. Y., devoting much time to literary pursuits and lecturing on popular subjects. May 1, 1875, he was married to Ida Lillian, daughter of Horace Greeley of New York and Chappaqua. She died in 1882, In 1878 he was defeated for Congress as a candidate of the Greenback party, and again in 1880 as an independent.

In 1883 he removed to Shelbyville, Ky. In 1889 he was appointed United States consul at Three Rivers,, Quebec, and in 1893 consul at Liege, Belgium. In recent years he had made his home in New York city, occasionally spending a few months in Kentucky. For the last two years he had been most of the time with his daughter in Philadelphia. He was never really ill in his life, and had been only growing weak for a few days before his death from Bright's disease.

Colonel Smith had three children: Horace Greeley, 2d, who bears his grandfather's name and is head of the bacteriological department of the board of health in Brooklyn; Mrs. Nixola Greeley-Smith Ford, journalist and author, who died March 9, 1919; and Ida Greeley-Smith Geissler (Mrs. Louis Geissler) of Philadelphia.

The following is quoted from the New York Evening Telegram: "In all of his six feet, three inches of height he radiated personality. Thatched with a veritable mane of hair which rivaled the shimmering whiteness of driven snow, he was the center of attention where- ever he went. People turned and stared at his wonderful physique and Apollo-like profile as he passed. Born in Shelby county, Ken- tucky, he retained all the courtly graces of the true before-the-war Southerner."