Daniel Willard

The contacts of Daniel Willard with the Century were naturally not continuous, he being a non-resident member, but they were not infrequent except in the later years. In all of them he was noted for the catholicity of his interests in men and things. Willard was an omnivorous reader. To someone who asked him the direct question he confessed to reading regularly three hundred books a year. History and especially biography he particularly loved. Circumstances, including health, had kept him from college, but at sixteen years of age he had held a teacher’s license in his native state, and during his sixteenth and seventeenth years he taught in the Hartland, Vt., district school. He boarded with a Mrs. Janice Taylor, a woman who was exceptionally cultured and could quote the great poets by the ream, and she excited his interest in good reading. Among the great railroad men of his time James J. Hill, Leonor F. Loree, and Fairfax Harrison were perhaps his nearest congeners in this respect. He had a distinctly retentive memory of what he read. About the only field of knowledge in which he was relatively but little interested was that of speculative philosophy; for everything else he seemed to have an unlimited appetite. Inquiry rather than disputation was his habit, and he was never caught in overstatement. With him the supposedly British leaning to meiosis seemed to be natural, as it does with so many other Vermonters. Moreover, when in a group he was a really good listener, and never obtruded “shop”; he talked it only when questioned about it. One who knew him intimately for more than half of his long life said that it seemed as if Willard never stopped educating himself, as if he were, subconsciously, regretting his early deprivation of college. He confessed, however, to a sneaking fondness for a lurid story of his boyhood days, “Red Knife, or Kit Carson’s Last Train,” and a morocco-bound copy of this classic reposed in his library, which he would re-read every few years. He told friends that it was not “intellectual enough” to attract the interest of his grandchildren! But of all novelists he liked Robert Louis Stevenson; and Whittier’s poem “In School Days” was his favorite piece of poetry. Millet, Corot and Inness were his favorite painters. Schumann’s Träumerei and Mendelssohn’s Spring Song were the pieces of music he liked best. A strong, sensitive and consistent character was his.

Geoffrey Parsons
1942 Century Memorials