Rev. Samuel Locke

TL;DR -- Samuel Locke was Head of Harvard in the period prior to the Revolution in which he is noted to have been a Patriot. He is one of the neglected Heads about whom little has been written or has been lifted to public attention. Given that our 250th view of those times is coming up, we expect to spend some time looking at Samuel. He was from Woburn, MA as was Count Rumford. 

-- 

As we continue our look at Harvard, we have started to build a list of pertinent posts: History of Harvard (ours), Heads of Harvard (Wikipedia), History of the Presidency (Harvard), Catalogues of Harvard (Hathi Trust, mainly for the classes, years and graduates) and several posts in this blog concerning specifics of Presidents, their times, lives, and families (including information from WikiTree). We had been picking interesting Presidents due to their being pertinent to some point that we were researching starting with James Bryant Conant who had been mentioned in a New Yorker article in 2021. 

Grave of Samuel Locke

The subject of today's post comes from the period right before the Revolution which was 250 years ago, to which event SAR and DAR are  paying attention. Samuel Locke (WikiTree: Locke-1406, the Collection of his papers) came into his role in 1770 which was 150 years (six generations) after the noted arrival, but he had a short reign. 

Locke graduated from Harvard in 1755 during the reign of Edward Holyoke who has not been covered yet in this series of post (will be soon). Locke was ordained at Sherborn, MA. His Harvard position started in 1770 during a time of turmoil. We will look at that further. 

Locke has minimal information published about him in Wikipedia. The Biography at the Collection is much better and mentions his patriot stance in the Revolution. Locke was the first Head where we thought to look for information in the SAR/DAR databases and in the multi-volume Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailor collection; however, he died in 1777 (we will review other Heads of that time). The material on him given at the History of the Presidency site at Harvard can support more research. 

Future work will look at Woburn, MA, the birthplace of Locke. Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was born there. Locke was followed by Winthrop, for a brief time. Thompson, when young, had attended, unofficially, lectures by Winthrop. 

Remarks: Modified: 06/28/2022

06/28/2022 -- Added link to post on Edward Holyoke.