Alonzo Ames Miner was born on August 17, 1814, in Lempster, New Hampshire, to Benjamin and Amanda Miner. His father earned a living as a farmer. He worked as a teacher in the early 1830s, and in 1835, he became principal of the Unity Scientific and Military Academy. While working there, he met Maria S. Perley, who served as the school’s preceptress. The couple got married on August 24, 1836.

 

He was ordained as a Universalist minister in June 1839, and he spent the next few years in Methuen and Lowell, Massachusetts. He moved to Boston around 1848. He served on the Boston school board, the Massachusetts Board of Education, and the Harvard University Board of Overseers. He also served as president of the Massachusetts State Temperance Alliance. He fiercely opposed slavery. On July 4, 1855, he delivered an “oration” denouncing the institution as a “harlot” that had defiled the “temple of liberty, and flaunt[ed] her shame in the glare of the noon-day sun!”

 

By 1860, he owned $8,000 of real estate and $2,000 of personal property. A decade later, he owned $45,000 of real estate and $20,000 of personal property. He became president of Tufts College in 1862, and he held the position for the next thirteen years. He ran for governor in 1878 as a Prohibition candidate. He died of “heart paralysis from gen[eral] exhaustion” in Boston on June 14, 1895.

 

Image: Alonzo A. Miner (courtesy Wikicommons)

SOURCES