Gardiner Greene Hubbard

Hubbard was born, raised and educated in Boston, Massachusetts to Samuel Hubbard (June 2, 1785 – December 24, 1847), a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice,[3] and Mary Greene (April 19, 1790 – July 10, 1827).[4] His younger brother was Charles Eustis Hubbard (1842-1928), who later became the first secretary and clerk of the Bell Telephone Company.[5]

Hubbard was a grandson of Boston merchant Gardiner Greene.[6] He was also a descendant of Lion Gardiner, an early English settler and soldier in the New World who founded the first English settlement in what later became the State of New York, and whose legacy includes Gardiners Island which remains in the family.[3]

He attended Phillips Academy, Andover, and graduated from Dartmouth in 1841. He then studied law at Harvard, and was admitted to the bar in 1843.[1]

He first settled in Cambridge and joined the Boston law firm of Benjamin Robbins Curtis.[1] There he became active in local institutions. Hubbard helped establish a city water works in Cambridge, was a founder of the Cambridge Gas Co. and later organized a Cambridge to Boston trolley system. Hubbard also played a pivotal role in the founding of Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was the first oral school for the deaf in the United States, and Hubbard remained a trustee for the rest of his life.

Hubbard entered the national stage by becoming a proponent for the nationalization of the telegraph system (then a monopoly of the Western Union Company, as he explained) under the U.S. Postal Service stating in an article: "The Proposed Changes in the Telegraphic System",[7] "It is not contended that the postal system is free from defects, but that it removes many of the grave evils of the present system, without the introduction of new ones; and that the balance of benefits greatly preponderates in favor of the cheap rates, increased facilities, limited and divided powers of the postal system." During the late 1860s, Hubbard lobbied Congress to pass the U.S. Postal Telegraph Bill known as the Hubbard Bill. The bill would have chartered the U.S. Postal Telegraph Company that would be connected to the U.S. Post Office, but the bill did not pass.

To benefit from the Hubbard Bill, Hubbard needed patents which dominated essential aspects of telegraph technology such as sending multiple messages simultaneously on a single telegraph wire. This was called the "harmonic telegraph" or acoustic telegraphy. To acquire such patents, Hubbard and his partner Thomas Sanders (whose son was deaf) financed Alexander Graham Bell's experiments and development of an acoustic telegraph, which led to his invention of the telephone.

Following Curtis's retirement, Hubbard relocated to Washington, D.C. where he continued to practice law for 5 more years. In 1876, he was appointed by President Grant to determine the proper rates for railway mail and he served as a commissioner to the Centennial Exposition.[1]

Hubbard and his wife, Gertrude, in the 1890s

In 1846, Hubbard married Gertrude Mercer McCurdy (1827–1909), the daughter of Robert Henry McCurdy, a prominent New York City businessman,[14] and Gertrude Mercer Lee, who was the niece of Theodore Frelinghuysen, a United States Senator and former vice presidential candidate.[15] Her brother, Richard Aldrich McCurdy, served as president of Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York.[15] Together, they had six children:[16]

• Robert Hubbard (1847–1849), who died young.
• Gertrude McCurdy Hubbard (1849–1886), who married Maurice Neville Grossmann (1843–1884)
• Mabel Gardiner Hubbard (1859–1923), who married Alexander Graham Bell, the son of Alexander Melville Bell, in 1877.[2]
• Roberta Wolcott Hubbard (1859–1885), who married Charles James Bell (1858–1929), son of David Charles Bell and a cousin of Alexander Graham Bell, in 1881.
• Grace Hubbard (1865–1948), who married her sister Roberta's husband, Charles, in 1887 after Roberta's death during childbirth in 1885.
• Marian Hubbard (1867–1869), who also died young.[17]

Gardiner Hubbard's daughter Mabel became deaf at the age of five from scarlet fever.[18] She later became a student of Alexander Graham Bell, who taught deaf children, and they eventually married.[19]

Hubbard's house on Brattle Street in Cambridge (on whose lawn, in 1877, Hubbard's daughter Mabel married Alexander Graham Bell) no longer stands. But a large beech tree from its garden still (in 2011) remains. To service his then-modern Cambridge house, Hubbard wanted gas lights, the then-new form of illumination. So he founded the Cambridge Gas Company, now part of NSTAR. After he moved to Washington, D.C. from Cambridge in 1873, Hubbard subdivided his large Cambridge estate. On Hubbard Park Road and Mercer Circle (Mercer was his wife's maiden name), he built large houses designed for Harvard faculty. On nearby Foster Street, he built smaller houses, still with modern amenities, for "the better class of mechanic." This neighborhood west of Harvard Square in Cambridge is now both popular and expensive.[20][21]

He died on December 11, 1897 at Twin Oaks, his suburban residence.[1] His funeral was held at the Church of the Covenant in Washington, where he was president of the board of trustees.[22] His widow died during a car accident on October 20, 1909 in Washington, D.C.[23][24]

Descendants

1947 photograph of Bell descendants with statue of Bell

Through his daughter Gertrude, he was the grandfather of Gertrude Hubbard Grossmann (1882–1919), who married Peter Stuyvesant Pillot (1870–1935),[25] at Hubbard's home, Twin Oaks, in 1903.[26] Their daughter, Rosalie Pillot (1907–1959) was married to Lewis Rutherfurd Stuyvesant (1903–1944),[27] the son of Rutherfurd Stuyvesant,[28] in 1925.[29] After giving birth to a son,[30][31] they divorced in 1935.[32]

Through his daughter Mabel, he was the grandfather of Elsie May Bell (1878–1964), who married Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor of National Geographic fame,[33][34] Marian Hubbard "Daisy" Bell (1880–1962), who was married to David Fairchild.[35][36][N 1] and two boys who died in infancy (Edward in 1881 and Robert in 1883).

Through his daughter Roberta, he was the grandfather of Grace Hubbard Bell (1884–1979), who was married to Granville Roland Fortescue (1875–1952), an American soldier and Rough Rider who was the cousin of Theodore Roosevelt and son of Robert Roosevelt (born while his biological father was married to his first wife but adopted by him following her death and his marriage to his mother).[39] Grace was the mother of three girls, Marion Fortescue, who married Daulton Gillespie Viskniskki in 1934, Thalia Fortescue Massie (1911–1963), and Kenyon Fortescue Reynolds (1914–1990), better known as actress Helene Whitney.[40]

• Bell Telephone Company
• Clarke Schools for Hearing and Speech, which includes an image of Hubbard Hall
• Massie Case, a manslaughter trial involving Hubbard's granddaughter
• Hubbard Medal, of the National Geographic Society

Notes

Sources

• Media related to Gardiner Greene Hubbard at Wikimedia Commons
• Works by Gardiner Greene Hubbard at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Biography at National Geographic
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead. Missing or empty |title= (help)

• Poole, Robert M. Explorers House: National Geographic and the World it Made. New York: Penguin, 2004. ISBN 1-59420-032-7
• Gray, Charlotte, Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention, New York, Arcade Publishing, 2006. ISBN 1-55970-809-3
• Bruce, Robert V., Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude, Cornell University Press, 1973. ISBN 0-8014-9691-8
• Israel, Paul, Edison: A Life of Invention, Wiley, 1998. ISBN 0-471-36270-0