Horatio Gates Spafford, Sr.
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Horatio Gates Spafford (1778-1832) was a writer and inventor, who was well known for compiling two gazetteers of New York State.[1] He was born in Dorset, Vermont, but spent most of his adult life in New York State, near Albany. Spafford was the father of the lawyer and poet also named Horatio Gates Spafford.
Spafford's father was Captain John Spafford, who served with Revolutionary-War general and hero Horatio Gates, in Gate's victory at the Battle of Saratoga.[2] Despite his illustrious namesake, Horatio Gates Spafford did not stick with military training.
Captain Spafford and his wife, Mary Baldwin Spafford, raised their large family (eventually 10 children) in Vermont.[3]
Advocate for public education and science
Through publications and wide correspondence, Gates aimed to advance education for the American democratic citizenry. Among many notables with whom he corresponded were Noah Webster, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.[4]
Spafford’s first book was General Geography and Rudiments of Useful Knowledge… on a New Plan, and Designed for the Use of Schools (1809). Besides geography and other topics, it covered astronomy, government, education, and world religions.[5] Jedediah Morse had a lock on the school Geography-text market, however; so, Spafford did not have success there.[6]
In 1815, Spafford began compiling, editing, and distributing a magazine: American Magazine, A Monthly Miscellany of Many Kinds. He had an impressive list of subscribers, like Madison and Webster, but not enough to keep the journal going for more than a year.
One of Spafford’s articles in that magazine, written under a pseudonym, strongly encouraged practical over classical education. His idea may have influenced the founding, in Troy, New York, near where Spafford was living, of the future Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.[7] Spafford also wrote articles describing various of his own inventions, like a new carriage-wheel axle design.[8]
Spafford did not have much luck making money, whether by writing, inventions, or periods of land speculating. However, if only he had pursued it further, Spafford might possibly have invented a winner as an idea he presented in a scientific paper on “the art of making Iron and Steel from native Ores of the United States” was virtually the same as what Bessemer patented years later as the “Bessemer Process” for removing impurities from iron to make steel.[9]