Lawrence Street
From Worcester Activist wiki
A Worcester street and a Kansas city honor the same man. Amos A. Lawrence was a prominent and prosperous Boston business man whose ideals remained unsmirched by his fortune.
“Mr. Lawrence was an anti-slavery man, heart and soul,” declared the Boston Advertiser on Aug. 23, 1886, the day following his death.
Amos Lawrence was born in Boston in 1814; was graduated from Harvard in 1835 and began his business career on a high stool in a counting house in 1837.
When commercial concerns began to topple in the depression of that year, Lawrence went into business himself as a commission merchant.
Successful, he enlarged his operations; went into textile fabrics. Then he inherited considerable money from his father, part of which was in cotton manufacturing concerns. These Lawrence continued. He later established knit goods and worsted mills.
His father also left him a large tract of land in Wisconsin known as the “Williams Grant.” Lawrence added to this and founded Appleton, Wisconsin.
But he achieved his greatest fame when he wholeheartedly subscribed to a Worcester man’s plan to settle Kansas as a free state. Eli Thayer found in Lawrence the perfect treasurer for his New England Emigrant Aid Company.
The company spent about $140,000 in winning its objective. Lawrence was easily the largest subscriber. Lawrence, Kansas, one of the first towns founded in 1857, was named for him.
In Boston, Lawrence held many positions as an officer, president, director and trustee of savings banks, trust companies, insurance and steamship companies, manufacturing concerns, charitable, religious an educational institutions. He was a treasurer of Harvard University.
He died on Aug. 22, 1886, at his Nahant summer home.
Among the mourners at his funeral was a woman whom nobody knew. She had come from Lawrence, Kansas, as a delegation of one.
Lawrence street first appeared in 1871. It stretches from Kansas street west to D street.
The core of this article comes from A History of Your City Streets.
