VIII, FARNUM PREPARATORY SCHOOL,

OF NEW JERSEY.

PAUL FARNUM, whose name is indissolubly associated by act of the legislature of New Jersey, passed May, 1857, with the Preparatory School, at Beverly, which his liberality has established, endowed, and conveyed to that state, and by the legislature adopted as a state institution, was born in Worcester County, Mass., in the year 1788, and is now therefore in his seventieth year. He removed to Boston, in 1825, and from that year, until 1846, was very successfully engaged in mercantile pursuits in the cities of Boston, and Philadelphia. During the latter year he abandoned business, and retired to a quiet and rural home on the high banks of the Delaware, near the borough of Beverly, where he now resides.

Mr. Farnum had for many years, entertained as a favorite idea, the project of establishing and endowing a school of a high order, for the benefit of the youth in his adopted vicinage. But when the legislature of New Jersey, in the winter of 1855, passed an act for the establishment of a Normal School for the training of teachers, leaving the location of the institution, open to the competition of the different localities desiring it, his quick eye readily discerned the means by which his generous purposes might be made at once to assume a much more comprehensive and beneficent shape, and to confer a succession of untold blessings, not only upon his own immediate neighborhood, but upon the people of the entire state. Accordingly, when proposals for the location of the Normal School were solicited, Mr. Farnum, appeared before the Board of Trustees, with offers more liberal than those made by any other man, or association of men.

His propositions would have been promptly accepted, but for overruling considerations, which compelled the trustees to fix upon the capital of the state, as the most appropriate theater for the trial of an "experiment," instituted by the legislature, and dependent upon its approving aid for a successful issue.

Mr. Farnum cheerfully acquiesced in this decision of the trustees, but proceeded with the erection of the building already commenced by him, and awaited a favorable opportunity for the realization of his favorite object, that of aiding the commonwealth in her efforts for the training of teachers for her public schools. The State Normal