MR. NEWMAN WEEKS
Brief Sketch of a Busy and Useful Life Not Yet Finished, Hale and Hearty at Seventy-nine.
It is with much gratification that we this week present our readers with a most excellent likeness of a gentleman who is well known throughout Rutland County.
Mr. Newman Weeks was born in Clarendon, in the county of Rutland, October 24, 1824. His grandfather, John Weeks, came from Washington, Connecticut, in 1785 and settled on a farm in North Clarendon. His oldest son, William Weeks, father of Newman, built a large house on the farm in 1800 and kept a stage tavern until 1820.
Newman Weeks was the youngest of a family of fourteen children, and is the only one now living. He was educated , in the common schools and Black River Academy at Ludlow. From 1845 to 1848 he resided in the city of Boston, Mass., but in 1848 he returned to East Clarendon and, in company with his nephew, D. W. C. Gaskill, opened a railroad store and established a post office at East Clarendon.
In 1853, Mr. Weeks moved to Rutland village and has resided there ever since. He was in the employ of the Rutland and Burlington railroad until 1861, and served as chief clerk in the quarter-master general’s department of the state in fitting out the seventeen regiments of infantry and one regiment of cavalry which made such excellent records during the war of the rebellion.
After the war Mr. Weeks engaged in merchandising in furniture, crockery, carpets and general house-furnishing goods in Rutland for ten years. He has been a justice of the peace, holding courts for thirty-six years; and has been a pension claim agent, under commission from the United States pension department, for fifteen years.
In politics Mr. Weeks has always been a Whig and anti-slavery Republican; in religion a “Liberal Christian Spiritualist”; in habits, radical temperance—total abstainer from every kind of intoxicating drinks and tobacco in any form. He believes in being temperate in all things, trying to live according to nature’s laws and human laws, and keeping clear of the penalties that surely follow all violations. He tells us he has not been sick in sixteen years; tips the scales at 180 pounds and has no use for doctors except as friends.