Charles A. Dana (1819 - 1897)
Born at Hinsdale (NH); died at West Island (NY).
Writer, newspaper correspondent and editor, Civil War reporter.
Portrait by G.P.A. Healy, 1885.

Dana's parents moved from Hinsdale to Gaines (NY) when the boy was two years of age; later they moved to Guildhall (VT). At age twelve (1831) Dana went to live with an uncle at Buffalo (NY). He was educated at public schools, and studied for two years at Harvard College before leaving because of failing eyesight. [Dana received an honorary A.B. degree as a member of the Harvard Class of 1843; he received an honorary A.M. degree from Harvard in 1861.]

Between 1841 - 1846 Dana was a trustee of Brook Farm, an "Institute of Agriculture and Education" which was founded at West Roxbury (MA) by the transcendentalist George Ripley and his wife Sophia. The 192-acre farm failed in 1847, but included in its shareholders such luminaries as Nathaniel Hawthorne and John S. Dwight, in addition to Dana. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and W.H. Channing, among others, ensured a lively intellectual climate. Dana's first newspaper work was with Brook Farm's newspaper The Harbinger; in addition, Dana was an assistant editor on the Boston Chronotype (1844).

When Brook Farm closed in 1847 Dana became an assistant editor on Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. This was the most famous anti-slavery newspaper of its day, and except for a European trip in 1848, Dana stayed with the paper as a part owner and managing editor until April 1, 1862 - when Horace Greeley demanded Dana's resignation and got it. Greeley felt Dana was pushing too hard for a swift end to the Civil War; the two men did not meet again for ten years. In 1872 Dana's New York newspaper, The Sun supported Greeley as the Democratic Party's nominee for the presidency.

Two months after resigning from the Tribune, Charles Dana was made a member of a War Department commission investigating conditions and claims about pay irregularities in the Union forces' Western Army. On June 1, 1863 Dana was appointed a major, so that he might be eligible for exchange of military prisoners if he was captured at the battlefield. At the same time he was completing the sixteen-volume New American Cyclopedia (which he had been working on since 1858 with co-editor George Ripley, his old Brook Farm friend).

During 1863/64 Dana was an observer in the field for the Union Army. He visited the headquarters of Union Army generals Rosecrans, Sheridan, Sherman, and Grant. His work was extremely important to the war effort:

...Stanton and Lincoln...always honored him with their confidence and friendship, - Mr. Lincoln called him "the eyes of the government at the front"... (Senator William E. Chandler, "Charles Anderson Dana", Granite Monthly, vol. XX No. 3 (March 1896)

After the war, Dana started the Chicago Republican (1865), and in 1868 he became the owner and editor of The Sun, the New York daily. Dana turned The Sun into a strong voice for reform and for the Democratic Party. Serving as the newspaper's editor 1868 - 1897, Dana attacked Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall corruption. He fought the Grant Administration, while pioneering modern newspaper editing and a new kind of journalism which stressed "human interest." At the same time Dana found time to revise the American Cyclopedia (1873/76), and to edit books of poetry. His work The Art of Newspaper Making (1895) was widely read in its day; two additional works, Recollections of Civil War and Eastern Journeys, appeared posthumously in 1898.

Location: First Floor, State House