Octavius Brooks Frothingham

FROTHINGHAM, Octavius Brooks. b. Boston, Massachusetts, 26 November 1822; d. Boston, 27 November 1895. He was the son of Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham* (1793-1870), Unitarian minister and hymn-writer (JJ, p. 400) and his wife Ann Gorham Brooks. Octavius was educated at Harvard College (graduated 1843) and Harvard Divinity School (1843-46), where he was a contemporary of Samuel Johnson*, Samuel Longfellow*, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson*. He wrote of his time there: ‘To enter at once the Divinity School was to start on a predestined career. From childhood I was marked out for a clergyman’ (1891, p. 25). In March 1847 he was ordained to the North Church, Salem, Massachusetts, to which he...