Meserve was born on November 1, 1865, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of William Neal Meserve, a Congregational minister, and of Abigail Burnham Hill. The American Missionary Society sent the family to California, where William Meserve was active in founding several churches between 1868 and 1876. The family then returned to the East for a time and, while his father was pastor of several churches in the Boston area.
Meserve completed his secondary education in the Boston area. He studied medicine for a time in Boston but gave it up to go with his family to Colorado. The vigorous life of an outdoorsman appealed to him, and he spent extensive periods during 1887 and 1888, sometimes alone, atop Pikes Peak as an observer for Harvard University in an experiment to determine an appropriate site for an astronomical observatory. In 1888 Meserve entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While there he was a reporter for the Boston Globe and Herald, writing college news; he also worked part-time for an engineering firm. He left college in 1892, without graduating, to become the western manager for an engineering firm.
In 1893, Meserve moved to New York City to join Deering, Milliken, and Company, a textile commission firm. He remained with the firm for the rest of his life, although at one point he held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange with the brokerage firm of Charles W. Turner (1909 - 1919). Meserve's interest in old photographs began while he was collecting illustrations for a manuscript of his father's Civil War diary. Using income from his business ventures, he became a zealot in collecting photographs and negatives from the period 1850-1900, especially photographs of Lincoln. The collection eventually contained more than 200, 000 pieces. The extensive collection of Lincoln photographs was used by Jules Roiné during his work on the Lincoln Centennial Medal and by Victor Brenner, the designer of the head on the Lincoln penny. In 1911, Meserve had a book entitled Photographs of Abraham Lincoln privately printed. In 1917, four sets of a twenty-eight-volume work, Historical Photographs were produced; two more sets were made in 1944. The six extant sets of this work contain several hundred otherwise unpublished photographs of figures from government, education, and entertainment of the last half of the nineteenth century. Carl Sandburg assisted Meserve in the publication of The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln (1941). Meserve died in New York City.
Through his activity as a collector, Meserve discovered several "lost" photographs of Lincoln and preserved thousands of photographs of public figures that provide a visual record of a segment of American life in the nineteenth century. This collection was generously made available both to professional historians and interested nonspecialists.
(Excerpt from Historical Portraits and Lincolniana: Index ...)
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(Leopold Classic Library is delighted to publish this clas...)
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On November 6, 1899, Meserve married EdithTurner; they had three children.
