Background
Thomas W. Flagg was born on November 5, 1805, in Beverly, Massachusetts, the second of the ten children of Isaac Flagg and Elizabeth Frances Wilson. His father’s ancestor, Thomas Flagg, came from England to Massachusetts in 1637.
Thomas W. Flagg was born on November 5, 1805, in Beverly, Massachusetts, the second of the ten children of Isaac Flagg and Elizabeth Frances Wilson. His father’s ancestor, Thomas Flagg, came from England to Massachusetts in 1637.
Thomas Wilson Flagg — he later dropped the first name — graduated from Phillips Andover Academy in 1821, spent a few months at Harvard, and later studied medicine at the Harvard Medical School, 1824 - 1825, and with a doctor in Beverly. Flagg never practised.
His residence was at different times in Beverly, Boston, and Andover, and after 1866 in Cambridge.
In Boston, Flagg was an insurance agent, and around 1844, a clerk at the customshouse. Over a long period he wrote articles for the Atlantic Monthly and for various political and horticultural magazines.
Flagg wrote also a number of books. In the Analysis of Female Beauty (1834) he set forth in little essays of alternate verse and prose, with a fair quota of physiognomical details, the qualities of intellect which he held such details to indicate.
Ten years later came The Tailor’s Shop: or, Crowns of Thorns and Coats of Thistles. Designed to Tickle Some and Nettle Others; Intended Chiefly for Politicians. Inscribed to Those Whom They May Fit. This opus, fathered by Pope and mothered by a somewhat bumptious Americanism, flays many of the wicked, two of whom were "Smirk, the City Editor, " and "Puff the Poet. "
In 1861, Flagg published Mount Auburn. Its Scenes, Its Beauties, and Its Lessons, a lugubrious compilation of writings by himself and others, relating specifically to the cemetery near Boston, and generally to all mortuary matters everywhere.
The first memorably notable evidence of his interest as a naturalis — an interest which dominated his life — was in 1857, when he published Studies in the Field and Forest.
A Prize Essay on Agricultural Education appeared in 1858, The Woods and By-Ways of New England in 1872, and The Birds and Seasons of New England in 1875. The last two volumes, a little bulky for practical purposes, were in 1881 divided into three volumes, with new titles, Halcyon Days, A Year with the Birds, and A Year Among the Trees.
Flagg wrote only about subjects which he could investigate without ranging far from home, and he was certainly not an avid scientist, but he observed carefully and affectionately, and he set down his findings in prose which, if impersonal and unsuggestive, has always the merit of clarity and down-rightness. Thomas W. Flagg died on May 6, 1884, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Quotations: "My life has been too retired for that sort of personal adventure which inspires enthusiasm. Few men save those who from religious motives have retired from the world have lived so little in communication with it as I have. I am not a member of any society or club, of any church or institution, trade, profession, or organization. I have lived entirely without honors, and have never rejected any. My wife and children have been the only companions of my studies and recreations. But, perhaps from this cause alone, I have been very happy. "
On January 2, 1840, Thomas W. Flagg married Caroline Eveleth.