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The Natural Arithmetic - Specially Prepared For Elementary Schools.
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Zalmon Richards, the son of Nehemiah and Betsey Richards, was born on August 11, 1811 at Cummington, Massachussets. His father, a farmer, was a descendant of William Richards, an emigrant from England, who was in Plymouth in 1633 and moved later to Scituate and in 1693 to Weymouth.
Education
Between the ages of three and ten, when not needed on the farm, Zalmon attended the country school, and his first teacher, Sybil Bates, stirred in him a lifelong interest in education and religion. For short periods he studied in a private school at Cummington and in its successor, the Cummington Academy.
Supplementing his early schooling by courses at the Southampton Academy and private instruction, he entered Williams College, where he came under the influence of Mark Hopkins. He graduated in 1836.
Career
At fifteen he joined the local Baptist Church, of which his father was a founder.
He had already taken a pledge of total abstinence, which he kept throughout his life. At seventeen he was teaching a country school for eight dollars a month and board, and he now resolved to make teaching his profession.
He became principal of the Cummington Academy. In 1839 they took charge of the academy at Stillwater, New York. While there he organized teachers' institutes, then an innovation, in Saratoga County, New York, and in Vermont.
In 1849 he went to Washington, D. C. , as principal of the preparatory department of Columbian College. Always an educational organizer, he soon formed the Columbian Teachers' Association. In 1852 he established a private school, the Union Academy, which was fairly prosperous until its career was ended by the departure of the Southern students at the opening of the Civil War. He was an organizer of the Washington Young Men's Christian Association (1852), and was its first president; during the Civil War he was one of the three District of Columbia members of the Christian Commission.
In 1861 he was appointed to a clerical position in the United States Treasury Department, but was soon transferred to the bureau of statistics, where he remained until 1867. Here he collected school statistics which he unsuccessfully attempted to have tabulated and published.
In 1867 he was elected a member and president of the common council of Washington; for two years he conducted a public-school teachers' institute. He was largely responsible for the passage by Congress of the bill establishing a national department of education (1867), and held a position therein until it was made a bureau of the Interior Department in 1869. As a member of the city common council he secured the creation (1869) of the office of superintendent of public schools and was himself the first incumbent, serving for one year.
From 1871 to 1874 he was auditor for the District of Columbia government. He was one of the organizers and the first president of the National Teachers' Association (1857), which, in 1870, became the National Education Association. He was a regular attendant at its meetings until 1896, when his health failed, and numerous papers and reports by him appear in its Proceedings.
At the Toronto meeting, 1891, he presented a historical sketch of the Association, which later appeared in pamphlet form. He also published a Teachers' Manual (1880), for primary schools, and The Natural Arithmetic (1885). Although he accumulated considerable property, he lost the most of it through the indorsement of notes for friends and in his old age maintained himself by teaching a small private school in his own home. He died in Washington.