was sufficient for the transportation of the raw material to, and the manufactured goods from, his factory.  He was a man who combined in himself rare executive ability and mechanical skill, and gradually built up a large and flourishing business.  A great impetus was given to manufacturing during the last war with Great Britain, and Mr. Ames availed himself of every opportunity to enlarge his business.  The one-horse method of transportation was soon supplanted by six-horse teams; and when, on his retirement from active business in 1844, the firm of Oliver Ames and Sons was formed, the business had grown to large dimensions.

Honorable Oakes Ames, eldest son of Oliver and Susannah (Angier) Ames, was born in Easton, January 10, 1804; married November 29, 1827, Eveline Orville Gilmore; and entered heartily into the enterprises inaugurated by his father.  Under his supervision the manufacture of shovels grew into giant proportions.  A railroad, constructed to the very doors of the factories, furnished facilities for transporting to them yearly fifteen hundred tons of iron, two thousand tons of steel and five thousand tons of coal, and for carrying away from them more than one hundred and thirty thousand dozen shovels, in the manufacture of which employment had been given to five hundred workmen.  The fame of the goods kept pace with the advance of civilization; and on every frontier, in all quarters of the globe, were found as instruments of progress the Ames shovels.

It is not so much as the successful manufacturer, however, that Oakes Ames will be remembered, as the master mind through whose perseverance and indomitable energy, and in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, was forced to completion the pioneer railway across the Western Continent.  He gained a deserved and enduring fame as the builder of the Union Pacific Railroad, and that magnificent work will ever stand as his proudest monument.  During the former part of the war of the Rebellion he rendered important service to the Union cause by his shrewd and sagacious counsels in State affairs, and a little later for ten years represented the Second Massachusetts District in the National House of Representatives.  He died May 8, 1873.

Honorable Oliver Ames, second son of Oakes and Eveline O. (Gilmore) Ames, was born in North Easton, February 4, 1831. [See genealogical foot note].  He received his early education in the public schools of his native town and at the North Attleboro, Leicester, and Easton Academies.  Having thus laid the foundation of a liberal education, he entered the shovel works of his father, where he served an apprenticeship of five years, thus mastering the business in all the minuteness of its details.  At the age of twenty, appreciating the value of a more thorough scholastic training, he took a special course at Brown University, placing himself under the special tutelage of President Francis Wayland.  The bent of his mind in this, his early