To make more clear, if possible, the persistence of intellectual activity and moral virtue, let us study samples of the family.  Take for instance the eldest son, Timothy.  He was a member of and leader in the famous Massachusetts council of war in the Revolution, a colonel in the militia, and a judge.  His descendants have been leaders in Binghamton, Pittsburg, Indianapolis, Bangor, St. Louis, Northampton, New Bedford, San Francisco, New York, New Haven, and many other cities and towns in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio.  From his descendants a Connecticut town, Chaplin, is named; Newark, Ohio, had a long-time principal, Jonathan E. Chaplin; Andover Theological Seminary had one of its most famous treasurers, Samuel Farrar; the American board of missions had one of its grandest leaders and secretaries, Dr. Elias Cornelius; the American Baptist Missionary Union had one of its eminent secretaries, Dr. Solomon Peck; the American Missionary Association had as its great treasurer, W.E.  Whiting; the famous young ladies’ seminary of Lenox, Mass., had for thirty years its great principal, Elizabeth Sedgwick; Boston had a prominent lawyer, a graduate of Harvard, William Minot; St. Louis had a leading lawyer, William D. Sedgwick; Antietam had in the list of killed the gallant Major Sedgwick; San Francisco recorded among her distinguished sons the long-time superintendent of the Pacific mail steamship company; the United States navy counted as one of her able officers a surgeon, Dr. George Hopkins; Amherst had as her most famous instructor Professor W.S.  Tyler, D.D., LL.D., at the head of the Greek department for half a century; she also has the present brilliant professor of biology, John M. Tyler; Sheridan had as a brilliant colonel in the grand ride of the Shenandoah Colonel M.W.  Tyler; invention claims the discoverer of the Turbine wheel, W.W.  Tyler; Knox College has claimed as a leader at one time, as has Smith at another, Professor Henry H. Tyler.

A detailed study of the family of the eldest son is suggestive.  He was the sixth child, born in Northampton, 1738, when the father was thirty-five and the mother twenty-eight.  He was but twenty years old when the father and mother died and the care of the family devolved upon him.  He had graduated from Princeton the previous year but the responsibility of a large family prevented his entering upon professional life.  Two years after the death of his father he married and removed to Elizabethtown, N.J., where he resided for ten years.  In 1770 he returned to Stockbridge, Mass.  Berkshire county was still on the frontier and was sparsely settled.  The store which Mr. Edwards opened in 1770 was the first in the county.  The settlers raised wheat on the newly cleared land.  This Mr. Edwards bought and sent to New York, bringing back goods in return.  In five years he became the most prosperous man in the county, buying and clearing a very large farm on which he employed as many as fifty men in the busy season.