Nathan Appleton (October 1, 1779 – July 14, 1861) was an American merchant and politician.

Biography

He was born in New Ipswich, New Hampshire, the son of Isaac Appleton and his wife Mary Adams. He was educated in the New Ipswich Academy, and in 1794 entered mercantile life in Boston, Massachusetts in the employment of his brother, Samuel (1766-1853), a successful and benevolent man of business, with whom he was in partnership from 1800 to 1809. He co-operated with Francis C. Lowell and others in introducing the power-loom and the manufacture of cotton on a large scale into the United States, a factory being esablished at Waltham, Massachusetts in 1814, and another in 1822 at Lowell, Massachusetts, of which city he was one of the founders.

He was a member of the general court of Massachusetts in 1816, 1821, 1822, 1824 and 1827, and in 1831-1833 and 1842 of the national House of Representatives, in which he was prominent as an advocate of protective duties.

He married twice and had eight children. His first marriage was to Maria Theresa Gold, whom he married on 13 April 1806. They had the following children:

• Thomas Gold Appleton (1812-1884)
• Mary "Molly" Appleton (1813-?), married Robert James Mackintosh.
• Charles Sedgwick Appleton (1815 -1835)
• Frances Elizabeth Appleton (1817-1861), married the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• George William Appleton (1826-1827), died in infancy.

His first wife died in 1833 and he remarried on 8 January 1839 to Harriot Sumner. They had the following children:

• William Sumner Appleton (1840-1903(?))
• Harriet Appleton (1841- ?), married Greely Stevenson Curtis
• Nathan Appleton (1843-?).

He died in Boston.

References

• Memoir of Nathan Appleton by Robert C. Winthrop (Boston, 1861)
• Susan Hale's Life and Letters of Thomas Gold Appleton (New York, 1885).

External links

• Nathan Appleton Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography

Massachusetts politicians | 1779 births | 1861 deaths