Isaac Atwater

Biography

Isaac Atwater was born on May 3, 1818 in Homer, New York to Ezra Atwater, a farmer, and Esther Leaming. Both his parents hailed from Connecticut and were of English descent; their ancestors had emigrated from England in about 1748. He was the ninth of eleven children. As a youngster he worked on the family farm and received education in day schools. Ezra Atwater gave most of his farmland to his older sons and expected his younger sons, including Isaac, to become farmers; however, Isaac had intellectual interests from a young age, reportedly did not care about farming and by sixteen had studied Latin, algebra and history extensively. Atwater, whose father could not financially support his higher education, worked as a teacher in order to secure his admission to Yale University in 1840. In his senior year at Yale he was made an editor of the Yale Literary Magazine. He graduated in 1844 in the top quarter of his class. He worked as a teacher at a private school in Macon, Georgia for a year after his graduation in order to pay for an entry to Yale Law School, which he entered in 1845. Atwater graduated in 1847 and thereupon entered the practice of Robert Benner, a fellow Yale alumnus. After being admitted to the New York bar he opened his own practice in Nassau.

In August of 1849 he married Permelia A. Sanborn, who was from Geddes, New York. In 1850 they moved, on account of Atwater's poor health (he had been having symptoms of tuberculosis), to St. Anthony, Minnesota Territory; Atwater purchased a parcel of land there for $800 on credit, which he paid off in two years using the money he earned from his legal business. Atwater opened a new practice alongside John W. North, a former schoolmate of his. He split with North in 1851 and continued his practice alone. In April of that year, Elmer Tyler, a tailor from St. Anthony, asked Atwater if he would be interested in helping him run a newspaper, to which Atwater reluctantly agreed. The newspaper, the St. Anthony Express, resulted; it was the seventh newspaper started in Minnesota and the first printed in Minnesota outside of St. Paul. Atwater wrote the editorials while Tyler was initially responsible for publishing it. Tyler, finding that the scale of the newspaper was becoming too much for him to handle, quit. Atwater gave ownership of the St. Anthony Express to its printers, brothers H. and J. P. Woodbury.