George Whitefield Chadwick was born on 13 November 1854 in Lowell, Massachusetts, in a house on “Fifth St. Centralville.” His family, which had come from England, was by then in its eighth generation in New England (fig. 1.1). Great-grandfather Edmund Chadwick (1754- ca. 1820) had participated in the battle of Bunker Hill. The father, Alonzo Calvin Chadwick (1810-1878), born in Boscawen, had been trained in playing the viol, the clarinet, and the bugle. He “taught school” and, gifted with a good tenor voice, “kept singing school.” In 1837 Alonzo married Hannah G. Fitts (ca. 1812-1854) from Candia, New Hampshire. The couple lived for several years on the Fitts family's farm. Their first child was born in 1840; a second died before being baptized. In 1845, however, Alonzo is listed in Lowell as a carpenter. In 1853 he worked for the Massachusetts Mills. Both Chadwick parents were Congregationalists, and admiration for the Methodist preacher George Whitefield (1714-1770) caused Alonzo C. Chadwick to choose the name for his youngest son. The mother, Hannah G. Fitts, died “ten or twelve days” after his birth, at the age of 42. According to Chadwick's writings, he consequently was brought to Boscawen where he spent his first three years living with a nurse. Around 1858 the young child returned to Lowell, where Alonzo had taken Susan Collins as a second wife in 1855. As Alonzo started building up an insurance business in the newly founded town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, the family moved there in 1859, and lived in a house on Newbury Street. As Lowell had before, Lawrence soon developed from a rural into an industrial town, advancing to become the hub of the textile mill business. Founded as a town in 1847, Lawrence was chartered as a city as early as 1853. Multifold migratory movements, both intra-American and international, quickly expanded the population the city; over the decades she became the urban center with the highest percentage of immigration—48.1% around 1910 in the United States.