[1] When his father, Deacon Akers, moved the family from Saccarappa to Salmon Falls on the Saco River, he started a wood-turning mill.

"[1]Patron John Neal claimed Akers was "the first person, man or woman, that ever tried to model anything in the shape of a head" in Portland, Maine.

[6] Among his works are busts of Edward Everett and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a head of John Milton and The Dead Pearl Diver,[7] on display at the Portland Museum of Art.

Nathaniel Hawthorne described Dead Pearl Diver as an important work of the protagonist, Kenyon, in his novel The Marble Faun, acknowledging his debt to Akers in the introduction.

[8] He planned a free gallery of art for New York, to contain copies in marble of the chief works of ancient art, but in the midst of his work and plans his health failed and he returned home in 1858, and the next year started for Rome, where after his arrival he entered upon the execution of a commission from August Belmont of a statue of Commodore Perry for Central Park, New York, which was left unfinished.