Within it are to be found implements, household utensils, paintings, ornaments, and sundry furnishings, with luxurious appliances, gathered by the generations which have occupied it from birth to death.
Most interesting among its contents is a large, select, and valuable library of many thousand volumes, collected principally by the father and brothers of George R. Baldwin and by himself, giving evidence of their scientific and literary tastes.
Learned tomes in many languages, costly illustrated works, series of scientific publications on construction and engineering, and sumptuous editions of the best writers in various departments of literature, are among its treasures.
The father wished this boy, as he grew up, to enter Harvard College, but the son was disinclined to scholarship in that institution as its standard then was, and from his earliest years his bent was for mathematical and scientific studies, pursued by himself, and for practical out-of-door work in waterways, surveying and engineering, in the examination of mills and water-power, dams and raceways.
He, as we have already noticed, had marked facilities for practice of this sort, with preliminary training in a school kept by Dr. Stearns in Medford, and by accompanying his father and brother in field and office work.
In his fourteenth year he made some sketches of the fortifications of Boston harbor in the War of 1812, of which his brother Loammi Baldwin Jr. was the chief engineer.
He was called upon as expert, witness, referee or examiner in many ways, at a period when the development of our railroad and manufacturing enterprises made a demand for talent and skill.
He was naturally shy, modest, diffident, and reticent, of most retiring and undemonstrative ways, therefore when called upon for any utterance in public before many persons it was for him a serious strain.
With accomplished skill in draughting and etching, his pencil was ever busy in sketching all the objects of special interest, and his descriptions are illustrated by a mass of drawings, more or less perfected.