John Amory Lowell

His father maintained a well-established law firm in the city, and three years after John Amory's birth, retired for reasons of his failing health.

After retiring in 1801, the elder Lowell spent much of his time and wealth patronizing the burgeoning horticultural society in Boston, so much so that he became known to his friends and family as "The Norfolk Farmer."

(Greenslet 1946) [2] Like his father and grandfathers before him, Lowell was the fourth member in his family line to graduate from Harvard College in 1815, at the age of 17.

Lowell's wife, Susan Cabot, who was a great-granddaughter of Edward and Dorthy (Quincy) Jackson, connected their children and their descendants to those of the Holmeses of Boston, a family that includes poet Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and U.S. Supreme Court justice and Civil War hero, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. With his second wife, Elizabeth Cabot Putnam (1807–1881), Amory fathered a son and three daughters.

The list of Lowell Lecturers during his tenure was a veritable pantheon of the most internationally celebrated figures in science, literature, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology, including Britain's most celebrated geologist, Sir Charles Lyell, Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, and novelists Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray.