Walter Sydney Adams, 1876-1956

Abstract

Walter Sydney Adams was born on 20 December 1876, in the village of Kessab near Antioch in Northern Syria, then a province of the Turkish Empire. His father and mother, Lucien and Nancy Adams, were missionaries under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions with headquarters in Boston. They were both college graduates—Lucien of Dartmouth College and Andover Theological Seminary, Nancy of Mount Holyoke College. Walter was the youngest of the family. In the village in which he lived there were no schools except one for Mohammedan children and one for Armenians, so he received his earliest training in the elements of arithmetic, grammar and geography from his mother. For books he had his father’s library which, apart from theological books, consisted largely of histories and classical text books and treatises. At the age of six he knew more of the history of Athens and Rome, and of the campaigns of Alexander the Great and Hannibal than of the rise and development of the United States. In 1885, when Adams was eight years old, he moved with the family to the United States and settled in the village of Derry, New Hampshire, his father’s old home.