Thaddeus Mason Harris

Who was Thaddeus Mason Harris?

Thaddeus Mason Harris was a Harvard librarian, Unitarian minister and author in the early 19th Century. His most noted book was The Natural History of the Bible first published in Boston in 1793.

Harris's father was killed fighting on the colonists side in the American Revolutionary War. Harris had been born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, but after his father's death he was sent to live on a farm in Stirling, Massachusetts. Harris went on to study at Harvard University from which he graduated in 1788. He then was a school teacher at Worcester, Massachusetts, before becoming the librarian of Harvard in 1781 and then being appointed the minister of the First Unitarian Church of Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1791.

Harris's son Thaddeus William Harris would also serve as a librarian at Harvard and be one of the leading American naturalists in the first half of the 19th century.