His early years involved a series of uprootings. When his father's modest business failed a few years after Charles's birth, the family moved to the village of Gaines in western New York. When Charles was nine, his mother died, leaving three other children besides him: seven-year-old Junius; three-year-old Maria; and David, an infant. The family then moved to the Denison homestead in northeastern Vermont: Charles was sent to live on a farm with his uncle David Denison while his brothers and sister remained with their grandfather nearby. Charles worked on the farm, attended the district school, and studied Latin on his own until he was twelve, at which time he was sent to Buffalo, then a small frontier city, where he worked as a clerk in his uncle William Dana's general store.
During the six years he spent as a clerk, Dana continued his self-education in Latin, added Greek, and read generally among the masters of English literature. When the panic of 1837 forced his uncle to close the store, young Dana made plans for a more formal education in order to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. By mid-1839 he was sufficiently prepared to enter Harvard University; he took the approximately $200 he had saved and set out for Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he enrolled as a freshman in September.
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