I filially love the 'Granite State,' but could well excuse the absence of sundry subdivisions of her granite." As that comment suggests, the farm was poor, and in 1820 Zack Greeley lost it and had to hide in the woods to escape debtors' prison. The family moved to Westhaven, Vermont, to eke out a bare living cutting wood and working another nearly infertile patch of ground.
Under these conditions, Greeley got little formal education, but the combination of a natural intelligence and his mother's storytelling, reading, and ballad singing from the time he was a toddler sparked the interest in ideas that was to become his life. It was said that he could read by the age of four, and as a youngster he read on his own the Bible and any other books he could get. He attended school sporadically--usually in the winter, when he was not needed to work on the farm--until he was fourteen. Beyond that, he was selftaught, a factor to which critics later attributed his tendency to promote for a while an idea that appealed to him, only to drop it in favor of another that suddenly seemed more attractive.
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