Thorpe was perhaps North East’s outstanding man, of most winning personality, besides being a man of prodigious learning.” At the end of his life he was recognized as an accomplished author, scholar, educator, friend, husband and father. Thorpe succumbed to throat cancer at the age of 69. In addition to 2-3 unpublished dramas, he also wrote An American Fruit-Farm, an account of horticulture in North East, and two successful fiction novels, The Divining Rod and The Spoils of Empire.
Thorpe’s bibliography contains a few surprises, however. Of all of his accomplishments, Thorpe is perhaps best known for his literary works, as he wrote continuously for forty years and penned more than 70 books and articles, constitutional law and American history the topics of many. Ten years after the purchase of the farm, he built a modest house in the middle of the vineyards and named his farm Indian Arrow Vineyard. Thorpe visited the farm every summer, along with his wife and daughter. He longed to walk the familiar paths he took as a child walking his neighbors’ cows to pasture, and in 1892 he purchased 50 acres in North East. This was a great honor for the university and Thorpe, as he was the only academic appointed to the commission.Īlthough his work required he live elsewhere, Thorpe maintained a fondness for the shores of Lake Erie. While teaching at the university, Thorpe was one of 25 men appointed by PA Governor William Sproul to serve on the Commission of Constitutional Amendment and Revision. In 1911 he was hired as a professor of Political Science and Constitutional Law at the University of Pittsburgh, and he and his family purchased a home on Castleman Street in Pittsburgh’s Shady Side. Thorpe skillfully served the North East public school system until 1885 when he began his 13-year Fellow of History and Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Two years later he was elected the first principal and superintendent of the new Academy, and was challenged with writing the rules and regulations and course of study for the newly opened high school. In 1876 he was chosen to teach the Intermediate Department of his beloved and familiar North East Academy – 70 students in total. Upon graduation, Thorpe was elected assistant principal at Pleasantville, PA, a position he held less than one year. ( Life and Letters of Francis Newton Thorpe (1857-1929), Part I & II, edited by Marion E. I continued at the Seminary until I graduated. Late in the year I earned enough by doing chores for a neighbor, to enable me to enter the Seminary at the opening of the Spring term in 1872. In 1872, the Lake Shore Seminary was opened, but my father thought the Academy was good enough in its opportunity for me. As he would recall later in life in preparing notes for an autobiography that would never be written, Mr.
When Lake Shore Seminary opened its doors in 1872, he seized the opportunity to attend. Thorpe’s story, in his lifetime he was recognized as the premier authority on constitutional law and the American Constitution, an extraordinary educator, orator and author.īy the age of fifteen, Thorpe’s education at the North East Academy came to a close, but his hunger for knowledge and an industrious spirit fuelled his pursuit of an education. Although today few North East residents are familiar with Mr. Included on this list of students is Francis Newton Thorpe. During the short life of North East’s Lake Shore Seminary, the school helped shape a few hundred students into bright, ambitious young men and women.
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