Valentine Brother, the first child of Mary Ann Pratt and Henry Brother, was born in October 1827.
This was the same year that the Franklin Academy in Prattsburgh, founded by Mary Ann’s grandfather and friends, opened its school to girls.
This spark of modernization was a premature light for the next decade, which would welcome into the Brother home at 22 West Morris Street in Bath, New York, a series of girls and bursts of laughter, tears, study, and industry.
They called their first boy “Val” and expected great things of him, even if he was, what they deemed at the time, “a quiet leader,” unlike the girls that followed.
Baby Cornelia was next, born in December 1828.
Years later she would attend the academy and make many friends who loved story and theater.
The Brother boys stuck close to home to help with the mills and the stores and instead went to the Bath Classical School for boys, taught by Mr. Ralph Knickerbocker Finch, a Dartmouth educated teacher. Mr. Finch married the best friend of Mary Ann Pratt and he frequently coached Val on his Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare. It is not clear what elementary school Charles Brother, who later became a Civil War Marine, attended because by the time he was born (1844).
Val preferred business of the mills. He was so attached to accounting and business affairs, in fact, that it concerned his mother, who asked Henry to straighten the boy out.
As he heard this, he rolled over in bed. The head of the household mumbled into his pillow something, but Mary Ann could not make it out. As she reached over to rub into him her opinion more profoundly, and he winced, a child cried out and she left their room.
Upon her exit, Henry Brother opened his eyes and looked at the doorway and followed the flinkering fire-light coming from down the hall.
He listened to his wife comfort the child. His father, Valentine Brother, died at the age of 46 like his father before him.
There would be no reprogramming or softening. Val would keep doing the tour of the mills with him.
Valentine Brother, oldest child of Mary Ann Pratt & Henry Brother