The Antiquarian

Erastus Richardson spent his working life keeping other men's books — for the Chases at Valley Falls, seven years in the office of the Albion Company, two with Edward Harris at Woonsocket, then thirty-six years as bookkeeper for the Lippitt Woolen Company from 1865 to his retirement about 1901, and finally as paymaster at the Clinton mill. He did not take a vacation in the first thirty-four of those years. His mother died when he was an infant, he left school at thirteen, and he bought six weeks of high school and six weeks of academy with wages earned teaching country school. Everything else he taught himself in the evenings: mathematics first, then Latin after forty, Greek at fifty, and Hebrew last of all.

On that foundation he wrote the history of Woonsocket on the town's commission for the Centennial, published a verse Aeneid, left the Iliad and Odyssey in hexameters in manuscript, wrote occasional poetry for his regiment and his parish across at least twenty-one years, served as quartermaster's clerk of the 12th Rhode Island Volunteers and later as chaplain of its veteran association, sat on the town council, stood three times for city office, and spent the last decade of his life auditing Woonsocket's water department in print. In 1928, seventeen years after he died, Yale University Press published his translation of Anacreon.

He was a nephew of William A. Richardson of Worcester, Massachusetts, whose estate he joined in contesting in 1905. The dates 1837–1911 come from the cataloguing of his own book. His birthday is fixed at April 10, 1837 by the Call's birthday notices of 1909 and 1910. That puts him at 25 in the quartermaster's tent, 39 when the History appeared, 46 when the Aeneid appeared, 49 at his earliest surviving poem, 57 when Brown gave him his master of arts for original work in cylindrical sections, 71 when he took the water commissioners apart line by line, and 74 at his death.