Cabot, included author and astronomer Percival Lowell, Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and poet Amy Lowell. Career In 1835 and 1838, John Amory became the first treasurer for both Merrimack Manufacturing Company and Boott Cotton Mill, textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. And in 1857, he became director of The Winnipiseogee Lake Cotton and Woolen Manufacturing Company. This were all positions that his son, Augustus, succeeded to within the same companies. (Bay State Monthly 1884) Lowell was a Fellow of Harvard College (1837–1877), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Linnean Society of London. Later, in 1851, Harvard honored John Amory with an LLD. Lowell Institute The trust—or Lowell Institute, as it came to be known—had an unusual mode of governance: a single trustee who was empowered to appoint his successor and who was, in the language of John Lowell, Jr.'s will, to "always choose in preference to all others some male descendant of my grandfather, John Lowell, provided there be one who is competent to hold the office of trustee, and of the name of Lowell." (Everett 1840) Despite this odd restriction (or perhaps because of it), the Institute proved to be an extraordinarily innovative philanthropic force. Under John Amory, its first trustee, the Institute flourished. Lowell was both a man of extraordinary financial acumen and a man of high intellect. The list of Lowell Lecturers during his tenure was a veritable pantheon of the most internationally celebrated figures in science, literature, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology, including Britain's most celebrated geologist, Sir Charles Lyell, Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, and novelists Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. The lectures were so immensely popular that crowds crushed the windows of the Old Corner Bookstore where the tickets were distributed and certain series had to be repeated by popular demand. John Amory tirelessly led the Lowell Institute for more than 40 years before naming his son, Augustus, as his replacement. See also Lowell family First Families of Boston Lowell Institute Lowell, Massachusetts Kirk Boott References 1798 births 1881 deaths Harvard College alumni Businesspeople from Boston American people of English descent 19th-century American philanthropists 19th-century American businesspeople