Stephen Minot Weld, Jr.

Stephen Minot Weld Jr. (January 4, 1842 – March 16, 1920), a member of Boston's illustrious Weld Family, was a horticulturalist and much-decorated United States Army officer of the American Civil War. Early life Weld was the son of Sarah Bartlett and Stephen Minot Weld. He prepared for higher education at the Jamaica Plain boarding school mastered by his father. Weld was an abstemious young man who claimed: I did not touch a drop of wine or liquor all through my college career until about a month before I graduated, nor did I smoke until then. Once he arrived at Harvard College, however, Weld had little love of that institution's authority figures and wrote: The whole spirit between the Faculty and the students was one of war...we looked on the Faculty as our oppressors, and we were--a great many of us--up to every devilment that we could think of, to trouble and bother them....The College then was more in the nature of a boarding-school. Stephen Minot Weld's older cousin George Walker Weld (for whom Weld Boathouse is named) was at Harvard the same time as Stephen and the pair sometimes cooperated in their mischief.