MIRON J. HAZELTINE (1824-1907)

Miron James Hazeltine, chess authority and chess editor of the New York Clipper for more than fifty years, was born in Rumney, New Hampshire, November 13, 1824. He was of German ancestry and was the son of James Hazeltine and his wife Lydia Steams. In the fall of 1847 he entered Amherst College, but while there he was severely injured in the gymnasium, causing him to leave college in the spring of 1849 and making him a semi-invalid the rest of his life. Later he went to Lowell, Massachusetts, where he started to study law and where he remained for four years. He then went to New York City where, from 1859 to 1861, he was principal of the Clinton Institute, a classical private school. He was married in Waterville, New Hampshire, July 21, 1853, to Hanna M. Bryant, a relative of William Cullen Bryant, and by her had seven children. He began his first chess column in the New York Saturday Courier, February 3, 1855, a pioneer attempt and probably the first chess column in the United States. In August, 1856, he began his chess column in the New York Clipper, and never missed a single issue until shortly before his death, a period of more than fifty years. In the late 1860's he removed to Campton Village, New Hampshire, where he was a justice of the peace from 1871 on. Afterwards he removed to Thornton, New Hampshire, where he died February 24, 1907.

Hazeltine was a classical scholar and made a translation of Anacreon from the Greek. For Beadle he wrote the "Dime Chess Instructor" in 1860, and published his "Brevity and Brilliancy in Chess" in New York in 1866. His collection of books on chess was one of the largest and most valuable in New England.

REFERENCES; Bella Chapin, The Poets of New Hampshire, Claremont, N. Y., 1883, 299, 302; British Chess Magazine, XIV, January, 1894, with portrait; Biographical Stretches of the Leading Citizens of Grafton County, New Hampshire, Buffalo, 1897, 298-99; New York. City Directories, 1860 and 1861; Granite State Magazine, XXXIX, 1907, 95; Amherst College biographical records.

Hand Books of Games and Pastimes. Dime Chess Instructor, 1860