ONE of Mrs. Eddy's brothers was Albert Baker. Born on February 5, 1810, he was eleven years older than she. Among all her relations (including father, mother, three brothers, two sisters, and more distant relatives) her mother and he, in her childhood and girlhood, were closest to her in companionship and in thought. He passed on at the age of thirty-one, after having entered upon a legal and political career of exceptional promise.
As a child and boy, Albert Baker lived with his parents, Mark and Abigail Ambrose Baker, on their five-hundred-acre farm five miles from Concord, New Hampshire. After attending the common school near his home and Pembroke Academy, he entered Dartmouth College in 1830. To pay the cost of a college education, he taught school and did tutoring. For one period he was principal of the Hillsborough Academy.
For "The Bench and Bar of New Hampshire" (published in 1914), Charles Henry Bell, also an alumnus of Pembroke Academy and of Dartmouth College, and afterwards Governor of New Hampshire, contributed a sketch of Albert Baker containing the following statements (p. 161): "In college he was an excellent scholar, and persistent to the extent of sometimes defending his own opinions in the recitation room against the doctrines of the professors. As a lawyer he was well-read, sharp in making points, and unyielding in maintaining them. . . . Though he died in early manhood, he had already made his mark in law and in politics. . . . Young as he was, he was an acknowledged party leader at the time of his decease."
