Quincy Adams Shaw


Quincy Adams Shaw was a Boston Brahmin investor and business magnate who was the first president of Calumet and Hecla Mining Company.

Family and early life

Shaw came from a famous and moneyed Boston family. With a net worth of $1,000,000 dollars in 1846, Shaw's father was one of the wealthiest men in Boston. His mother was Elizabeth Willard Parkman, whose father Samuel Parkman was the original source of capital upon which her husband built one of the wealthiest and largest business enterprises in Boston at that time. George Parkman, a wealthy Boston physician who was murdered in 1849 in a gruesome and highly publicized case, was Elizabeth's brother.
Shaw was good friends with his cousin, American historian Francis Parkman Junior, and the pair travelled together to the American West after graduating from Harvard University in 1845. Parkman's 1849 book, is dedicated to Shaw.
Shaw's older brother Francis George Shaw was an outspoken advocate of the abolition of slavery. Shaw's nephew, son of Francis George, was Robert Gould Shaw. The latter was a colonel in the Volunteer Army of the United States during the American Civil War, and commander of the all-black 54th Regiment. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was killed in action during the Second Battle of Fort Wagner in 1863.

Later life

On November 30, 1860, Shaw married Pauline Agassiz, daughter of Louis Agassiz and the step daughter of Elizabeth Cabot Cary. They had five children: Pauline, Marian, Louis Agassiz Shaw, Sr., Quincy Adams, and Robert Gould II.
Shaw's grandson, Louis Agassiz Shaw, Jr., is credited along with Philip Drinker for inventing the Drinker respirator, the first widely used iron lung.

Career

Shaw and his brother-in-law Henry Lee Higginson became major investors in the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, and Shaw was the first president of the company. Shaw retained that position for only a few months before Alexander Emanuel Agassiz took over.
In his Boston Daily Globe obituary, Shaw was named "the heaviest individual taxpayer in Massachusetts" and "the head of the family whose members in various ways have done much to promote the educational and commercial interests of Boston."