, Caroline Sophia Susanna Henrietta Wilhelmina,
born in Elberfeld on the 2d of March, 1796, was still a babe in arms
at the time of the family emigration. She was a tall, fair, handsome
girl, not long past her fifteenth birthday when she became a wife.
Her husband, John Hecker, was nearly twice her age, having been born
in Wetzlar, Prussia, May 7, 1782. He was the son of another John
Hecker, a brewer by trade, who married the daughter of a Colonel
Schmidt. Both parents were natives of Wetzlar. Their son learned the
business of a machinist and brass-founder, and emigrated to America
in 1800. He was married to Caroline Freund in the Old Dutch Church in
the Swamp, July 21, 1811. He died in New York, in the house of his
eldest son, July 10, 1860.

Events proved John Hecker to have been equally fortunate and
sagacious in his choice of a wife. At the time of their marriage he
was thrifty and well-to-do. At one period he owned a flourishing
brass-foundry in Hester Street, and during his early married life his
prosperity was uninterrupted. But before many years had passed his
business declined, and from one cause and another he never succeeded
in re-establishing it. This misfortune, occurring while even the
eldest of the sons was still a lad, might easily have proved
irreparable in more senses than one. But the very fact that the
ordinary gates to learning were so soon closed against these children
caused the natural tendency they had toward knowledge to impel them
all the more strongly in that shorter road to practical wisdom which
leads through labor and experience. The Hecker brothers were all hard
at work while still mere children, and before John, the eldest, had
attained to legal manhood, they had fixed the solid foundations of an
enduring prosperity, and all need of further exertion on the part of
their parents was over for ever.

Isaac Thomas Hecker, the third son and youngest child of this couple,
was born in New York at a house in Christie Street, between Grand and
Hester, December 18, 1819, when his mother was not yet twenty-four.
He survived her by twelve years only, she dying at the residence of
her eldest son's widow in 1876, in the full possession of faculties
which must have been of no common order. From her, and through her
from Engel Freund, who was what is called "a character," Father
Hecker seems to have derived many of his life-long peculiarities. "I
never knew a son so like his mother," writes to us one