Martin P. Kennard

Martin Parry Kennard (July 24, 1818 – November 13, 1903) was a Boston businessman (by occupation a silversmith and jeweler ), abolitionist, and U.S. federal government employee.

Biography
Kennard was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He started his career as a jeweler with the Boston firm Jones, Low & Ball, and later was a principal of Bigelow Bros. & Kennard. This company was later reorganized as Bigelow, Kennard & Co., with the other name partners at that time being Alanson Bigelow and William H. Kennard. The company sold "high-quality domestic and imported silver, glass, and clocks." A business under this name persisted until 1971; Harvard University holds some of the firm's records in their library special collections.

In 1854, Kennard moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, and along with figures like Ellis Gray Loring and William I. Bowditch, was among the activists of the Boston Vigilance Committee, which was devoted to protecting fugitive slaves. Kennard is the primary source on the visit of Mikhail Bakunin to the United States in 1861. Kennard later became a customs house collector in Boston. From 1868 ("and never thereafter took an active interest in business") until the 1890s, he held Treasury Department appointments in Boston.

He was a member of the Boston Art Club, the Boston Union Club, the Boston Commercial Club, the Mercantile Library Association (committee on lectures), the Merchants Club, and the Tuesday Club. Kennard was described a "Republican of the most pronounced stripe," and as a "staunch Unitarian" who was a member of the First Unitarian Church of Brookline. Kennard was survived by his wife Caroline Kennard, a naturalist and women's rights activist, and four children. Their son Frederic Hedge Kennard was a landscape architect and naturalist involved in birding and in the preservation of the American bison; Frederic's daughter, Dr. Margaret Kennard, was a notable 20th-century neuropsychologist. His son Edward Parry Kennard also worked as a silversmith. The Martin Parry Kennard house now houses Brookline Music School.