Armstrong – Table of Contents

(though non-sectarian) college. During the most productive portion of his life, as a
teacher, he received a salary of less than $1000 per year, part of which money was at
times returned to keep the school operating, especially during the lean years that followed
the Civil War.
In order to supplement his meager teaching salary and to support his
family, Charles’ father began farming as well as the raising and selling of blooded brood
mares, racing horses and Shetland ponies. In winter, the care of the stock and during the
summer the planting and harvesting of crops with which to feed the stock, supplied an
abundance of work for the whole family. The trustees and faculty of the religiously strict
institution in which he taught frowned upon Theodore Armstrong’s interest in the
breeding of fine horses, but his less puritanical ideas made him popular with his students.
In fact, on several occasions when the school’s “temperance” committee of the faculty
was about to conduct a sudden raid on the students’ favorite tavern, Theodore Armstrong
warned the students to give the appearance of studying their texts rather than debating the
quality of the tavern’s alcoholic beverages (1). When Charles Armstrong was about 10
years old, his father gave up teaching to devote his whole attention to the farming and
livestock business. Charles Armstrong speculated that with this exposure in his early
domestic life, he naturally developed an interest in the care and treatment of ill animals.
The livestock business brought many visitors to the Armstrong home that
was just outside the corporate limits of Alliance; the visitors included horsemen and
traders who were always invited to stay for meals and to spend the night. In addition to
these visitors, town friends of the Armstrong siblings, both boys and girls, were usually
present during the day attracted by the opportunities to ride the horses or the ponies. Dr.