George H. Smith Outstanding As Civic Leader Here
Services Monday
Services for George Harding Smith, 82, former Norwood civic leader and a founder of the Norwood Press, were held Monday at 2:30 p. m. in the Unitarian Church. He died last Wednesday at Framingham Hospital where he had been a patient since Nov. 26 when he was struck by an automobile in front of his home.
Mr. Smith was born Feb. 18, 1859, the son of Jason Harding Smith and Elizabeth Heath Smith, a direct descendant of Henry Smith who settled in Medfield in 1652, the year after the town’s founding
In 1833, in partnership with tbe late James Berwick, he started a small printing business in Purchase Street, Boston. Because of its rapid expansion, the business was moved to Norwood in 1893 and became well known as the Berwick & Smith Company, book printers, associated with the J. S. Cushing Company, typographers, and the E. B. Fleming Company, binders, in the Norwood Press.
During his 30 years of residence in Norwood, from 1899 to 1929, Mr. Smith was active in the Universalist Church and in civic affairs, serving as president of the Business Men’s Association, chairman of the school committee, and chairman of the first building committee of the junior high school.
Mr. Smith is survived by his widow, the former Laura Huntington Brown whom he married in 1886; two sons, Henry Sanders Smith of Boston, and George Harding Smith, Jr., of New York city; two daughters, Mrs. Ernest Gruening, wife of the governor of Alaska, and Miss Laura Huntington Smith of Medfield, and six grandchildren.
(All articles originally published in the Norwood Messenger)