Prentiss Mellen
Prentiss Mellen (October 11, 1764December 31, 1840) was a lawyer, politician, and jurist from Massachusetts and Maine. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Harvard, Mellen served for two years as a United States Senator from Massachusetts, and was appointed Maine's first chief justice after it achieved statehood in 1820. Early years Prentiss Mellen was the eighth of nine children of Rev. John Mellen and Rebecca (Prentiss) Mellen, born in 1764 in the second parish of Lancaster, Massachusetts, now Sterling. Mellen's father was the local minister, and his mother the daughter of the first parish minister. He graduated from Harvard College in 1784. He moved to Barnstable, where he worked as a tutor for the family of James Otis Jr., and studied law with Shearjashub Bourne. He was admitted to the bar in 1788, and established a practice in Sterling. This was unsuccessful, and he next opened a practice in Bridgewater. There he met Sally Hudson of Hartford, Connecticut, whom he married in 1795. The couple had six children, four of whom survived him. Still not meeting with financial success, he briefly joined his brother's law practice in Dover, New Hampshire before finally settling in Biddeford in the Massachusetts District of