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- Title
- Roswell Farnham Correspondence
- Description
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An 1849 graduate of the University of Vermont, Farnham taught school in lower Canada and northern Vermont while studying law. He was admitted to the Orange County Bar in 1857 and began a private practice. Farnham was commissioned from Bradford on May 1, 1861 as a 2nd lietenant in Co.D, 1st Vt....
Show moreAn 1849 graduate of the University of Vermont, Farnham taught school in lower Canada and northern Vermont while studying law. He was admitted to the Orange County Bar in 1857 and began a private practice. Farnham was commissioned from Bradford on May 1, 1861 as a 2nd lietenant in Co.D, 1st Vt. Infantry and mustered out August 15, 1861. He was later commissioned as a lieutenant colonel of the 12 Vt. on September 19, 1862. After returning to Vermont, Farnham was elected to the Vermont State Senate in 1868 and elected governor in 1880. The collection includes letters to family and friends during Farnham's service in the First and Twelfth Vermont Infantry regiments. The letters contain detailed descriptions of regimental activities, including a narrative of the Battle of Big Bethel, camp life at Wolf Run Shoals in Virginia, and the hard march to Gettysburg in June 1863. Some sketches and maps are included. Also included are four letters from Sergeant (later First Lieutenant) Ezekiel T. Johnson (Tenth Vermont Infantry) of Windsor, Vermont, three written from Camp Washburn, Brattleboro, where his regiment was mustered into U.S. service, and one (June 13, 1863) from White's Ford, Maryland, giving an account of a cavalry skirmish. A letter (May 31, 1863) to Mrs. Mary Farnham from Private Nelson J. Rogers (Twelfth Vermont Infantry) describes regimental activities and the Confederate attack on a train near the camp of the Twelfth Vermont.
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- Title
- Roswell Farnham Diary, 1848-1849
- Date Created
- 1848-1849
- Description
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Roswell Farnham was born in Boston, Massachusetts on July 23, 1827, the son of Roswell and Nancy Bixby Farnham. Farnham's family moved to Bradford, Vermont in 1840, and he received his education at Bradford Academy and the University of Vermont, from which he graduated in 1849. Married to Mary...
Show moreRoswell Farnham was born in Boston, Massachusetts on July 23, 1827, the son of Roswell and Nancy Bixby Farnham. Farnham's family moved to Bradford, Vermont in 1840, and he received his education at Bradford Academy and the University of Vermont, from which he graduated in 1849. Married to Mary Elizabeth Johnson on December 25, 1849, Farnham taught school before gaining admittance to the Orange County bar in 1857. When the Civil War broke out, he entered the First Vermont Regiment with the Bradford Guards militia as a Second Lieutenant. Farnham served with distinction in both the First Vermont and the Twelfth Vermont, and left the Army in July of 1863 as a Lieutenant Colonel.Following the war, Farnham became general counsel for the Vermont Copper Company and continued to work as both lawyer and administrator of the VCC for the rest of his life. In addition, he held a number of local and state political offices culminating in his defeat of Democrat Edward J. Phelps for the governorship of Vermont in 1880.
After completing a single popular term as governor, Farnham returned to his law practice. In 1889 he also became president of the newly-formed New England Company, a group of Northern investors interested in developing the coal and iron deposits of northwestern Georgia. The New England Company was never a success, and Farnham spent much of the last decade of the nineteenth century trying to save it and the VCC from bankruptcy. Badly injured in a fall in November 1898, Farnham recovered sufficiently to resume some of his work but never regained full health. Roswell Farnham died at his home in Bradford on January 5, 1903, at the age of seventy-five.
Three of Farnham’s four children lived to adulthood: Charles Cyrus Farnham (1864–1937), Florence Mary Osgood (1866–1958), and William M. Farnham (1869–1927). His first child, Roswell Phelps Farnham Jr., died in infancy in 1861. Farnham was predeceased by a half-brother, Cyrus C. Farnham, in 1863.
Topics in this diary include the curriculum, faculty, and student experience at UVM in the late 1840s; Burlington and neighboring towns in the late 1840s, UVM’s Lambda Iota fraternity, Zachary Taylor and the Whig Party, and teaching in Vermont and Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. Near the end of the diary are several essays written by Farnham during his senior year at UVM. Topics in these essays include religion, natural history, and King Lear.
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