William Franklin Bascom was born on January 17, 1817, in Orwell, Vermont, to Artemidorus and Chloe Bascom. He attended school in Addison County, Vermont, and he graduated from Middlebury College in 1838. He spent the next seven years working as a tutor. He married Anne F. Strong on September 17, 1845, and they had at least three children: William, born around 1847; Edith, born around 1849; and Gertrude, born around 1855.

 

By the early 1850s, he was working at Middlebury Female Seminary. He was admitted to the Vermont bar in 1856, and he worked as a lawyer in Middlebury. He supported the Republican Party, and he served in Vermont’s constitutional convention in 1857. By 1860, he owned $1,000 of real estate and $800 of personal property.

 

During the Civil War, he served as a member of the United States Sanitary Commission and then as a pension agent. He worked as professor of Latin and Greek at Howard University from 1868 until 1874. By 1870, he owned $2,700 of real estate and $5,000 of personal property. According to an early biographer, he resigned from Howard because he was “dissatisfied with its questionable management.” He moved to Michigan and then to Bonnersville in the Dakota Territory. By 1900, he was living in his daughter Edith’s household in Washington, D.C. He died there of acute Bright’s disease on June 25, 1903.

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