Joseph Bradford Hardon was born on March 31, 1834, in Mansfield, Massachusetts, to Comfort Hardon and Anna Field. His father was a “cistern maker.” The family moved to Berkeley County, Virginia, sometime in the 1840s, and he attended school there. He planned to attend college in 1853, but poor health thwarted his plans. He spent the next three years working as a clerk in a silk goods house in Boston, Massachusetts.

 

He finally enrolled at Harvard University in 1857. As one classmate recalled, he was “older than the rest of us…more sedate, and attended more closely to his studies.” Although he “did not enter into our common recreations freely, he won universal respect for his sterling qualities of mind and heart.” He graduated from Harvard in 1861 and spent the next three years teaching high school in Portland, Maine. He returned to mercantile life in 1864, becoming a clerk in New York City and then a bookkeeper in Boston.

 

He married Alison Nisbet Cleveland on June 29, 1876, and they had at least three children: Cleveland, born around 1877; Frances, born around 1879; and Joseph, born around 1880. By 1880, he was working as a wholesale milliner in Boston. The family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late 1800s, and he took several trips to Utah and Colorado. He died in Massachusetts on January 1, 1902.

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