Edward Albert Hill was born on September 16, 1857, in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, to Charles W. Hill and Martha Wight. His father was a farmer and teacher. The family lived in Shrewsbury until the 1860s, when they moved to Boston, Massachusetts. By 1870, the family owned $6,000 of real estate and $2,000 of personal property. Hill graduated from the Roxbury Latin School in 1876 before enrolling at Amherst College.

 

He joined the Republican Party, and he began working at the Evening Union newspaper in 1880. By 1884, he had become managing editor of the newspaper. In March 1888, a fire broke out in the office, and Hill remained behind until everyone had reached safety. As a local writer later reported, “Mr. Hill, while urging everybody to…escape, staid by those who had not presence of mind to do it, and was finally hemmed in by the flames at a front window where nothing but his cheer and courage preserved them all from leaping to their death in the dreadful delay of the ladders.”

 

He married Elizabeth M. Alexander in Springfield, Massachusetts, on February 22, 1883, and their son Herbert was born around 1884. They settled in Springfield, and Hill worked as an editor of the Springfield Homestead newspaper. He supported the Republican Party, and he became “one of the best known of the younger newspaper men” in the region. He died of heart disease in Springfield on September 1, 1895.

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