Homer Morgan Crafts was born in July 1836 in West Springfield, Massachusetts, to Chester Crafts and Martha Morgan. His father was an inn keeper who owned $9,204 of real estate in 1850. His mother died in the late 1830s, and his father married Olive Day in May 1843. Crafts grew grew up and attended school in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He married Roxanna Forehand in the late 1850s. By 1860, Crafts was living in Claremont, New Hampshire, and working as a merchant. He owned $2,500 of personal property.
He enlisted in the Union army on May 21, 1861, and he mustered in as a sergeant in Company I of the 2nd New Hampshire Infantry on June 7. As he explained in June 1861, the "way I come to enlist into the United States Service was I had a good office offered me, and times being so very hard and I thought I might run some risk of my life for the sake of the neadful which we are all after." He took part in the First Battle of Manassas and the Battle of Williamsburg, and he was discharged for disability on May 28, 1862. By 1870, he had returned to his parents’ household in Holyoke. He died in Northampton, Massachusetts, on August 13, 1872.