Roswell Farnham Papers

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 Elizabeth Johnson on December 25, 1849, Farnham taught school in Dunham, Quebec, Franklin, Vermont and at the Bradford Academy 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 -- member of the Republican State Committee (1865-68), State Senator elector the same year -- 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, concentrating largely on the affairs of the financially ailing VCC. 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 really regained full health. Roswell Farnham died at his home in Bradford on January 5, 1903, at the age of seventy-five.