WILLSON, BYRON FORCEYTHE: 1837-1867.
Forceythe Willson was born at Little Genesee, Allegany County, N. Y. , on Apr. 10, 1837. His father, Hiram Willson, was a native of Vermont, a patron of liberal education and an early abolitionist. His mother was Ann Calvin Ennis, who had been born in Rhode Island .
In about 1846 the family started west, flatboating to Maysville, Ky., where they remained about a year before moving on to Covington, Ky., Forceythe Willson had his first formal schooling in Maysville , continuing in Covington . In 1852 the family again moved, this time to New Albany, Ind.,
Here Hiram Willson conducted a prosperous lumber business until his death in 1859, three years after his wife had passed away. Although he left eight children, of whom Forceythe was the eldest, there was property enough to render them all comfortable.
Young Forceythe had already spent a year at Antioch College in Ohio , which was then under the direction of Horace Mann. He continued for a year or two at Harvard, but left because of ill health and returned to New Albany .
He became interested in spiritualism when that belief enjoyed a vogue in New Albany around 1858. He soon left the company of the more avid followers of the sect but continued in his faith in his own psychic powers–of which he gave a demonstration to Lowell, Longfellow and James R. Gilmore during his later resident at Cambridge .
After his father's death he lived alone–apparently in a house apart from his younger brothers and sisters–and began his serious writing. When the Civil War began, he took somewhat more interest in it than might have been anticipated after his recent apparent renunciation of things worldly. He began to write editorials for the LOUISVILLE JOURNAL, and raised (and, according to tradition, equipped at his own expense) a company of Union volunteers. He did not serve in the war himself, although he was said to have been offered a commission.
His first poem to attract attention, "The Old Sergeant," was published anonymously as the "carrier's New Year's address" of the LOUISVILLE JOURNAL on Jan. 1, 1863. It was supposed to have been based on fact, one of the characters being a New Albany man. It was said to have appealed to Abraham Lincoln: certainly Oliver Wendell Holmes approved it, read it frequently in his wartime lectures, and made continued efforts to locate the author.
In 1863 Willson married Elizabeth Conwell Smith of Laurel, Ind., a twenty-one-year-old student in De Pauw College for Women at New Albany , and the two moved to Cambridge, Mass., purchasing a house near that of James Russell Lowell. Elizabeth Willson died the next year, leaving a few poems of her own page: 342[View Page 342] which her husband printed privately a year or two later.
Willson remained in Cambridge until 1866, but he made no effort to become acquainted with Lowell, Holmes, or the other New England literateurs who were his neighbors. Before he left, however, they found him out, and after his death Holmes wrote of him: "He came amongst us as softly and silently as a bird drops into his nest. His striking personal appearance had attracted the attention of the scholars and poets who were his neighbors, long before they heard his name or condition. It was impossible to pass without noticing the tall and dark young man with long curled locks, and large, dreamy, almond-shaped eyes …"
In the autumn of 1866 he suffered a recurrence of his old illness–evidently tuberculosis. He recovered somewhat for a few weeks but died in Alfred, N. Y., on Feb. 2, 1867, and was buried beside his wife at Laurel, Ind.
Information from Piatt, John James–"An Ohio Valley Poet" in The Hesperian Tree, 1900, and Nicholson–The Hoosiers.
- The Old Sergeant and Other Poems.
Boston, 1867.
