Harry Fielding Reid - Early Life

Early Life

Harry Fielding Reid was the fourth child of seven born to Andrew Reid and Fanny Brooke Gwathmey Reid. HF Reid's mother was a descendant of Betty Washington Lewis, sister of the first US President; his father was a successful sugar merchant. The younger Reid's early education took him for at least one year to Switzerland; he is also known to have attended and graduated from the Pennsylvania Military Academy. In 1877 Reid enrolled at the newly-founded Johns Hopkins University, from which he earned a B.A. in 1880 as part of the second graduating class. During the following year, he entered the Hopkins Ph.D. program, which was then revolutionizing American scientific and intellectual life. Reid studied under physicist Henry Rowland and mathematician J. J. Sylvester, two of the original Johns Hopkins professors. In February 1885 Reid was granted his doctorate with a dissertation on the spectra of platinum, an assignment typical of those that Rowland - the pioneering figure in modern spectral studies - gave his students.

While in graduate school Reid married Edith Gittings (1861–1954). Her father, James Gittings, was descended from a long-standing Baltimore County family with strong connections to the legal and medical communities of Maryland. Her mother was Mary Elizabeth MacGill, whose father was a physician in Hagerstown, MD. Together, Reid and his wife would have two children: Francis Fielding Reid, born in 1892, and Doris Fielding Reid, born in 1895. Through the Gittings line the two Reid children were distant cousins to Wallis Warfield (born 1895-6), later Duchess of Windsor.

Through his mother, Harry Fielding Reid was a great-great-grandnephew of George Washington. In addition to this social connection, the Reids were closely involved in the academic world of Baltimore, particularly figures from the “heroic” era of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, like Sir William Osler, and graduate school friends such as Woodrow Wilson.