Edmund H. Bennett - Family and Education

Family and Education

Bennett was born in Manchester, Vermont. His father was Milo Lyman Bennett and his mother was Abigail Hatch. Milo Bennett came from Sharon, Connecticut, and was a graduate of Yale College in 1811. He studied at the Litchfield Law School, then lived in Burlington, Vermont, and finally settled in Manchester. He served as the State attorney and was also judge of probate. In 1838 Bennett became judge of the Vermont Supreme Court, and in 1859 served as a commissioner revising the state's statutes. Conrad Reno in his memoir of New England judges recorded that the Bennett family's ancestors hailed from New England.

Bennett was educated at the Manchester and Burlington Academies, and then studied at the University of Vermont where he graduated in 1843 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He taught for a while in a private school in Virginia, but abandoned this for a career in law. He started that career as an employee in his father's law office and was admitted to the bar of Vermont in 1847. In July 1848 he relocated to Massachusetts and was admitted to the Suffolk bar. He then moved to Taunton as a partner in the firm of Nathaniel Morton, Henry Williams, Henry J. Fuller and Fred S. Hall. In 1853 Bennett married Sally Crocker, the daughter of the congressman Samuel Leonard Crocker. She outlived him and died in 1911. They had four children: Caroline, Edmund Neville, Samuel and Mary. The first two children died in infancy, while Samuel Bennett later became the Dean of Boston University Law School.

In 1872 the University of Vermont conferred the Doctor of Laws degree (LL. D.) on Bennett.