Lester Frank Ward - Biography

Biography

Lester Frank Ward was born in Joliet, Illinois, the youngest of 10 children born to Justus Ward and his wife Silence Rolph Ward. Justus Ward was of old New England colonial stock, but he wasn't rich and farmed to earn a living. Silence Ward was the daughter of a clergyman; she was a talented perfectionist, educated and fond of literature. When Lester Frank was one year of age the family moved closer to Chicago, to a place called Cass, now known as Downers Grove, Illinois about twenty three miles from Lake Michigan. The family then moved to a homestead in nearby St. Charles, Illinois where his father built a saw mill business making railroad ties. Ward first attended a formal school in 1850 when he was nine years old. He was known as Frank Ward to his classmates and friends and showed a great enthusiasm for books and learning and he liberally supplemented his education with outside reading. 4 years after Ward started attending school, his parents, Lester Frank and one of his older bothers, Erastus, traveled to Iowa in a covered wagon for a new life on the frontier. Four years later, in 1858, Justus Ward unexpectedly died and the family returned to St. Charles, much to the dismay of Ward's mother who wanted the boys to stay in Iowa and continue their father's work. The two brothers lived together for a short period of time in the old family homestead in St. Charles, doing farm work to earn a living, and encouraged each other to pursue an education and abandon their father's life of physical labor. Their estranged mother lived just down the street in the home of one of their sisters. In late 1858 the two brothers moved to Pennsylvania at the invitation of Lester Frank's oldest brother Cyrenus (9 years Lester Frank's senior) who was starting a business making wagon wheel hubs and needed workers. The brothers saw this as an opportunity to move closer to civilization and to eventually attend college. The business failed, however, and Lester Frank, who still didn't have the money to attend college, found a job teaching in a small country school; in the Summer months he worked as a farm laborer. He finally saved the money to attend college and enrolled in the Susquehanna Collegiate Institute in 1860. While he was at first self-conscious about his spotty formal education and self learning, he soon found that his knowledge compared favorably to his classmates, and he was rapidly promoted. It was here that he met Elizabeth "Lizzie" Carolyn Vought and fell deeply in love. (Their rather torrid love affair is documented in Ward's first journal: "Young Ward's Diary", which remains under copyright and in print.) He married Lizzie on Aug. 13, 1862 and almost immediately enlisted in the Union Army and was sent to the Civil War front where he was wounded three times. After the end of the war he successfully petitioned for work with the federal government in Washington, DC, where he and Lizzie then moved. Lizzie assisted him in editing a newsletter called "The Iconoclast", dedicated to free thinking. She gave birth to a son, but the child died when he was less than a year old. Then, in 1872, Lizzie became ill and died. These were hard times for Ward to live through.

After moving to Washington, Ward attended Columbian College, now the George Washington University, and graduating in 1869 with the degree of A.B.. In 1871 he received the degree of LL.B. (and was admitted to the Bar of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia), and that of A.M. in 1873. Ward never practiced law, however, and concentrated on his career in the federal government. Almost all of the basic research in such fields as geography, paleontology, archeology and anthropology were concentrated in Washington, DC. at this time in history, and a job as a federal government scientist was a prestigious and influential position. In 1883 he was made Geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey. In 189S, he was made Paleontologist. He held this position until 1906, when he resigned to accept the chair of Sociology at Brown University. While he worked at the Geological Survey he became good friends with John Wesley Powell, the powerful and influential second director of the US Geological Survey (1881–1894) and the director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution.