Heman Humphrey
Heman Humphrey was a 19th-century American author and clergyman who served as a trustee of Williams College and afterward as the second president of Amherst College, a post he held for 22 years.Biography
Humphrey was born in West Simsbury, Hartford County, Connecticut. His father's name was Solomon Humphrey, descended in direct line from Michael Humphrey, an immigrant who came from England some time before 1643. Heman's mother Hannah Brown Humphrey was the second wife of Solomon and was the eldest of the six children of Captain John Brown, who died on June, 1776, during the American Revolution in defense of New York. Heman's father Solomon was a farmer and moved from Simsbury in 1755, first to Bristol and then to Barkhamstead, where he died in 1834.
Humphrey graduated from Yale University with an A.M. in 1805 and was ordained a Congregational minister on March 16, 1807. He became a minister in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1807, moving to Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1817. Following his tenure at Williams College, in 1825 he was appointed president of Amherst. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1842. Humphrey was influential in the nineteenth-century temperance movement and typical of the early proponents of prohibition. He was the father of U.S. Representative James Humphrey.
