Simeon Eben Baldwin | |
---|---|
65th Governor of Connecticut | |
In office January 4, 1911 – January 6, 1915 |
|
Lieutenant |
Dennis A. Blakeslee Lyman T. Tingier |
Preceded by | Frank B. Weeks |
Succeeded by | Marcus H. Holcomb |
Personal details | |
Born |
New Haven, Connecticut |
February 5, 1840
Died | January 30, 1927 | (aged 86)
Political party | Democratic |
Alma mater | Yale College |
Simeon Eben Baldwin (February 5, 1840 – January 30, 1927), jurist, law professor and the 65th Governor of Connecticut, was the son of jurist, Connecticut governor and U.S. Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin and Emily Pitkin Perkins. He was born in New Haven, which continued to be his home throughout his long life; in spite of his participation in activities of national and international importance, he was associated in a peculiar and intimate way with the political, legal, and intellectual life of his native town and state for more than half a century. On 19 October 1865 he married Susan Mears Winchester, daughter of Edmund Winchester and Harriet Mears. Simeon and Susan had three children: Florence, Roger and Helen.
As a boy he attended the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven, Connecticut. Ties of loyalty and interest bound him to this school for the rest of his life. Active in all its alumni work, he was, more specifically, for many years president of its board of trustees; in 1910, on the occasion of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the school, he delivered a discourse on its history; when shortly before his death it became necessary to house the school in new quarters, he was one of the largest, if not the largest, of the individual donors whose contributions made possible a set of modern buildings for what he was fond of referring to as the fourth oldest institution of learning in the United States.
From the Hopkins Grammar School he went to Yale College, from which he was graduated with the class of 1861. There is scant information as to his four years at college. During that period he kept a diary from which he read extracts on the fifty-fifth reunion of his class, but this diary is not at present available. That the studious traits which he later manifested were not altogether lacking at this time may be inferred from the fact that he was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Skull & Bones. Such records as we have do not indicate that there was anything unusual about this young student who had among his classroom contemporaries the poet Edward Rowland Sill, and two others who like himself were later to have much to do with the life of the university, his friends Tracy Peck and Franklin Bowditch Dexter.