Degree Recipient

Life Experience

William Hamilton Stockwell was born in 1811 in Kentucky. Having just turned thirteen, he began attending Indiana State Seminary (now IU) when the new school’s doors were first opened in April of 1825. At the age of eighteen, while still a student, he was appointed superintendent of the seminary’s preparatory department. He graduated from IU with a bachelor’s degree at age nineteen and was one of the four students in IU’s first graduating class. He also received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Transylvania University in Kentucky. He taught at Indiana’s Princeton Seminary from 1843 to 1844. While living in Indiana, he was elected state senator and was proposed as a possible member of Congress. He declined the candidacy.

Stockwell was a practicing physician in New Orleans. For some time, he was an editor of a medical journal in New Orleans. Upon moving to New Jersey, he was made superintendent of the public schools. He spent several years in travel and observation in Europe. He died in 1875.

Marriage and Family

Stockwell married Mary Strange; she was twenty-four years his junior. His wife, two sons, and two daughters survived him. In 1888, his son, Nathaniel, died at age twenty-seven of pneumonia.

References

1. Wylie
2. Findagrave.com
3. http://portlandartmseum.us/mwebcgi/mweb.exe
4. files.usgwarchives.net/in/gibson/schools
5. The New York Times 03/30/1888
6. David D. Banta (1890) “The Indiana Seminary” in Wylie
7. David D. Banta (1891) “History of Indiana University: The New Department” (IU Law Collection)
8. Gil R. Stormont (1914) History of Gibson County Indiana (Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen & Co.)