Humphriss, Richard Watson

Life Span
to
Dickinson Connection
Class of 1857
    Full name
    Richard Watson Humphriss
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Slave State
    No. of Spouses
    1
    No. of Children
    1
    Family
    Joshua Humphriss (father), Ann Humphriss (mother), Mary Isabella Tilson (wife, 1863), Annie Florence (daughter)
    Education
    Dickinson (Carlisle College)
    Other
    Other Education
    Methodist Episcopal Biblical Institute, Concord, NH
    Occupation
    Clergy
    Educator
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Church or Religious Denomination
    Methodist

    Richard Watson Humphriss (Dickinson Chronicles)

    Scholarship
    Richard Watson Humphriss was born to Joshua and Ann Humphriss in Sudlersville, Maryland on May 27, 1836. He prepared for college at the Hyatt Academy and entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in the fall of 1854 with the class of 1857. He was elected to the Union Philosophical Society but withdrew from the College after one year to take a position as the principal of the grammar school in Pottsdown, Pennsylvania. He also taught at the Williamsport Dickinson Seminary. He then completed studies at the Methodist Episcopal Biblical Institute in Concord, New Hampshire and entered the Philadelphia Conference of the Methodist Church as a clergyman. 

    He transferred to the New Hampshire Conference in 1861 and was pastor at the Wesley Church in Haverhill, Massachusetts in 1863. He then moved on to the Providence Conference and the County Street Chucrch in New Bedford. He finally setttled into the Philadelphia Conference structure in 1868 and the served the congregations of Trinity Church, Christ Church, St John's, Green Street, Grace Church, and several others in a remarkable career in the city. In addition to this, he was a pastor in Reading and Chester, Pennsylvania and was for a time chaplain to the Pennsylvania Military College in West Chester outside the city of Philadelphia. He was pastor of the Eighteenth Street Church in the city from 1902 untill his retirement in 1905.

    In March 1863, he had married Mary Isabella Tilson of New Hampshire. The couple had a daughter they named Annie Florence. Richard Watson Humphriss died on April 5, 1918 and was buried at the Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia. He was eighty one years old.
    John Osborne and James W. Gerencser, eds., “Richard Watson Humphriss,” Dickinson Chronicles, http://chronicles.dickinson.edu/encyclo/h/ed_humphrissRW.htm.
    How to Cite This Page: "Humphriss, Richard Watson," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5943.