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.