Author: Ward, Milton
Biography:
WARD, Milton (1808-74: ancestry.com)
The son of Benjamin and Mary (Bartlett) Ward, he was born in Plymouth NH and graduated from Dartmouth College with the Class of 1825 to whom his volume of poems is dedicated. (Kettell published extracts in Specimens of American Poetry in 1829.) He went on to study medicine (MD 1829) but eventually chose the church over medicine and became a clergyman in the Episcopal Church. In Antrim NH in 1834 he married Mary Frances Symonds; the couple had three children. They fell on some hard times: in the preface to his set of Discourses on Christian Faith and Practice (Boston 1840), Ward explains that sickness in the family had made it impossible for him to work for a living, and so he hoped for some income from writing. By 1850, however, they had moved to Michigan and he was recorded in the Census again as a clergyman--in St. Clair MI in 1850, then in Detroit in time for the Census of 1860 and again in 1870. He was still in active service as the rector of St. Stephen's Church when he died in Detroit in 1874. (ancestry.com 12 Dec. 2020; General Catalog of Dartmouth College [1890]) HJ