Henry Stevens (Wisconsin politician)

Henry Stevens was born in Wilton, New Hampshire, in January 1818. He was raised and educated there and moved to Caledonia, Wisconsin, in 1855, where he established a farm. In Caledonia, he was elected chairman of the town board. In 1863, in the midst of the American Civil War, he was elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly running on the National Union ticket. He was subsequently elected to the Wisconsin State Senate in 1866 and 1868.[1] He did not run for a third term in 1870.

Stevens killed himself on July 10, 1875, hanging himself from a tree near his home in Caledonia. Obituaries indicated that he had suffered from depression for some time.[2]

Henry Stevens was the fifth of six children born to John Stevens and his wife Hannah (née Lovejoy). John Stevens served 20 years in the New Hampshire Legislature, representing the towns of Wiltshire and Mason. Henry Stevens' paternal grandfather was also named John Stevens; he was a volunteer in the New Hampshire militia during the American Revolutionary War and served in the Ticonderoga Campaign.[3] His maternal grandfather was Major Samuel Lovejoy, who served as an enlisted man in Nichols' Regiment of Militia in the Battles of Saratoga. The Lovejoys can trace their heritage back to John Lovejoy, an English colonist who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a child in 1630.[4]

Henry Stevens married Eliza Sawtelle of Wiltshire.[3]

• Henry Stevens at Find a Grave