James Warner Ward

Background

James Warner Ward was born at Newark, N. J. , son of William and Sara (Warner) Ward.

Education

He attended the Boston public schools until he was fourteen, when he began business as a freight checker in a shipping house in Salem, Massachussets.

Career

In 1834 he went to Columbus, Ohio, and opened a school. After the death of his wife in 1844, he moved to Cincinnati, where he became a pupil of and later assistant to Prof. John Locke of the Medical College of Ohio. In 1851 he was elected professor of general literature and botany in the Ohio Female College, situated in College Hill, seven miles north of Cincinnati. Ward left the Ohio Female College in 1854 and for a year, in association with Dr. John A. Warder, edited the Horticultural Review and Botanical Magazine in Cincinnati. In 1859 he moved to New York City, where he spent the next fifteen years first as clerk, later as deputy auditor in the customs house. In July 1874 he began a card catalogue of the Grosvenor Library in Buffalo. The library had been given its charter in 1859, was opened in 1870, and by 1874 had a book collection of 17, 900; the staff consisted of two, the librarian and his assistant. Ward became librarian on October 1, 1874, and began twenty-one years of efficient service in which he brought the library from its infancy to a position of real eminence. The first modern inventory was taken in 1876, and the gaps in the collections were filled out. Ward was one of the first members of the American Library Association, organized in 1876, and took part in technical discussions as reported in the Library Journal. He had active supervision, together with the architect, of the details of construction of the Grosvenor Library building, which in 1895 superseded the library's rented quarters. At that time the book collection numbered 38, 000, a large collection for the day. Ward retired, January 15, 1896, and spent the winter in Worcester, Massachussets, and in the South, returning to Buffalo, where he died at his home, June 28, 1897, aged eighty-one years. He was survived by his wife. He contributed papers on these subjects to the journals of the day, composed for the voice and organ, and was the author of much poetry. In 1852 he wrote a poem entitled Woman, originally prepared for the Young Men's Mercantile Library Association of Cincinnati, which was revised and read for the graduating exercises of the Ohio Female College, July 17, 1852, and published by the college. In 1857 was published a volume of poems, Home Made Verses and Stories in Rhyme, which were usually signed "Yorick, " and in 1868 Higher Water, a parody on Hiawatha describing a stream of the Ohio River.

Achievements

• Ward is perhaps bestknown in the world of books as editor of A. W. Sangster's Niagara River and Falls from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario (1886), a series of etchings with an accompanying text which includes a poem, "To Niagara, " by Ward.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Woman. A poem

    (This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)

  • Woman: a Poem

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

Membership

He was a member of several microscopical societies and of the Torrey Botanical Club.

Interests

• Ward took an active interest in music, art, and the natural sciences, especially astronomy, botany, and microscopy.

Connections

At nineteen he married Roxanna Wyman Blake, who bore him a son and a daughter. On June 29, 1848, he married Catherine McClyment Lea, daughter of John and Catherine (McClyment) Lea of Cincinnati, and a niece of Henry Charles Lea, the historian.

Father:

William Ward

Mother:

Sara (Warner) Ward

Spouse:

Roxanna Wyman Blake

Spouse:

Catherine McClyment Lea