Joseph Estabrook was born in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and died in Anderson County, Tennessee. He was the grandson of Joseph Estabrook, a Revolutionary soldier, and the great- grandson of Nehemiah Estabrook, who moved to Lebanon from Mansfield, Connecticut.
Destined, he thought, for the ministry, he completed his course at Dartmouth College in 1815 and began the study of theology at Princeton.
An affection of the voice caused him to change to pedagogy, and from 1817 to 1824 he lived at Amherst, four years as president of the academy and four years as professor of Latin and Greek in the college. Here in 1823 he was married to Nancy Dickinson. As a teacher he was more successful with young boys than with college students, and when at last he went away he left with the citizens of the little town a memory which, it would seem, made up in color for anything it lacked in probity. He was given to elegant ruffles and fine boots, to the prodigious use of snuff, to shooting even on Fast-day, and, capping all, to dreams which told him faithfully how to win $5, 000 by lottery. Probably because of his bronchial trouble, in 1824 he went South. For a while he conducted a school for young ladies in Staunton, Virginia, and afterward a similar school in Knoxville, Tennessee. Then he was president of the school in Knoxville—East Tennessee College, 1834-40, and East Tennessee University, 1840-50—which later became the University of Tennessee. During the period from 1826 to 1857 this school was almost entirely under the direction of New Englanders. Neither its other executives imported from Estabrook’s section of the country, however, nor the indigenous ones who were at times wedged into the administration, brought it to the pitch of attainment that—with its all-Dartmouth faculty—it maintained throughout the forties. In spite of this success, for some reason he determined to withdraw from public life, and to retire to a place in Anderson County about twenty-five miles distant from Knoxville. There he set out to produce salt by boring into the earth till he could obtain salt water. All his time and much of the money he had accumulated were devoted to this end and it was generally believed throughout the spring before his death that the undertaking was just short of success.
Here in 1823 he was married to Nancy Dickinson.
