Background
Hollister, Gideon Hiram was born on December 14, 1817 in Washington, Connecticut, United States. Son of Gideon and Harriet (Jackson) Hollister.
Hollister, Gideon Hiram was born on December 14, 1817 in Washington, Connecticut, United States. Son of Gideon and Harriet (Jackson) Hollister.
Graduated from Yale, 1840. Studied law with Judge Origen South. Symour, Litchfield, Connecticut.
After studying law in Litchfield with the Honorary Origen South. Seymour, he was admitted to the bar in April, 1842. He began practice in Woodbury, Connecticut, but soon removed to Litchfield, where, in 1843, he was appointed Clerk of the Court, an office which he held—a single year excepted—until 1852.
In 1856 he was elected to the Connecticut State Senate, and in February, 1868, was appointed by President Andrew Johnson Minister of the United States to Hayti, but was recalled by President Ulysses South. Grant in September, 1869.
In 1880 he represented the town in the Connecticut Legislature, as a Democrat. He died in Litchfield, after about a week"s illness, of suffusion of the heart, March 24, 1881, in his 64th year.
Hollister was best known as the author of a History of Connecticut, in two volumes, published in 1855. A revised edition was about to appear at the time of his death.
He also published, in 1851, an historical romance, entitled Mount Hope, or Philip, King of the Wampanoags, which his maturer judgment disapproved as too florid in style, and a tragic poem, in 1866, entitled Thomas a Becket, which was dramatized and played by Edwin Booth, besides other minor poems.
This article incorporates public domain material from the 1881 Yale Obituary Record.
Member Connecticut Legislature, 1880-1881.
Married Mary South. Brisbane, June 1847.