Background
William Drew "W. D. " Washburn, son of Israel and Martha (Benjamin) Washburn, was born on a farm in Livermore, Me.
William Drew "W. D. " Washburn, son of Israel and Martha (Benjamin) Washburn, was born on a farm in Livermore, Me.
Common schools and the academies of Gorham, Paris, and Farmington prepared him for Bowdoin College, where he graduated in 1854. He then studied law with his brother Israel in Orono and with John A. Peters in Bangor.
He spent a little time in Washington as a clerk in the House of Representatives. In 1857 he followed his brothers Cadwallader and Elihu into the West, and settled in Minnesota to practise law. At once he was made secretary and agent of the Minneapolis Mill Company, organized by his brother Cadwallader and others. In 1858 he was elected to the second Minnesota legislature, which never met. From 1861 to 1865 he was federal surveyor-general for Minnesota, living in St. Paul; in 1864 he ran against Ignatius Donnelly for the House of Representatives, but was defeated. Upon retiring from his surveyorship in 1865, he once more became agent of the Minneapolis Mill Company, and took up his residence permanently in Minneapolis. In 1867 he was one of those who launched the Minneapolis Tribune and in 1871 he sat in the legislature. Lumbering, with a sawmill at Minneapolis and one at Anoka, development of water power, especially on the west side of the Falls of St. Anthony, realestate deals, and the manufacture of flour were some of his manifold activities. In 1878, after a brief association with his brother in Washburn, Crosby & Company, he founded the milling firm of W. D. Washburn & Company. Elected to the national House of Representatives, partly as the result of a contest between farmers and millers, he served from 1879 to 1885, working especially for the improvement of the upper Mississippi, for control of its floods, and for the improvement of navigation on the Great Lakes. In 1884 many of his interests were consolidated in the Washburn Mill Company. Railroad building and management, primarily as a factor in the milling industry, also engaged his attention. He was a leader in organizing and promoting the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad, and he was the principal projector of the Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie Railway Company, of which he was president until 1889. His election to the United States Senate in that year was a turning point in his life. Upon taking his seat he dropped most of his active connections with his business enterprises, although he remained a director of the Pillsbury-Washburn Flour Mills Company with which the Washburn Mill Company was merged in 1889. His one term in the Senate, however, scarcely gave him time to make himself a power in that body. Defeated in the legislature by Gov. Knute Nelson in 1895, through what he was inclined to consider political treachery, he made no further attempts at political advancement but busied himself with business, church, social, and philanthropic interests.
He was one of the founders of the First Universalist Society of Minneapolis. Not a "mixer, " living and acting in what many considered an "aristocratic" manner, he was, while not a negligible political factor, more important as a major figure in the business, financial, and social life of his community.
He had married Elizabeth Muzzy of Bangor, April 19, 1859, and they had eight children.
