Moses E. Howard, 1810-1890

Moses E. Howard, the son of Elijah Howard and Eleanor Sprague, was born on 16 October 1810, in Derby, Vermont. He spent his childhood years in Lisbon, New Hampshire, moving as a young adult to Walden, Vermont and then to Berlin, Vermont, where he would live for nearly fifty years. He was married twice, first to Caroline M. Harris (1816-1859) and, after her death, to Ann E. Barrows (1826-1892). He had six children from his first marriage and two from his second. At the time of his death on 29 October 1890, however, he was living alone in Brookfield, Vermont, his second wife having been granted a bill of divorce on the grounds of intolerable cruelty and his surviving children scattered in New England and the Midwest.

What caused Howard to leave Berlin at the end of his life was the obsession that shaped his later years, a penchant for settling his differences in court. A string of disastrous judgments in the mid-1880s caused him to lose his farm to his lawyer, right around the time that his second wife divorced him; after losing the farm, he sold out the rest of his land holdings and left town.

I’m currently assessing the scope of Howard’s legal activity between 1840 and his death. Once I have that in place, I’ll be looking to put his history with the courts in the context of the legal history of 19th-century New England and the events of his life outside the legal system. If you are interested in collaborating on this project, I’d love to hear from you via the Contact page.

Howard’s encounters with Montpelier newspaper editor Hiram Atkins are featured in my blog post “A Tale of Two Obituaries.”