Born: June 10, 1813, Providence, Rhode Island.
Died: October 1, 1903, Newton, Massachusetts.
Buried: Originally in Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. His grandson, Charles Pitkin, had the remains disinterred and cremated in 1919, for reasons unknown.
Henry was the husband of Maria Carlisle Loring.
He grew up in Kingston, Massachusetts, and was educated at Worcester and Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
He went into the manufacturing business in Worcester and Boston, and in 1875 became president of the Union Mutual Life Insurance Company. He served as a Massachusetts state senator, but is perhaps remembered as a poet.
He wrote his well known poem The Vacant Chair after the death of Lieutenant John William Grout of the 15th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment (1843–1861), killed during the American civil war Battle of Ball’s Bluff in Loudoun County, Virginia. The poem, set to music George Root, is featured on the soundtrack and played during Ken Burns’ 1990 documentary series, The Civil War.
Washburn’s other works include:
We shall meet, but we shall miss him,
There will be one vacant chair;
We shall linger to caress him,
When we breathe our evening prayer;
When a year ago we gathered,
Joy was in his mild blue eye,
But a golden cord is severed,
And our hopes in ruin lie.
At our fireside, sad and lonely,
Often will the bosom swell
At remembrance of the story
How our noble Willie fell;
How he strove to bear our banner
Thro’ the thickest of the fight
And uphold our country’s honor,
In the strength of manhood’s might.
True, they tell us wreaths of glory
Evermore will deck his brow,
But this soothes the anguish only
Sweeping o’er our heartstrings now.
Sleep today, O early fallen,
In thy green and narrow bed,
Dirges from the pine and cypress
Mingle with the tears we shed.
Henry Stevenson Washburn
Worcester Spy, 1861