Simeon E. Baldwin

Simeon Eben Baldwin (February 5, 1840 – January 30, 1927) was an American jurist, law professor, and politician who served as the 65th governor of Connecticut.

Education

The son of jurist, Connecticut governor and U.S. Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin and Emily Pitkin Perkins, Baldwin was born and lived for much of his life in New Haven, Connecticut, and was one of nine children. Among his ancestors were the initial five governors of the Connecticut Colony. Another ancestor was Roger Sherman, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence. His father had served from 1844 to 1846 as the governor of Connecticut.

As a boy he attended the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven, Connecticut. Active in all its alumni work, he was, more specifically, for many years president of its board of trustees; in 1910, on the occasion of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the school, he delivered a discourse on its history; when shortly before his death it became necessary to house the school in new quarters, he was one of the largest, if not the largest, of the individual donors whose contributions made possible a set of modern buildings for what he was fond of referring to as the fourth oldest institution of learning in the United States.

From the Hopkins Grammar School he went to Yale College, from which he was graduated with the class of 1861. There is scant information as to his four years at college. During that period he kept a diary from which he read extracts on the fifty-fifth reunion of his class, but this diary is not at present available. That the studious traits which he later manifested were not altogether lacking at this time may be inferred from the fact that he was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Skull & Bones. Such records as we have do not indicate that there was anything unusual about this young student who had among his classroom contemporaries the poet Edward Rowland Sill, and two others who like himself were later to have much to do with the life of the university, his friends Tracy Peck and Franklin Bowditch Dexter.