In Memoriam. 
439 
WILLIAM FRANCIS ALLEN. 
Late President of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts and Letters. 
By JAMES D. BUTLER. 
William Francis Allen was born September 5,1830, and died Decem¬ 
ber 9, 1889. His birth was in Northborough, a Massachusetts village, 
thirty-five miles from Boston; his death was in Madison. He grad¬ 
uated at Harvard University in 1851. His preparation for college was 
made at home in a school taught by his father, also a Harvard graduate, 
and a Unitarian pastor. For three years he gave instruction at New 
York city in a private family, and then in 1854 went abroad. He was for 
one year a student in the universities of Berlin and Gottingen. The 
following winter he spent in Rome, and the spring in Greece, returning to 
America in June, 1856. During the next seven years he was one of the 
principals of a classical school near Boston, at West Newton. Late in 
1863, accompanied by his wife, married the year before, he went to South 
Carolina in the employ of the Freedman’s Aid Association. After a half 
year of pioneer work in the education of negroes he came north, but very 
soon repaired to Arkansas as an agent of the Sanitary commission. This 
service was over early in 1865, and in the spring he returned to South 
Carolina, where he served till the close of the school year as a superin¬ 
tendent in Charleston. The next two years he taught, first in Antioch 
college, Ohio, and then at a military academy in New Jersey. His first 
wife died in 1865, and after three years he re-married. 
Professor Allen was a religious man. He was the true founder of the 
Unitarian church in Madison. His life was a sermon of admonition and 
a hymn of praise. The training of his children, a daughter by the first 
marriage and three sons by the second, was a rare specimen of personal 
assiduity. His nature was so far from doing harms that he suspected 
none, and his faith in the doctrine of depravity may hence not have 
been orthodox. Notwithstanding, no more stinging censure smote Fisk 
and Tweed than fell from his lips. 
His coming to Wisconsin was in 1867. In that year he accepted a call 
to the state university. His chair was at first called that of Ancient 
Languages and History, afterwards Latin and History, and for the last 
four years of his life History alone. In this Northwest he found the 
niche he was ordained to fill — for his teachings here his whole past life, 
studies at home and abroad, early training and varied school experi- 
