Intermediate Language Lessons Part 3, Lesson 79, Selection To Be Memorized

This short biography was written while Henry Bennett was still alive, thus it reads in the present tense. Henry died on April 30, 1924.

Henry Holcomb Bennett

Henry Holcomb Bennett, son of John Briscoe Henry and Eliza (McClintock) Bennett, and elder brother of John Bennett, was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, December 5, 1863. He was educated in the public schools of his native city, and in Kenyon College, class of 1886. After leaving college he devoted himself, for a period, to various lines of business, chiefly railroading, in the West, where he lived five or six years. Returning to Chillicothe, he became a reporter for, and, later, city editor of, the Scioto Gazette. Mr. Bennett withdrew from journalism in the autumn of 1897, since which time he has given his energy chiefly to writing stories of army life and articles on ornithology, the latter illustrated by his own drawings. He has been an occasional contributor to several leading periodicals of the day, including Munsey’s, McClure’s, the Century, and Lippincott’s; and in the last-named magazine appeared (1898-9) a series of his sketches on the National Guard.

This versatile writer is a thorough student of American history, and a specialist of recognized authority on matters pertaining to the annals of Ohio, especially in the territorial period and the period of early statehood. He was secretary of the committee in charge of the “Constitutional” Centennial of Ohio, held in 1902, and chairman of the committee on decoration, of the Ohio Centennial of 1903; and it was he who, in 1902, designed the large bronze tablet erected to mark the site of the old Capitol at Chillicothe, the first state-house in America.

As a landscape-painter, Mr. Bennett has studied under some of the best American artists, and his work in water-color and in book-illustration has secured for him a reputation which keeps his talents increasingly in demand. Though he has not yet published any book of verse, he is well known as a poet, owing to the universal popularity of his patriotic lyric, “The Flag Goes By.” Poems from his pen have appeared in the Century Magazine, the Youth’s Companion, and the New York Independent.