FRANCIS GRANGER ANTHONY
NEW HAVEN: Deputy Collector
Francis G. Anthony was born in Lima, Livingston county, New York, October 6, 1830. He is the son of William Miles Anthony, who was a native of Harwinton, in this state, where he was born in August, 1804. Mr. Anthony’s education was acquired in the public schools of Lima and the neighboring town of West Avon, with part of a year at a select school in Batavia, N. Y. The death of his father when the lad was but thirteen years of age terminated his attendance at school, as the family were left without means, and thus were unable to incur the expense of a liberal education. During the year of his father’s death Mr. Anthony came to New Haven, - part of the trip, from Rochester to Albany, being made on a canal boat, - to live with his uncle, Willis M. Anthony, who proved to be better, if possible, than a father to him. Here he spent nearly four years as clerk, first in Washington Yale’s drygoods store, and then with Fairman & Johnson. He is one of the original "Forty-niners," having taken the California gold fever on its first outbreak. On the 6th of February, 1849, he sailed from New York with a party of gold-seekers for California on the bark Clarissa Perkins, going around Cape Horn, the trip occupying two hundred and seventeen days. Arriving in San Francisco, the party disbanded, and Mr. Anthony went to the mines. He was a practical gold miner for two years, meeting with varying success, making some days $200 a day, other days nothing. Was a baker in Nevada, California, for about one year, at which business he did better than at mining - the income being more certain, and not so much up and down as in "prospecting for diggings." He returned east in 1852; lived in Michigan two years, operating a foundry; went to Kentucky in 1854, where he was in general merchandizing eleven years at Athens, in Fayette county, seven or eight years of which time he was postmaster. The succeeding five years he spent in New York city, and in 1870 he returned to New Haven, where he has since been employed in the tax collector’s office; at the present time is the deputy tax collector, and for the last thirteen years has been the rate-book maker. He has been a director in the Masonic Mutual Benefit Association of New Haven for fourteen years, and is at present executor of several estates. He is also a commissioner of the superior court for New Haven county. His acquaintance with New Haven people is very extensive, his business giving him familiarity with nearly every tax-payer in the city. He has been a lifelong democrat, though not an active politician; is a prominent member of the Masonic fraternity, in which he has taken all the degrees up to and including the thirty-second. He has held the office of recorder of New Haven Commandery, Knights Templar, since 1880; belongs to the Arabic order of the Mystic Shrine.
Mr. Anthony was married July 32, 1854, to Miss Electa Hulbert of Ann Arbor, Michigan, by whom he has had three children. Mrs. Anthony died February 29, 1888, and but one of the children, the youngest, has survived her.
Source: Illustrated Popular Biography of Connecticut - 1891, Compiled and Published by J. A. Spalding, Hartford Conn., Press of the Case, Lockwood and Brainard Company, 1891
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