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SETH BENJAMIN JONES was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, July 3, 1841. His
parents were Seth Bouton and Sarah Elizabeth (Whittemore) Jones. He was prepared for
college at Mount Anthony Seminary, Bennington, Vermont, with William Swan, who entered
Williams with him and was his roommate during his college course.
While in college, Jones became a member of the Delta Psi fraternity; also he was a
member of the 'Technian Literary Society, and one of its vice-presidents during Senior year;
a member of the Lyceum of Natural History, and its curator and corresponding secretary
during Senior year; chairman of the committee of songs and one of the ushers on the Class
Day program; was one of the "Moonlight" prize speakers; and was prominent in college
athletics and musical societies. He belonged to the Instrumental and Glee Club. He played
the guitar in concerts, and sang the second tenor in the Glee Club entertainments. In class
singing, Jones was generally called on to start the song. In athletics he was excellent in
gymnasium work, and was very prominent in football and baseball, being a member of the
Greylock Baseball Club. He represented our Class as one of the editors of The University
Quarterly, 1860-61. After graduation he sang in the South Congregational Church choir, at
Bridgeport, for many years, and is today a member of the famous Tippecanoe Campaign
Chorus Club, which assisted materially in singing Hon. E. J. Hill into Congress.
After leaving college, Jones engaged in teaching for two years in Bennington,
Vermont, and studied medicine at the same time. It was while living in Bennington that our
classmate married, probably at an earlier date than any other member of the Class, except
Cairns, who took to himself a wife more than a year before our graduation day. Jones was
united in wedlock, September 7, 1863, with Emily Clarissa Yates, daughter of Prof. and Mrs.
George W. Yates, of Bennington, Vermont.
After two years in Vermont, Jones removed to his old home city in Connecticut, and
there began his career as a "pedagogue." In 1872, he built and equipped Park Avenue
Institute, at Bridgeport, a preparatory school for boys and young men, its purpose to fit
them for college or for their life work. It has flourished under our classmate's management,
and he is still its principal, vigorous mentally and physically, and he is not yet ready to put
into other hands the institute which has been his pride for so many years.
Our classmate has had two daughters: one, Lillian, the first born of our Class after
graduation, and honored as The Class Girl with a souvenir token, now the wife of E. H.
Taft, M.D., of Buffalo, New York; the second, Mollie, the widow of the late Mr. H. E.
Billings, of Hartford. There is one grandchild, Heywood Yates Billings, a student of Park
Avenue Institute, and he is now eight years old. Many a day, during the past winter, Jones
might have been seen on the ponds about Bridgeport skating with this lively and frolicsome
grandson.
Source:
Class of Sixty-Three Williams College Fortieth Year Report, by
the Class Historian, Thomas Todd Printer, Boston, 1903
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