Fire Destroys the Home of the Founder of Howard University

An eighteenth-century farmhouse in Leeds, Maine, was recently destroyed by fire. The house was the home of Oliver Otis Howard, the Civil War general who in 1868 founded Howard University in Washington, D.C. A staunch abolitionist, Howard was a graduate of Bowdoin College and the U.S. Military Academy. He later served on the faculty at West Point. After the Civil War he was named the head of the Freeman’s Bureau. He later fought in the Indian Wars and remained on active duty in the Army until the age of 64. Howard died in 1909.

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