Higginson (Thomas Wentworth) is born in Cambridge.

The son of Stephen and Louisa (Storrow) Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson graduates from Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School, and serves as pastor of the First Religious Society of Newburyport (1847-51), and the Free Church in Worcester (1852-61), and marries Mary Channing in 1847.* In the Civil War, Col. Higginson commands the First South Carolina Regiment, one of the first African-American units in the Union Army. He subsequently becomes a well-known writer and biographer and a mentor for Emily Dickinson, beginning in 1862.* Higgins marries Mary Thatcher and moves to Cambridge in 1881. He dies there on May 9, 1911, and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery.