Walker (Francis Amasa) is born in Boston.

Francis Amasa Walker graduates from Amherst College, serves as a general in the Civil War, works as a journalist, serves as U.S. Census director, and teaches at Yale College. He returns to Boston to serve as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1881-97). A leading thinker in political economics and statistics, Walker also serves as a trustee of the Boston Public Library, where he becomes involved in a controversy in 1896.* He dies in Boston on January 5, 1897.