Hubert Howe Bancroft - Biography

Biography

Bancroft was born in Granville, Ohio to Azariah Ashley Bancroft and Lucy Howe Bancroft. His parents were staunch abolitionists. The family home was a station on the Underground Railroad, and is now a dormitory on the campus of Denison University. He attended the Doane Academy in Granville for a year, and he then became a clerk in his brother-in-law's bookstore in Buffalo, New York. In March 1852, he was sent to San Francisco, California, where he initiated and managed a regional office of the business. He also began his own publishing house. In 1868, he resigned from his business in favor of his brother, A. L. Bancroft. He had accumulated a great library of historical material, and abandoned business to devote himself entirely to writing and publishing history.

Bancroft's library consisted of books, maps, and printed and manuscript documents, including a large number of narratives dictated to Bancroft or his assistants by pioneers, settlers, and statesmen. The indexing of this vast collection employed six persons for ten years. The library was moved in 1881 to a fireproof building, and in 1900 numbered about 45,000 volumes.

He developed a plan to publish a history in 39 volumes of the entire Pacific coast region of North America, from Central America to Alaska. He employed collaborators for the preliminary work, and then revised it all, and wrote the most important chapters himself. In 1886 the publishing establishment of A. L. Bancroft & Company burned, and the sheets of seven volumes of the history he had written were destroyed.

Bancroft's first marriage was to Emily Ketchum in 1859. They had one daughter, Kate. Emily died in 1869. Bancroft married again in 1879. His second wife was Matilda Coley Griffing. They had four children, Paul, Griffing, Philip and Lucy.

Bancroft died in 1918 in Walnut Creek, California, two days after being struck by a street car. He is interred in the Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, named in his honor, was founded when the University of California purchased his book collection in 1905. Part of a property Bancroft bought (c.1880) in Contra Costa County, California, is now the Ruth Bancroft Garden. An archive of Bancroft family correspondence, collected by his daughter Kate, is held in the Mandeville Special Collections Library in the Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego.