Compiled by Russell Bastedo
State Curator
1998

Walter Harriman (1867, 1868). Warner minister, shopkeeper, and (from 1853) politician. Governor 1867/9.

Walter Harriman (1817-1884) was born at Warner (NH), and educated at academies in Henniker and Hopkinton. He began his working life as a schoolteacher, working in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New Jersey, 1835/40. While teaching he studied theology, and in 1840 he joined the Universalist Church. He preached at Harvard (MA), and at Warner.

In 1849/50 Harriman was elected to the state legislature as the representative for Warner. In 1851 he gave up preaching and opened a store in Warner with a future governor of the new (1849) Minnesota Territory as his partner. [John Pillsbury was governor of Minnesota, 1876/82.]

Harriman, a Democrat, served as State Treasurer (1853/4), then as Clerk in the Pension Office, Washington, DC. (1855/6). He returned to New Hampshire and was a state legislator (1858/9), then a State Senator (1859/61). In 1861 he got into newspaper work in Manchester; in 1862 he was commissioned a colonel in the 11th New Hampshire Volunteers. He interrupted his military service to run as a War Democrat in the 1863 gubernatorial campaign, where his 4,000 votes were enough to give the election to Joseph Gilmore. Then he returned to military service, joining the 11th New Hampshire in time for The Battle of the Wilderness, outside Fredericksburg, Virginia. Captured, he was exchanged in September 1864, and mustered out as a brevet brigadier general in June 1865.

After the war, Harriman joined the Republican Party. He served as New Hampshire Secretary of State (1865/7), then won election as governor in 1867. He was reelected in 1868.

Governor Harriman urged the public and the legislature to develop New Hampshire's agricultural, industrial and forest resources, in order to develop a post-war economy. He was very concerned with the education of post-war citizens of the state, and he signed an act creating teacher institutes. He personally drafted a law to get education out from under county commissioners, and he established an education fund with monies from the sale of state lands.

In retirement Harriman served as Naval Officer for the Port of Boston (1869/77). He published his History of Warner (1879), then traveled to Europe and the Far East (1882/3). He published Travels and Observations in the Far East (1883) and died in 1884.

Location: State House, Second Floor
Portrait by U.D. Tenney, 1875; Presented by Governor Harriman