Biography

Charles Frederick Johnson was the son of Robert Charles and Katherine Ann (Bayard) Johnson. Due to the death of both his parents while he was a young child, Johnson was raised by his uncle, Samuel William Johnson. He was raised with his first cousins who had both attended the Litchfield Law School. He inherited large tracts of land in western New York from his father in the Susquehanna Valley, and cut it into various farm plots and sold it to the first settlers. Johnson then settled in Tioga Valley, NY in 1837 where he had a 200 acre farm called Meadow Bank. He never pursued a legal practice and was an inventor and writer instead. Johnson also made some literary efforts and translated Lucretius' De Rerum Natura in blank verse and it was published in New York in 1872. He lived in Tioga Valley until 1876 at which time he moved into the home of his daughter Mrs. Anna J. Bellamy of Dorchester, MA where he lived until his death. His wife, Sarah Dwight Woolsey was the daughter of William and Elizabeth (Dwight) Woolsey, and the sister of President Theodore Dwight Woolsey of Yale. Their son, William Woolsey Johnson, became a famous mathematician. Charles Frederick Johnson, a cousin of Litchfield Law School student William Samuel Johnson, was orphaned at the age of two and raised by Samuel William Johnson and Susan Pierpont Edwards Johnson (parents of William Samuel). Sarah Dwight Woolsey was the sister of Laura Woolsey (William Samuel's wife).

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