Fillmore Bennett
Musician · 1836–1898 · Plainfield, Illinois
Best known for
Songwriter
Sanford Fillmore Bennett was a Wisconsin schoolteacher, newspaper editor, druggist, and country physician who wrote the lyrics to “In the Sweet By and By” (1868) — set to a tune by his Elkhorn neighbor Joseph P. Webster — in roughly thirty minutes one afternoon at his desk. The hymn became one of the most-recorded songs in American religious music.
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- Born June 21, 1836, in New York State; his family moved to Plainfield, Illinois when he was two.
- Worked the family farm and attended district school during the winter months; began writing poetry in the early 1850s.
- Served as superintendent of schools in Richmond, Illinois for two years before moving to Elkhorn, Wisconsin.
- Was associate editor of the Elkhorn newspaper The Independent.
- Volunteered for the Civil War as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 40th Wisconsin Infantry.
- Wrote the lyrics to “In the Sweet By and By” in 1868 after composer Joseph P. Webster, a longtime collaborator and Elkhorn neighbor, remarked “it will be all right by and by”; Bennett finished the lyric within thirty minutes and the two sang it for friends that same hour.
- Ran an Elkhorn drugstore after the war, then trained as a physician and graduated from Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1874.
- Practiced medicine for more than twenty years.
- Died in 1898.
