Henry ward beecher, the eighth child of Lyman and Roxana Foot Beecher, was born in Litchfield, Conn., June 24, 1813. From the days of Hannah Beecher, a widow who settled in New Hampshire in 1638, eighteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims, down to the present celebrated family of preachers and litterateurs, extends a long line of New England anoes tors, nearly all of whom were remarkable for physical prowess or intellectual vigor.