Henry Metcalf

Henry B. Metcalf was a banker, manufacturer, and educator in Rhode Island.  He was on the board of trustees of Tufts College. 
     Although Metcalf accepted the Prohibition nomination for vice president in 1900, he appears otherwise to have been a Republican; he was elected to the Rhode Island legislature as a Republican.

-- Gammon, 2007, p.61

Henry Brewer Metcalf was born in Boston, April 2, 1829.  He was educated at the English High School in his native city.  In 1856, he went to Roxbury, where he remained for eight years, very active in political work, although not a candidate for office.
     In 1864, he removed to Winchester and became very active in politics as a working Republican, except in the Greeley campaign.  In 1872, he moved to Pawtucket, Rhode Island.  Two years later, he helped to re-organize the town government after some important annexations.  In 1885, he was elected to the State Senate, and was nominated for re-election, but was defeated by liquor men and their sympathizers who he had always vigorously opposed.
     At 15 years of age, he was apprenticed to a dry-goods importing and jobbing firm in Boston, and through that channel he became interested in manufacturing, to which, since 1872, he has given his entire attention.  He has held official positions in several manufacturing corporations and is now president of the Providence County Savings Bank, of Pawtucket.  For 20 years, he was a trustee of Tufts College and is at present (1895) vice-president of the corporation.
      Mr. Metcalf has been a life-long Universalist and, since 1891, he has been president of the national organization of the denomination.  For more than 60 continuous years he has attended Sunday-school, and for over 30 years has been a Sunday-school superintendent.
     All his life, Mr. Metcalf has been a temperance man.  He as one of the leaders in the Republican “anti-saloon movement,” of the Law Enforcement Party of Rhode Island in 1889, and of the Union Party in 1890.  For many years, he was president of the Rhode Island Temperance Union, and in that capacity very active in the prohibitory-amendment campaign of 1886.
     A Whig up to 1860, in that year he became a Republican.  In 1888, he left the Republican Party and called himself an Independent.  In 1890, he joined the Prohibition Party.  In 1893, the Prohibitionists of Rhode Island nominated him for governor.  In 1894, he was again named as gubernatorial candidate.

— Data from An Album of Representative Prohibitionists (1895)

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