James Ward (1813-April 27, 1895) taught at Georgetown College from 1833-1840, 1843-1850, and 1864-1868.
He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His family moved to Washington, D.C. when he was a child and he enrolled in the Washington Seminary (later known as Gonzaga College High School), a Jesuit School. He entered the Jesuit order in 1832.
In addition to teaching at Georgetown, he also taught at Loyola College, Baltimore, Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and at Gonzaga College High School and served as rector of Old St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia from 1857 to 1860. Among the subjects he taught were physics and chemistry but he was also known as an excellent Latin and Greek scholar and contributed many poems to the Georgetown College Journal.
Father Ward died at Georgetown in 1895 and is buried in the Jesuit Community Cemetery on campus. An obituary which appeared in the College Journal in April 1895 noted that Father Ward was a great favorite with his students, who showed their appreciation of his endearing qualities by thronging his confessional.1
His papers are housed in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections, Georgetown University Library.
- 1Georgetown University in the District of Columbia, 1789-1907, its founders, benefactors, officers, instructors and alumni. James Stanislaus Easby-Smith. New York : Lewis, 1907; Georgetown College Journal, vol. 23, no. 7 (April 1895)
