page_title: William Few
section_title: Death and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: William Few / Death and legacy
caption_attribution_description: Painting, miniature; Paintings
context_page_description: William Few Jr. was a farmer, a businessman, and a Founding Father of the United States. Few represented the U.S. state of Georgia at the Constitutional Convention and signed the U.S. Constitution. Few and James Gunn were the first Senators from Georgia.
  Born into a poor yeoman farming family, William Few achieved both social prominence and political power later in life. Exhibiting those characteristics of self-reliance vital for survival on the American frontier, he became an intimate of the nation's political and military elite. The idea of a rude frontiersman providing the democratic leaven within an association of the rich and powerful has always excited the American imagination, nurtured on stories of Davy Crockett. In the case of the self-educated Few, that image was largely accurate.
  Few's inherent gifts for leadership and organization, as well as his sense of public service, were brought out by his experience in the American Revolutionary War.
context_section_description: Few died at age 80 in 1828 in Fishkill-on-Hudson (present day Beacon, NY), survived by his wife Catherine Nicholson (daughter of Commodore James Nicholson) and three daughters. He wrote his memoirs and addressed them to his daughter, Frances. He was buried in the yard of the Reformed Dutch Church of Fishkill Landing. In 1973, at the request of the state of Georgia, his remains were removed and reinterred at Saint Paul's Church, Augusta, Georgia.
  James Marshall said of William Few, "He was one of those men, 'few and far between,' who effect more by solid weight of character than many can by eloquent speech or restless action."
  Few Street in Madison, Wisconsin is named in Few's honor and the William Few Parkway was constructed near his Augusta homestead in Columbia County, Georgia.
caption: Catherine Nicholson Few
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