Harrison Ruffin Tyler, Grandson of the 10th President, Is Dead at 96

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Harrison Ruffin Tyler, Grandson of the 10th President, Is Dead at 96

He was the last of three generations spanning nearly the entire history of the United States: When his grandfather was born, George Washington had just become president.


Harrison Ruffin Tyler in 2004. He was the last surviving grandson of John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States, who served in the White House from 1841 to 1845. via Sherwood Forest

By Robert D. McFadden
May 29, 2025

Harrison Ruffin Tyler, the last surviving grandson of John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States, who was born just after George Washington became president 236 years ago and who served in the White House from 1841 to 1845, died on Sunday at his home in Richmond, Va. He was 96. … His death was confirmed by Annique Dunning, the executive director of Sherwood Forest Plantation, a private foundation established by the Tyler family. … Mr. Tyler suffered a series of small strokes starting in 2012 and was later diagnosed with dementia. In recent years, his son William Bouknight Tyler oversaw the James River plantation that had been his family’s ancestral home.

Mr. Tyler, a retired businessman, and his older brother, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr., who died at age 95 in 2020, were sons of Lyon Gardiner Tyler Sr. (1853-1935), a longtime president of the College of William & Mary. Their grandfather was the U.S. president who pushed for the annexation of Texas as American expansion moved west, but he is perhaps best known for the Whig Party’s memorable 1840 presidential campaign slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.”


John Tyler was the first vice president to succeed a dead president. His claim to the presidency was disputed by many in Congress, who referred to him as “His Accidency.” Heritage Images/Getty Images

In a remarkable instance of successive longevities and late-in-life paternities, the Tyler family produced a genealogical marvel, if not a singularity: three generations that spanned nearly the entire history of the American experience. … Successive longevities over centuries are not uncommon, although they are not easily documented in ordinary families. But that was hardly the case with the former president and his academically distinguished son. And in 2012, when the website Mental Floss reported that two grandsons of President Tyler were still alive, the news — “an amazing, seemingly impossible piece of American trivia,” as New York magazine put it — went viral.

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Harrison Tyler, right, in 1932, with his brother Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. and his father, Lyon Gardiner Sr., who served as president of the College of William & Mary from 1888 to 1919. via Sherwood Forest

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Mr. Tyler in 1947, while he was studying chemistry at the College of William & Mary. via Sherwood Forest

Harrison Ruffin Tyler, who was born in Virginia on Nov. 9, 1928, earned a degree in chemistry at William & Mary in 1949 and a chemical engineering degree at Virginia Tech in 1951. In 1968, he was a founder of ChemTreat, an industrial water treatment business. He retired in 2000.

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Robert D. McFadden was a Times reporter for 63 years. In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths.

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1. Makes my lineage quite nouveau in comparison

I thought I was a rarity by having a great-grandfather who fought in the civil war (on the winning side, BTW). He was the oldest surviving civil war veteran in the county where he resided, having enlisted at age 15. Seems that coming from a long line of older parents didn’t match this amazing story.