George Templeton Strong entered the world at 50 Franklin Street in New York City on the 26th of January 1820. He received his early education at Columbia Grammar School before graduating with high honors from Columbia College in 1838.
On the 15th of May 1848, George Templeton Strong married Ellen Ruggles inside Grace Church in New York. Their household became deeply musical as both husband and wife performed together as amateurs while raising three children including a son named George Templeton Strong who later became a noted Romantic composer and painter.
George Templeton Strong avoided direct military service by using a section of the Enrollment Act of 1863 which allowed draftees to pay $300 to a substitute who would serve in their place. In 1864 he paid about twenty dollars one thousand one hundred to be his alter ego instead of fighting himself.
His extensive personal journals were discovered in the 1930s after decades of silence and span from the 5th of October 1835 when he was fifteen until his death nearly forty years later. It contains 2,250 pages of almost daily writing covering turbulent years before and through the Civil War.
The collection now resides within the archives of the New-York Historical Society and includes excerpts published in four volumes in 1952 as well as a new one-volume annotated edition focused on Civil War period entries that appeared via the Library of America in January of 2026.