Harrison Ruffin Tyler, grandson of 10th U.S. president and longtime Richmonder, dies at 96

Since 2020, Harrison Ruffin Tyler was the last living link to a vanished America. 

The Richmond resident, preservationist and chemical engineer, a man who founded water treatment company ChemTreat and for whom William & Mary’s history department is named, also had the distinction of being the grandson of a man who became U.S. president in 1841. As long as he lived, much of the great sweep of American history could be contained in just three generations of memory. 

But on Memorial Day weekend of 2025, Tyler died, five years after his last remaining brother. Annique Dunning, the executive director of the Sherwood Forest Plantation Foundation, which operates the Tyler family’s historic home in Charles City County, confirmed that Tyler passed on Sunday evening. 

Born on Nov. 9, 1928 in Richmond, Tyler was the son of Lyon Gardiner Tyler and Sue Ruffin. His father was a son of President John Tyler and president of William & Mary for more than three decades; his mother came from another Virginia family of long lineage and ardent support for slavery and secession.

How a man living in the 21st century managed to be the grandson of one born in the 18th is due to one factor: fathers who had children late in life. President John Tyler was 63 when Lyon Gardiner Tyler was born; Lyon was 75 when Harrison entered the world. 

The connection landed Harrison Ruffin Tyler attention throughout his life. At age 8, he was invited to the White House to meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He’s been featured in numerous stories throughout his life, particularly as he rose in age and the idea that a grandson of a pre-Civil War president could still be among us became ever more fantastic. 

But Tyler was also more than his family. After attending St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, he graduated from William & Mary — Lady Astor paid for his $5,000 tuition, although they had never met — and then Virginia Tech, where he studied chemical engineering. 

In 1968, he and business partner William P. Simmons founded industrial water treatment company ChemTreat in Glen Allen, serving big-ticket clients like Philip Morris and Kraft. In 1989, the pair began transferring ownership of the company to employees, who achieved a controlling interest in 2000 when Tyler and Simmons retired. The company was eventually bought by Danaher Corporation. 

In his later years, Tyler also became an ardent preservationist. In 1975, he acquired Sherwood Forest Plantation from relatives and restored it along with his wife, Francis Payne Bouknight Tyler. The property, which is open to the public and operated by a foundation today, boasts not only “the longest frame house in America” but a ghost known as the Gray Lady who has been heard rocking in one of the house’s rooms for over 200 years. 

In 1996, Tyler bought and financed the preservation of Fort Pocahontas, a Civil War earthwork fort near Sherwood Forest that had been built by Black soldiers of the Union’s U.S. Colored Troops. And in 2001, he donated thousands of papers and books, as well as $5 million, to William & Mary’s history department, which was renamed in his honor in 2021. 

At the time of his death, Tyler had been living in a Richmond-area nursing home, where he had been cared for since a dementia diagnosis. His wife died in 2019, and he is survived by three children and a number of grandchildren. 

Contact Reporter Sarah Vogelsong at svogelsong@richmonder.org