Winfield Scott Lovecraft

Winfield Scott Lovecraft (26 October 1853 - 19 July 1898): Lovecraft’s father. Named after General Winfield Scott, who visited Rochester, New York, on 14 October 1852. In the early 1870s he worked for the James Cunningham, Son & Company carriage factory as a blacksmith. His whereabouts from 1874 to 1889 are not clear, although it has been suggested that he worked in New York City for his cousin, Frederick. In 1889 he began working as a traveling salesman for Providence’s Gorham & Company. He married Sarah Susan Phillips on 12 June 1889 at St. Paul’s in Boston. In 1893 he began having hallucinations while in Chicago on business, and on 25 April he was admitted to Butler Hospital in Providence, diagnosed as having “general paresis” – the tertiary stage of neurosyphilis.

source: http://www.hplovecraft.com/life/family.aspx