Harrison Ruffin Tyler (born 1928), a living grandson of 10th U.S. President John Tyler (March 29, 1790 - January 18, 1862), is the son of Lyon Gardiner Tyler (August 24, 1853 - February 12, 1935) and Sue Ruffin (1889 -1953). Tyler is also a great-grandson of the noted Virginia secessionist Edmund Ruffin.
He attended the College of William and Mary, where his father had served as the 17th president of the college from 1888 to 1919, and earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1949. He also holds a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, received in 1951. He was the co-founder of ChemTreat Inc., an industrial water treatment company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia.
Tyler and his wife, Frances Payne Bouknight Tyler, live at Sherwood Forest Plantation, the estate of President John Tyler in Charles City County, Virginia, the only private residence in the United States to have been owned by two unrelated US Presidents--and possibly the longest frame house in the U.S., at over 300 feet.
In 1996, he bought the land containing Fort Pocahontas, the site of one of the fiercest battles between African-American Union troops and the Confederate army during the American Civil War. An earthen fort built and manned by hundreds of United States Colored Troops under the direct command of Brigadier General Edward Augustus Wild, it is the site of a May 24 1864, action that resulted in a victory for the USCTs against an attack led by Major General Fitzhugh Lee, the nephew of Robert E. Lee. Tyler, in conjunction with the College of William and Mary's Center for Archaeological Research and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, is working to preserve and interpret the fort and to discover information about life in a Civil War encampment.
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