He was the son of Gideon Hollister and was born in Washington, Litchfield County, Conn., December 14, 1817.

He graduated from Yale College in 1840. After studying law in Litchfield with the Hon. Origen S. Seymour, he was admitted to the bar in April, 1842. He began practice in Woodbury, Conn., but soon removed to Litchfield, where, in 1843, he was appointed Clerk of the Court, an office which he held—a single year excepted—until 1852. In 1856 he was elected to the Connecticut State Senate, and in February, 1868, was appointed by President Andrew Johnson Minister of the United States to Hayti, but was recalled by President Ulysses S. Grant in September, 1869. He then resumed the practice of law, in company with his brother in Bridgeport, Conn, but in 1876 returned to Litchfield. In 1880 he represented the town in the Connecticut Legislature, as a Democrat. He died in Litchfield, after about a week's illness, of suffusion of the heart, March 24, 1881, in his 64th year.

In June 1847, he married Mary S. Brisbane, a native of Charleston, South Carolina, who survived him with one only of their four children.

Hollister authored 'History of Connecticut, in two volumes, published in 1855. A revised edition was about to appear at the time of his death. He also published, in 1851, an historical romance, entitled Mount Hope, or Philip, King of the Wampanoags, which his maturer judgment disapproved as too florid in style, and a tragic poem, in 1866, entitled Thomas a Becket, which was dramatized and played by Edwin Booth, besides other minor poems.

  This article incorporates public domain material from the 1881 Yale Obituary Record.

• Gideon Hiram Hollister at Find a Grave
• Memorials of Connecticut Judges and Attorneys