professor, rural sociologist, b. Hamilton, N.Y. He graduated from Colgate Univ. (A.B., 1885; A.M., 1888) and Harvard Univ. (A.M., 1895). He was professor of history at Kalamazoo College, Mich. (1888-1891), and principal of Union Academy at Belleville, N.Y. (1891-1901). In 1905 he moved to Madison to serve as Baptist pastor at the Univ. of Wisconsin (1905-1911). In 1911 he was appointed part-time instructor in the university's department of agricultural economics, was made a full-time member of the faculty in 1912, and held the rank of associate professor when he left the university in 1919. At Wisconsin Galpin's contribution lay in initiating rural life studies, and in 1915 he completed a rural study of Walworth County, "The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community," published as the first experimental station bulletin in rural sociology. In 1919 he left Wisconsin to serve as head of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. (1919-1934). After leaving this post he continued to serve as advisor to the Department of Agriculture, and maintained his residence in Virginia. He was the author of Rural Life (1918), and My Drift into Rural Sociology (1938). Who's Who in Amer., 21 (1940); Amer. Sociological Review, 13 (1948); C. J. Galpin, My Drift into Rural Sociology (Baton Rouge, 1938).

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[Source: Dictionary of Wisconsin biography]