The neighborhood where William Gillette was born, Nook Farm (in Hartford, Connecticut), was a literary and intellectual node, abiding Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe. His father was Francis Gillette, a former US Senator with reformist ideas, fighting for the abolition of slavery, public education, temperance, and women's suffrage, and constructing most of town's infrastructure. His mother was Elisabeth Daggett Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker, the puritan leader, who founded the town. In the Gillette home, young Will grew up with his three brothers and a sister. One other sister, Mary, died as a small child. One of his brothers, Edward H. Gillette, became a newspaper editor and congressman.