GEORGE WILLIS BEMENT received a common school education and worked during his summer vacations in his father's foundry, where he learned the trade of iron molder. At seventeen years of age he took a district school position in the Arnold District, five miles southeast of Fostoria, Ohio where he met and solved successfully the multifarious difficulties that beset the district school master. At the end of one year of teaching he left Fostoria with his older brother, Arthur Orin Bement, and went to Battle Creek, Michigan where the two spent several months in the foundries of the Nichols + Sheppard Company, manufacturers of threshing machinery. Late in the year 1869 he returned to Fostoria to become cashier in the general store of C. W. Foster + Company, the junior member of which, Charles Foster, later became Secretary of the Treasury in the Cabinet of President McKinley. During this period his father sold the foundry business in Fostoria, and moved to Lansing, Michigan where, with his oldest son, Arthur Orin Bement, he established in 1869 the business which later became widely known under the name of E. Bement + Sons, manufactures of agricultural implements and stoves.

In 1871, George joined his father and brother at Lansing and began the long and arduous business career which terminated only with his sudden death in 1903. The growth of E. Bement + Sons business was phenomenal, and after its incorporation he became Secretary-Treasurer. His acceptance of that position demanded that he work early and late, being at one and the same time a molder, bookkeeper, correspondent, and salesman. The days were spent in the foundry, the evenings in the office; which exacting routine was varied at first by infrequent, and later by more frequent trips into the various small towns in central Michigan where the ploughs and harrows made by the firm were sold. He early developed a genius for salesmanship, and gradually more and more of this part of the business fell to his lot.

An account of his life at Lansing is more than the story of a man's absorption in the rapidly growing and prosperous enterprise. In less than twenty years after its inception the business was employing hundreds of men and shipping its manufactured product to every state in the Union and many foreign countries. Upon going to Lansing he at once united with the Plymouth Congregational Church, and for many years his extra business activities centered about the civic community and to the state. Gifted with a naturally good voice, he early became a member of the church choir, and was later precentor in both church and Sunday school. His chief activity in the church, clustered however around his long period of service as the Superintendent of the Sunday School and as a trustee of the church.

He was always keenly interested in civic betterment. No movement looking toward municipal improvement, whether material or moral, failed to secure his hearty support. In these days when municipal reform is crying so loudly for the unselfish devotion of intelligent men, it is to be questioned whether a better pattern of the rare "good citizen" could be found than he himself proved to be. He accepted no trust or responsibility, however small, without giving it more than the usual grudging share of attention, and the public business entrusted to him was sometimes performed to the neglect of his private affairs. He seemed to radiate throughout his public activities the atmosphere of a strict devotion and an even stricter integrity. He was a member of the city school board (1883-1892), and served several times as President of the Board; he was also a member and Vice President of the Michigan State Agricultural Society; and was Presidential Elector on the Republican ticket in 1896, casting his vote for William McKinley.

No one of his public activities appealed to him, however, as did his membership on the Board of Control of the Michigan State School for the Blind to which position he was appointed in 1893 by Governor Luce. He was at once elected Treasurer of the Board, and served as such until his death in 1903. That State School for the Blind was located at Lansing, and during his ten years of incumbency he was the only local resident of the Board. He felt a keen sense of personal responsibility for the school, and supplemented this feeling with sentiment of personal interest and affection for all that pertained to the institution, and he seldom let a week elapse without paying it a visit. His presence at the school was always helpful, suggestive and friendly; and he was welcomed alike by officers, teachers, and pupils. In a trip abroad in 1900 his interest in the education of the blind prompted a careful study of English methods; and he visited the famous school at Upper Norwood, where he was a guest of its more famous superintendent, Sir Francis Campbell.

In 1892 he built the pleasant home in which he lived until his death. He never liked to be long away from it; though each year, with few exceptions, he made extensive business trips which almost invariably took him through the West to the Pacific Coast. There was scarcely a State in the Union in which he did not number many business acquaintances, whom his genial social qualities had converted into warm personal friends. The number of these was doubtless augmented by his Masonic affiliations, as he was a Knight Templar, a Thirty-third Degree Scottish Rite Mason. Indeed it was at a Knight Templar banquet that he suffered the stroke of apoplexy which caused his death. On Friday evening, 17 April 1903, while delivering an after-dinner speech at the Annual Banquet of Commandery 25, Knights Templar, at Lansing, he was stricken, dying two days later.

The public press of the city and state has seldom borne warmer testimony to a man's worth. The simplest and most unassuming of men, he was yet the subject of encomium of preacher and editor alike. Both houses of the State Legislature, then in session, adjourned out of respect to his memory, after framing resolutions of sympathy and regret. On the day of his funeral, every mercantile house and every manufactory in the city that was his home, closed during that hour, as well as all the schools, and during that hour the activities in Lansing of the four trunk railroads entering the city were suspended. Seldom have grief and respect mingled to pay a more spontaneous tribute to a man who was not great save in spirit; who was not ambitious save as he could be useful; who was not famous save as goodness it recognized and revered wherever seen.

At fifty-three he was still a boy; vigorous in body, elastic of step, full of the zest of life, quick to plan, eager to accomplish. His cutting off in his youthful prime, re-stated the ever recurrent riddle of Providence - the reason for the breaking of the useful, and the preservation of the cracked and useless vessel.

Chronicles of the Bement Family in America; 1928, pp. 379-384