William Howard Prescott was born in Reynoldsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1873. His father, Charles Holden Prescott, was a lumberman, rafting white pine timbers down Sandy Lick Creek to the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers. He then moved his family and lumber operations to Bay City, Michigan, and in 1884 made the strategic decision to relocate yet again—this time to Cleveland, a logical distribution point. He and William’s older brother, Charles Jr., set up the Saginaw Bay Company, purchasing several Cleveland wholesale lumberyards and consolidating them.

William Prescott attended Western Reserve University for two years, then transferred to the University of Chicago (Ph.B., 1894). In 1895, he studied law at the University of Michigan, married the following year, and then returned to Cleveland to join the family business. By 1910, with a 1,200-foot dock frontage on the Cuyahoga River, the company was handling about 35 million board feet each year. Prescott was active in the city’s War Chest campaign and sat on the boards of several large companies, including Cleveland Trust and Reliance Electric. He died in 1931 at age 58.