Attorney H. W. Farnham represented Conrad Gerlach in the famous lawsuit that gave birth to the "Boneyfiddle" neighborhood nickname. Farnham, however, is also remembered as the attorney of Jacob Johnson, who successfully sued the Portsmouth School Board in 1885 to secure his daughter's admission into the white-only Portsmouth High School.

Farnham was a native of Ashtabula, Ohio, and, during the Civil War, he had enlisted in a Pennsylvania volunteer infantry regiment at the age of twenty. At the end of the war, he was honorably discharged and soon thereafter, in the fall of 1865, he came to Scioto County, Ohio, where he took a position as a public school teacher. After three years in a Haverhill classroom in eastern Scioto County, Farnham moved to Portsmouth to study law under Nelson Wiley Evans, the noted Scioto County attorney and historian.

At the Ratification Celebration for the Fifteenth Amendment in April 1870, Farnham would be among the white speakers on the program. Five years later, in 1875, Farnham was elected Scioto County Prosecuting Attorney as a Republican. He would serve two terms before returning to private practice. Farnham's health failed at the age of fifty-one. Suffering from heart failure, liver disease, and, according to his records at a Federal Veteran's Home in Dayton, a "morphine habit," he spent less than a year in the facility before he passed away in 1896.