Trego's parents were artists. His father, Jonathan K. Trego, was believed to have studied under Sully because his portraits evidenced a strong Sully influence. His mother painted flowers and animals. Young William, born a healthy baby, was at a tender age, a victim of the medical profession. A doctor gave him a dose of calomel, when he was nearly two, to help him through teething, paralyzed him for two years and left him crippled for life. His right hand was bent back at the wrist with all the fingers curled and rigid and unmovable. Only the thumb and the forefinger of his left hand would move. The toes of both of his feet were so curled that he walked with difficulty. Despite the frustration and pain, portraits show his face gentle and tender.

William drew pictures from an early age, imitating his parents.

He hated public school. All he wanted to do was to draw and paint.

When the family moved to Detroit in his 16^th year and sent him to high school, he burned off all his hair in a gas jet, making himself such a fright that he couldn't go to school. His father took pity and kept him home in the studio, where William rapidly learned to paint with two hands: the brush jammed into the stiff fingers of his right hand and guided by his left.

At the age of 20, in 1879, he painted The Charge of Custer at Winchester and created a sensation. No one else had ever managed to capture with so much realism and force horses and troops in rapid motion. One critic called him: "...one of the finest colorists in America."

Encouraged, Trego returned to Philadelphia and enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) where he experienced the rigid and painstaking discipline of Thomas Eakins and Thomas Anschultz who drilled drawing from nude figures and had anatomy taught by surgeons. A strong advocate of good drawing, Trego deplored his method of learning it. Trego painted several large canvases between 1879 and 1883, among them, The March to Valley Forge.

He shared a studio with his father in North Wales, PA, and painted feverishly, trying to earn some money. He went, in 1888, to Paris and studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts with such painters as Vuillard, Matisse, Leger, Duchamps and Derain. He painted and exhibited Color Guard in the French salon and earned enough praise to come home mildly famous. This led to several commissions for battle scenes, but they made him little money. He sought to become an instructor at PAFA, but they turned him down. He took private students and tried to get work illustrating books and magazines. What he got was small and low-paying.

Had he not been able to live with his father and a sympathetic stepmother, he might have starved. With their aid, he painted more than 200 battle scenes during the 1890's, scenes from the Revolutionary, Civil, and Franco-Prussian Wars, using local citizens and lead soldiers for models. He was active researcher.

He did get a commission to sculpt a bronze figure of a deceased florist which still stands in the cemetery at Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and, in 1899, his painting, The Rescue of the Colors, created another sensation and brought more fame but no money. His father died in 1901; his stepmother in 1907, the year that he painted his last big picture: The Chariot Race from Ben Hur, which hangs, now, at George School. But painting was changing.

People wanted impressionism, not large battle scenes.

On June 25, 1909, in the midst of a terrible heat wave, ill and discouraged, alone and depressed, William B. T. Trego shot himself. He was 51 years old.

All information on this page is courtesy of the Valley Forge Historical Society.  Battery B, 4^th U.S. Light Artillery would like to thank the Valley Forge Historical Society for the use of this information.