John Hosea Washburn was born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, June 5, 1859. He entered the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1874 and graduated after four years. He had taught for a year and a half in Massachusetts public school, when he became head of the Rhode Island Reform School in Providence. During that year he studied chemistry in the laboratories of Brown University.

In the fall of 1881, he returned to the Massachusetts Agricultural College for post graduate work. In 1893, Washburn was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the Connecticut Agricultural College in Storrs. He resigned in 1887 to study at the University in Gottingen from which institution he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in 1889.

He was appointed in May of the same year to be Principal of the Rhode Island Agricultural School. The land for a college had been appropriated for Rhode Island with the passage of the Morrill Act of 1862. Washburn's first order of business was to wrest the appropriation of land-grant status from Brown University. He successfully engaged in a conflict with Brown University to become the official land-grant institution in Rhode Island. By 1902, however, Washburn's self-opinionated and undiplomatic manner led to his being asked to resign in August of 1902 from the position of the president of the Rhode Island Agricultural and Mechanic Arts College.

After dismissal from the College, Washburn became Director of the National Farm School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from 1902-1917, until he retired. He died on August 3, 1932.