Nathaniel Wilson Leighton was born on June 11, 1833, in Falmouth, Maine. In 1857 he graduated from Bowdoin College, and in 1858 from New York Medical College. He worked as a physician in Brooklyn, New York. During the Civil War he served with the Union Army for three years. In 1861 he married Mary Elizabeth Purinton of Portland, Maine, with whom he had three children. Mary Elizabeth died in 1882, and in 1884 he remarried to Helen Hudson. They had one daughter. N.W. Leighton died on August 12, 1899 in Brooklyn, New York.