His family was descended from Benjamin Nye who had emigrated from England in 1635 and settled in Massachusetts where he eventually built and operated a sawmill near Sandwich.

Nye then sailed to California, crossing the Isthmus of Panama on foot, and arriving in San Francisco shortly after the Fire of 1851 which had destroyed much of the city.

He was with the advance guard of the cavalry when it entered Richmond, Virginia in 1865 and set up a trading post there in one of the city's remaining brick buildings.

Their summer retreat, Onset Bay Grove, built by the association in the late 1870s, claimed to be the "largest community of spiritualism yet formed in the fifty years history of its teachings.

"[9] In his later years Nye said of his beliefs: That I am a spiritualist must be to those I leave behind me the touch that withers my memory or the ever living archway about which they can entwine earth's fragrant flowers and through which they may in gladness follow me to the evergreen shore.