He was an industrial pioneer in the coalfields of West Virginia, opening some of the earliest mines in the southern part of the state.

Edwards was born in Hunter, New York, a village that had been founded by his family just five years earlier and originally called Edwardsville.

His grandfather was Colonel William Edwards, founder of the family tannery business and inventor of several devices used in the manufacture of leather goods.

[2] The Edwards family owned and managed a very large tannery in Hunter that relied on tanbark harvested from the hemlock forests of their country estate in the Catskill Mountains.

He disliked the strong religious tone at Williams, but greatly appreciated that the school was one of the first colleges in America to make natural history an important part of the curriculum.

It is credited with sparking an interest in the region among natural scientists; in particular, Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace read Edward's account and were inspired to make the Amazon the destination for their famous expedition.

Eventually, Edwards' book was just the first of several works written by naturalists that recorded the growing interest in the scientific exploration of the Amazon.

[2] During the 1850s Edwards built a significant collection of butterflies and corresponded with many prominent entomologists and other naturalists including Spencer Fullerton Baird.

Baird, the first curator at the Smithsonian Institution, was supportive of Edward's new passion and sent him numerous butterfly specimens from the museum collections.

[2] By 1865 Edwards had begun work on the Butterflies of North America, a three-volume masterpiece that has been called "one of the most important entomological publications of the 19th century.