George Quimby was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and spent much of his early life in Western Michigan. As a young man he was a sailor in the Great Lakes but also was a part of many early archaeological excavations in Muskegon County. He would become the director of the Lakeshore Museum Center in 1942 before becoming the Curator of North American Archaeology at the Field Museum in Chicago. Quimby continued to be a world renown anthropologist publishing many books on North American archaeology and anthropology and even having a feature named after him, the Mason-Quimby line.