Deacon John Simpkins

One of the pall bearers at Samuel Salisbury’s funeral was a deacon from the New North Church, John Simpkins. Mr. Simpkins was born in Boston on Nov. 12, 1740, graduated from Harvard in 1786 and became an upholsterer. Deacon Simpkins was a Captain in the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Society, recruited in 1769, and served in the Revolution in the company of Cadets under the command of John Hancock.

For many years Deacon Simpkins was the senior and presiding deacon of the Congregational Churches of Boston as well as serving as the treasurer of the Massachusetts Missionary Society and the Mass. Charitable Society.

The Boston Mite Society was founded in Deacon Simpkins’ home when at a social gathering Grandmother Wollcott (the Mite Society’s founder) asked, "Why a society could not be formed to do good among the poor, by each member contributing one cent per week?" Deacon Simpkins replied, “I can now forbear drinking this glass of wine, and devote my cent to this purpose,” at which point the other guests followed the example of their host and the society was born.

Deacon Simpkins died on December 11, 1831 at 91 years of age, leaving a handsome estate and a mansion near the Brattle Street Church.

Mr. Samuel Salisbury, Esq.

Samuel Salisbury was born on November 29, 1739, possibly making him the oldest man in the room, depending on the exact birthdate of Thomas Bumstead. The eighth of eleven children he attended Boston’s Latin School but not college.

He became a hardware merchant and, along with his brother, Stephen (who opened a store branch in Worcester), was among the largest wholesale importers in Boston. His mother came to live with him, an arrangement he found most difficult, writing to his brother, “I have been made uneasy by our honoured Mother interfering and talking to me about the affairs of my family that my life has been thereby rendered very unhappy. You know very well that I could never bear it about the business of the shop, but by keeping things hid from her I could then make it out pretty well. But now my house is so nigh and she is so often finding fault with my conduct . . . which determines me to change my situation.”

As with most merchants of the time, he had conflicted loyalties during the Siege of Boston in 1774 and the economic disaster it created. In a letter to his brother in Worcester, Samuel Salisbury described John Hancock as a “Son of Liberty, Son of Hell” after purchasing some English writing paper from Mr. Hancock. Mr. Salisbury joined the covenant of those pledging not to buy or sell English goods only after many refusals to do so had earned him considerable displeasure among his fellows. Suffice it to say that he was not with founder Moses Grant dumping the tea overboard.

During the siege, Samuel initially stayed behind to watch over his store, but his family was allowed by the British to receive safe passage with their goods to Worcester where Samuel’s brother Stephen had gone. As things grew worse, Samuel also removed to Worcester.

Back in Boston, he continued to prosper after the Revolution, eventually owning a fine mansion on Summer Street in Boston. In 1791 he was elected a selectman. The portrait shown here was painted by Gilbert Stuart. Samuel Salisbury died on May 2, 1818 with an estate valued at $400,000.

Mr. Josiah Salisbury

One of several father-son teams amongst our founders, Josiah Salisbury was the son of founder Samuel Salisbury. Josiah was born in Worcester on Feb. 15, 1781, graduated from Harvard in 1798 and studied theology at the University of Edinburgh. He was also the brother-in-law of founder Jedidiah Morse.

After returning from Scotland, he was invited to settle in Providence, “but experience had convinced him that ‘his bodily strength was not equal to the effort required in continual preaching,’ to which being added ‘a natural reluctance to be the object of public attention, and extreme diffidence of his qualifications for usefulness as a minister,’ he decided, about a year after his return from Europe, to relinquish the profession. His pulpit performances, however, are said to have been excellent and highly acceptable.” Mr. Salisbury instead took the path of a merchant.

Josiah Salisbury spent some time in Dr. Channing’s church but found himself more in line with the Orthodox and became, like his father, a Deacon at Old South Church. A participant in many charitable endeavors, Josiah Salisbury was the person responsible for the profits from The Panoplist being given to charity. Josiah Salisbury died in Boston on Feb. 10, 1826.

The History of Old South Church records part of his funeral sermon, which said, “His was a consistent character — always the Christian, at home and abroad, in the social circle and in the busy throng. As a deacon in a Christian church . . . his retiring disposition prevented his being as publicly active as some who sustain that important office. He never, however, shrunk from any obvious duty. In the various business transactions of the church, important services were frequently required of him, and always judiciously and promptly performed. To the poor of the church he was kind, attentive and liberal.”

Mr. Timothy Rogers

Just a few weeks after our founding, Mr. Timothy Rogers became Rev. Timothy Rogers and was settled in the church in Bernardston, Mass. He married Mary Pierce the following year. After preaching Calvinism for twelve years, his theology shifted and it was under the leadership of Rev. Rogers that the church in Bernardston moved from the Orthodox to the Unitarian side of the aisle.

Of course such a shift took its toll and, with a number of members leaving for the Baptists or Methodists, Rev. Rogers was reduced to half time employment, becoming also employed by the Massachusetts Evangelical Society and the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians. While his biography would indicate that Timothy Rogers was one of our younger founders, his birth and death dates are unknown.

Mr. Daniel D. Rogers, Esq.

The son of a revivalist preacher, Daniel Denison Rogers was born in Exeter, NH on May 11, 1751 and became a successful merchant in the dry goods business. Shortly after his 1781 marriage in Boston to Abigail Bromfield, the couple moved to London where they became very close to John and Abigail Adams.

When Mr. and Mrs. Rogers returned to the US, Abigail Adams wrote to her friend Mary Cranch, “There is not an other family who could have left London that I should have so much mist.” Shortly before returning to America, Abigail Rogers sat for a portrait by John Singleton Copley (pictured here), who also painted portraits of both John Adams and founder John Quincy Adams.

Later in life, Mr. Rogers moved into the business of stock and notes and invested in real estate. He was a member of First Church in Boston and died on March 25, 1825.

Mr. Ebenezer Rockwood, Esq.

Born on June 2, 1781, Mr. Rockwood was the son of a Revolutionary War surgeon. He graduated from Harvard in 1802, and entered law. Mr. Rockwood had the reputation of a brilliant lawyer and evidenced great gifts as an orator. We can only imagine what such a gifted man might have attained in his career, for he died suddenly on May 8, 1815 at only thirty-four years of age.

The Honorable Edward H. Robins

The son of the minister in Milton, Edward Hutchinson Robbins (as it is more frequently spelled) was born in Milton on Feb. 19, 1758, graduated from Harvard in 1775, and turned his mind toward Law. He was admitted to the bar in 1779. At only 21 years of age he was elected as a delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, the youngest member of that body.

Mr. Robbins was Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1793-1802, judge of the probate court for Norfolk County, and was Lieutenant Governor from 1802-1806. Judge Robbins participated in the US Constitutional Convention, and was a member of Trinity Church in Boston.

Having owned some land in the District of Maine in 1786, the town of Robbinston, in Washington, ME was named for him at its 1811 incorporation. Mr. Robbins died in Boston on Dec. 29, 1829 and was the great-great grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Dr. Isaac Rand

Born in Charlestown on April 27, 1743, Dr. Rand was one of our oldest founders and, like his father before him, was a medical doctor. In fact, after his 1761 graduation from Harvard, he studied medicine with his father (also Isaac Rand) in Charlestown, before removing to Boston to finish his studies with Dr. Lloyd in 1764.

He was doubtful that the Revolution could succeed and thus sided with the Royalists, although he took no active part to support their cause. He remained in Boston during the time of the siege, and a book of medical biography by James Thacher in 1828 records: “His duties at this time were both excessive and arduous, and he acquired among the inhabitants a high character for charity as a man, as well as for skill as a physician.”

Dr. Rand petitioned for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Medical Society, becoming its President in 1898, and his opposition to quackery and insistence on accuracy in medical terms and language did much to advance his profession. This was true especially in the area of obstetrics, to which he turned a large portion of his energies.

Unfortunately, the passion that drove such a specialty was steeped in the culture of the day. Dr. Rand’s mentor, Dr. Lloyd had championed the cause “to rescue from the hands of unqualified females, the important branch of obstetrics, and to raise it to an honorable rank in the profession.” What Dr. Lloyd left unfinished, Dr. Rand completed, leaving the mixed blessing of obstetrics becoming valued and more greatly studied but leaving gifted women with one less avenue of practice.

Known for his learning and breadth of reading the Greek and Latin classics, Dr. Rand turned to the study of theology in his later years. He was also known for his charity to the poor, both generally through gifts to benevolent societies and specifically in helping individual families of his acquaintance. Practicing his craft well into his later years, the New England Magazine in 1897 records: “The chaise in which he practiced in his latter days was a notable object. The width of it, though not equal to that of Solomon's temple, was several cubits.”

Dr. Rand petitioned for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Medical Society, becoming its President in 1898, and his opposition to quackery and insistence on accuracy in medical terms and language did much to advance his profession. Dr. Rand died in Boston on December 11, 1822.

Rev. Eliphalet Porter, DD

The son of the parish minister in North Bridgewater, Eliphalet Porter was born there on June 11, 1758. He graduated from Harvard, studied theology with his father, and was ordained to the parish in Roxbury on October 2, 1782, where he remained until his death on December 7, 1833.

An overseer of Harvard College and a member of the Corporation, Rev. Porter was also involved in other benevolent societies of the day. At the church, Rev. Porter took on Rev. George Putnam as an associate in 1830, who said the following in Rev. Porter’s funeral sermon: “He knew no party but that whose bounds include the whole church of Christ. He never lent a hand in the work of division. He never kindled the fires of ecclesiastical discord. He never bore or followed the banner of religious warfare. He never bandied the bad words of exclusion and uncharitableness. Wherever he appeared, there was a mild and firm champion of Christian toleration, union and love. Though he, and such as he, had not power to prevent the mischief of dissension that have prevailed, yet his benignity of manner, his collected temper, his acknowledged wisdom, and his unfailing exhibition of a Christian spirit, have had on many occasions, and on many points, a soothing, directing, and most salutary influence in the affairs of the church.”

Rev. John Pierce

John Pierce was born in Dorchester on July 14, 1773 and followed the path of so many other founders. He graduated from Harvard in 1793 (where his total college expense was $296.06!), taught for a bit, studied theology and then took a church. He accepted the call to Brookline (pictured here) in December of 1796 and was ordained there the following March, remaining in that charge for 50 years as the sole pastor, after which he consented to have a colleague join him.

A special love of Rev. Pierce was history and on the 50^th anniversary of his ordination he preached a sermon rich with the history of church and town. That interest also drew him into many of the historical and genealogical societies of the day. At the Massachusetts Bible Society he served as secretary for 19 years and then took over as President upon the death of William Phillips, serving in that role for another 21 years.

He was also interested in the temperance movement and other social reform enterprises, aligning himself with related societies there as well. Rev. Pierce was secretary of Harvard’s board of Overseers for 33 years and used his strong singing voice to lead the singing of “St. Martin’s” at Harvard commencement dinners for 54 years.

While his published works consist mostly of sermons and addresses, he did leave eighteen volumes of memoir, principally a detailed accounting of the religious and theological turmoil of the day.

Like Francis Parkman, Rev. Pierce was grieved by the split in the Congregational Church. His eulogy says of this: “But he was only grieved, not alienated or embittered. He did not defy his former associates, or go into the opposite ranks to contend against them. He loved them just the same, — would not be driven from his familiar associations with them, — and, to the last, took as much interest in them and their institutions, their public occasions, and all their religious affairs, as he did in the affairs of those friends who were excluded with him, and who were ever ready to hail him as father, and reciprocate his confidence. And yet he was always true to his Liberal friends. When he found they were to be driven asunder from their old associations, be did not hesitate to go with them. And we know that to the end of his life he rejoiced that such had been his decision. It would have been violence to his whole nature to have joined what he always considered the illiberal side.”

John Pierce died in Brookline on August 24, 1849.

Mr. William Phillips, Esq.

Born in Boston on March 30, 1750, MBS President William Phillips was not healthy enough to receive a college education. Coming from both a wealthy and benevolent family (William’s two uncles founded Phillips Academy), William devoted his life to managing and distributing his father’s fortune.

For many years he was a state representative, eventually becoming Lieutenant Governor of the Commonwealth. He was a deacon at Old South Church from March 24, 1794 until his death on May 26, 1827, just a few months after his son Edward’s passing.

Although his early health was poor, it did not stop him from becoming involved in Society and societies. At the time of his death he not only was President of the Massachusetts Bible Society (as he had been since our founding), but was also President of The American Education Society, The Society for Propagating the Gospel, The Foreign Mission Society of Boston, The Congregational Charitable Society, the General Hospital Corporation, The Boston Dispensary and was an honorary Vice President in several other organizations both locally and in other parts of the country.

He was as liberal with his money as with his time and generally contributed between eight and eleven thousand dollars each year to a variety of charitable causes, including, of course, MBS. He bequeathed $62,000 to charitable organizations upon his death.

The Honorable Jonathan Phillips

Born to founder William Phillips on April 24, 1778, Jonathan Phillips graduated from Harvard college in 1818, worked in the dry-goods and hardware business, and served as a state senator. He married the daughter of founder Samuel Salisbury.

He was known for both his intelligence and his wealth, which he shared generously in imitation of his father. He was the largest benefactor in Boston of an expedition to the arctic, gave $10,000 dollars to build a music hall and another $10,000 to the Boston Public Library.

Known for his steady demeanor, he was chosen to chair a particularly heated debate on December 8, 1837 at Faneuil Hall dealing with the murder of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy, at which his good friend William Ellery Channing and his cousin Wendell Phillips also spoke.

He was part of a gathering of intellectuals called “The Friends,” and was a trustee of Massachusetts General Hospital and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Jonathan Phillips died on July 29, 1860.

The Honorable John Phillips

Although twenty years his junior, John Phillips was the cousin of MBS President William Phillips. He was born in Boston on Nov. 26, 1770 and married founder Samuel H. Walley’s sister, making the founders’ bond tighter still.

John Phillips graduated from Harvard College in 1788, studied law, became a prosecutor, and then served in the Massachusetts Senate, serving as that body’s president from 1813-1823. A noted orator, he gave the fourth of July oration before the people of Boston in 1794. Those were skills he passed to his son, the noted orator and abolitionist, Wendell Phillips.

John Phillips took part in the Constitutional Convention for the State of Massachusetts in 1820 and was part of the group that drew the first charter for the City of Boston in 1822. He was subsequently elected the city’s first mayor on April 16, 1822.

Always interested in education, he was a Trustee of Phillips Academy and also part of the Corporation of Harvard College, a seat that he maintained until his death on May 29, 1823. It was written of him that “In politics he was fixed, but not stern; wary, but not suspicious; courteous in manner, but unyielding in principle—his independence never approximated to rudeness, nor could his condescension be mistaken for fear. His political friends and opposers knew where to find him, and the former never feared that he would trim for popularity, nor the latter ever led to suspect that he might be seduced by flattery or the promise of rewards.”

Mr. Edward Phillips

Edward Phillips was born on June 24, 1782 and became a merchant, serving as a deacon at Old South Church starting on May 8, 1817. The son of MBS President William Phillips and brother to Jonathan Phillips, Edward’s last words were “God has given me the victory.” He died at 45 years of age on June 24, 1782.

Mr. William Perkins

Born in Boston in 1742, William Perkins (along with founder Moses Grant) was known best for his role in the Revolution. His military career is recorded by the Sons of the Revolution: “William Perkins was Lieut. in Callender's Co. at battle of Bunker Hill, afterwards Captain of same Company. He was Captain in Knox's Regt. of Artillery, 1st January, 1776, in Crane's Regt. Artillery, January, 1777; commissioned Major of same, September 12,1778 ; was at Valley Forge 1777-78 ; commanded the the “Castle" in Boston Harbor till ceded to United States in 1798, with rank of Lieut. Colonel; was member of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati.”

His grandson of the same name was born in 1804, was long the treasurer of the Society of the Cincinnati and was a prominent member of King’s Chapel, making it likely that the Revolutionary War hero was indeed the man on our founding list. He died in 1812.

The Lynn Western Burial Ground has a large number of Revolutionary War heroes and although the date of death is obscured on the stone, the following inscription probably belongs to our Mr. Perkins:

“Here lyes Buried the Body of Mr. William Perkins, a Gentleman of liberall Education, he was bred at Harvard College & Commenced Master of Arts there in ye Year 1761. He was justly admired for his uncommon Abilities Natural & acquired his Literature exemplary Piety Modesty Meekness and many other Humane & Christian Virtues which rendered him lovely in every Relation of Life.”

Rev. Eliphalet Pearson, DD

Nicknamed “elephant” by his students, Rev. Pearson was born in Newbury, Massachusetts on June 11, 1752. He graduated from Harvard in 1773, taught at Andover and studied theology, but was prevented from taking a charge due to his poor eyesight. During the Revolution he manufactured saltpeter and gunpowder for the Patriot army.

In 1778 he became the first preceptor at Phillips Andover Academy, a post which he held for eight years before becoming the Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at Harvard in 1786.

When Harvard President Samuel Willard died in 1804, Professor Pearson became the acting President as they embarked on a search for a new President. Shortly after taking over as the interim President, the vacant chair of the Hollis Professor of Divinity was filled by the liberal minister and fellow MBS founder Henry Ware. That appointment set in motion the chain of events that would tear the fabric of the Congregational Church into “Orthodox” and “Unitarian” factions.

Pearson himself was on the Orthodox side of that fault line and, although he went back to his professorship for a brief time once fellow founder Samuel Webber was named the new President in 1806, he found he could no longer abide the religious climate at his alma mater.

In 1807 he left Harvard, returned to Andover and helped to found the nation’s first seminary there, making sure that orthodox theology was the rule. He was ordained to the Congregational Church in 1808, and his ordination sermon also served as the opening sermon for Andover Seminary. He served as a professor of sacred literature there for just one year before retiring.

Of his teaching it was said that he had “more severity in his discipline than would suit modern feelings, but he cherished genius, excited emulation, and gave tone and character to minds under his tuition, and thoroughly grounded his pupils in the true elements of letters and morals.”

He was part of many religious and benevolent societies and devoted most of his retirement years to agricultural pursuits. Rev. Pearson died in Greenland, NH on September 12, 1826.

Mr. Francis Parkman

One of our younger founders, Mr. Parkman was just 21 years old at the time of our founding, going on to serve MBS as the Corresponding Secretary for 31 years, with 21 years on the Executive Committee, holding the office of Vice President of the Society upon his death on Nov. 12, 1852.

He was born in Boston on June 4, 1788 and graduated from Harvard in 1807, where he was also an Overseer from 1819 to 1849, helping to establish the endowment for the Parkman Professorship of Theology. He studied theology with William Ellery Channing and in 1815 he was ordained as the pastor of the New North Church, where he served for 36 years.

The son of a prominent Boston merchant, Rev. Parkman inherited a substantial fortune and in the introduction to his memoir it is recorded: “Every association in his native State and city, devoted to the cause of humanity, if based on a broad and Catholic platform, found in him a liberal patron, and in very many cases an active officer and fellow-laborer.”

A memoir of his son, historian Francis Parkman, says of the father: “He held a prominent place among the Unitarian clergy of his day, was esteemed an eloquent preacher, and was thought to have ‘a special gift in prayer.’ His conversation was delightful, abounding in wit and humor.” It is also noted that he was “particularly kind to the unattractive.”

Mr. Nathan Parker

Born on June 5, 1782 in Reading, Mass., Nathan Parker was the son of a farmer. He graduated from Harvard in 1803, studied theology and taught school in Worcester and then served for a time as a tutor at Bowdoin College, also performing the President’s Chapel duties at the College when the Presidency was vacant.

Nathan Parker was ordained to the struggling South Church and Parish in Portsmouth, NH (pictured here) in 1808. Rev. Parker built the congregation back to strength, and when some questioned his theology, fellow founder Joseph Buckminster jumped to his support and thereafter took him under his wing as a son. Nathan Parker served that congregation for 28 years and died at the age of 52 on Nov. 8, 1833.

As the Orthodox/Unitarian split raged around him, and he found himself unwelcome to once devoted colleagues simply because he attended the ordination of a Unitarian in Baltimore, Rev. Parker stuck to his ideals “‘to unite with good men in doing good, whatever name they might bear, to strengthen the influence of every one who appeared honestly laboring in the cause of Christ, to do all in his power to cherish kind affections, and persuade Christians to love each other.’ The confession of faith used at the admission to his church would exclude Christians of no denomination. He would not assume the responsibility of sitting in judgment over others, but yielded to all the Christian name, who exhibited the fruit of the Gospel in their lives. But he attached a higher value to liberty of conscience—to the rights of exercising the mind given for that purpose in the examination of religious truths. He pressed it upon his people, to examine the Bible for themselves, to follow servilely the opinions of no frail mortal, but to go to Revelation itself, and with devout and prayerful hearts to use the light of their own minds, fearless of the decision which they honestly and conscientiously should make. He was not a partisan. He looked to interests higher and holier than those of any party—the interests of Christianity itself.”

The Honorable Isaac Parker

The son of a Boston goldsmith, Isaac Parker was born in Boston on June 17, 1768 and graduated from Harvard in 1786. After studying law, he moved to Maine where he was elected to Congress in 1796 and after serving one term became the U.S. marshal for the district of Maine.

Mr. Parker came back to Massachusetts in 1806 upon being elected to the State Supreme Court, becoming the Chief Justice in 1814 and remaining so until his death on July 25, 1830. In a controversial ruling for a Dedham church about who retains the property in a church split, Parker ruled that whoever stays, even if a minority of the congregation, keeps the property. Judge Parker was a Unitarian.

In 1816 Judge Parker was made Harvard’s first Royall Professor of Law, a post that he held until 1827, and in 1820 he served as the President of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention. It was Judge Parker who laid out the plan for Harvard Law School.

Greatly esteemed both as a man and as a jurist, his eulogy records: “We wanted a cautious, but liberal mind, to aid the new growth of principles, to enlarge the old rules, to infuse a vital equity into the system, as it was expanding before us. We wanted a mind to do, in some good degree, what Lord Mansfield had done in England, to breathe into our common law an energy, suited to the wants, the commercial interests, and the enterprise of the age. We wanted a mind, which, with sufficient knowledge of the old law, was yet not a slave to its forms; which was bold enough to invigorate it with new principles, not from the desire of innovation, but the love of improvement. We wanted sobriety of judgment; but, at the same time, a free spirit, which should move over the still depths of our law, and animate the whole mass. Such a man was Mr. Chief Justice Parker.”

Mr. Daniel P. Parker

A well-known Boston merchant, Mr. Parker traded in textiles, owning one of the finest ships in the port, The Samuel Appleton, named for his friend and neighbor. The ship was 781 tons and was used to conduct trade with China.

On the boards of many banks and one of the Trustees of Massachusetts General Hospital, Mr. Parker was born in 1781 in Southboro and died in 1850.

The best known story associated with him relates to a visit to Boston by the much-reviled Andrew Jackson: “Mr. Daniel P. Parker, a well-known Boston merchant, had come to his window to catch a glimpse of the guest of the State, regarding him very much as he might have done some dangerous monster which was being led captive past his house. But the sight of the dignified figure of Jackson challenged a respect which the good merchant felt he must pay by proxy, if not in person. ‘Do some one come here and salute the old man!’ he suddenly exclaimed. And a little daughter of Mr. Parker was thrust forward to wave her handkerchief to the terrible personage whose doings had been so offensive to her elders.”

Rev. Jacob Norton

Born in Abington on Feb. 12, 1764 and graduated from Harvard College in 1786, Jacob Norton was ordained at Weymouth on October 10, 1787. Described as “a tall, erect, spare man of dignified appearance,” Rev. Norton served the church in Weymouth until 1824, during which time he also preached the election sermon before the legislature as well as addresses to other societies, our own included.

His departure from Weymouth was a matter of theology rather than health, being dismissed from that congregation due to his theological changes, especially his new opposition to infant baptism. He became a Unitarian after his dismissal. A Unitarian paper in 1843 wrote of discovering the aged, yet spry Rev. Norton in their congregation: “He appears cheerful and happy—and why should he not? He has spent a long life in virtue and usefulness, and now he has the hope of Universalism to cheer him as he travels to the tomb.”

He died in Billerica on Jan. 17, 1858 at the age of 93 years, eleven months, and five days. At the time of his death he was the oldest surviving graduate of Harvard College. He was noted for his many polemical writings although his character was such that he was highly esteemed by his colleagues although they “deplored his heresy.”

Rev. Jedidiah Morse, DD

For 30 years the pastor of the church in Charlestown, MA, Rev. Morse was born in Woodstock, Connecticut on Aug. 23, 1761. He began at Yale in 1779 and since he did not come from a wealthy family, supported his tuition by teaching school and teaching singing. It was only there at Yale, in conversation with Yale’s President Stiles, that the young Morse made a profession of faith and joined the church. He then determined to enter the ministry.

He graduated from Yale in 1783 and began the study of theology. He was licensed and preached in several locations while also tutoring at Yale, finally becoming ordained right before swapping positions with fellow founder Abiel Holmes, just recently come north from Georgia. After six months in Georgia, Rev. Morse returned to New England, finally settling at the Charlestown Church.

Rev. Morse was one of the Overseers of Harvard standing in opposition to the selection of founder Henry Ware as the Hollis Professor of Divinity. Health forced his resignation from Charlestown in 1820 and he went back to New Haven.

While the Bible Society is more apt to highlight his theological background, most of society knows Jedidiah Morse as the “Father of American Geography,” a passion that developed during his years teaching young girls, when he wrote a textbook on the subject for them. That textbook turned into more and better until his reputation was universally established. The son of Rev. Morse, Mr. Samuel F.B. Morse invented the telegraph and “Morse Code.” Rev. Jedidiah Morse died on June 9, 1826.

Deacon Josiah Moore

Elected Deacon to the First Church in Cambridge in 1804, Josiah Moore was a carpenter by trade and served as Deacon with fellow founder William Hilliard. Born in Sudbury on September 25, 1747, he was an assessor and overseer of the poor for many years after serving as a sergeant in Captain Thatcher’s company of Minute Men, who marched 28 miles on the alarm on April 19, 1775 when the British landed in East Cambridge. Josiah Moore died suddenly on May 1, 1814.

Mr. John Mellen, Esq.

John Mellen might well have been listed as Rev. John Mellen, due to his 1783 ordination to the East Congregational Church in Barnstable. With his wife’s ill health, however, he resigned that position in 1800 and moved to Cambridge where he became active in the affairs of his 1770 alma mater, Harvard College.

For Harvard, Mr. Mellen ran the lotteries of 1806 and 1811 which built Halworthy Hall and in 1808 was chosen to represent Cambridge in the General Court. Born June 17, 1752, he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Massachusetts Militia and was a member of many of the Societies of the day.

But the accomplishment for which he is best remembered was his ability to endure the total blindness that encompassed many of his later years with both grace and cheerfulness. He neither retreated from the company of others nor gave up his pursuit of learning and theological inquiry, having works read aloud to him that he might digest and discuss their merits.

After his death on Sept. 19, 1828, the Christian Examiner wrote of him: “The knowledge which he had laid up in former years was now an inexhaustible fund, from which he brought the materials for new processes of thought, and the aids to a constant moral improvement. The truths, and to a wonderful extent, the words even, of the New Testament were engraven on his memory, and its spirit had long been cherished in his heart. The evident pleasure with which he listened, and the judicious criticism of his remarks, converted the office of reading aloud into a privilege, and he never wanted friends who were glad to avail themselves of such an opportunity of doing and of acquiring good. He was thus enabled to maintain an acquaintance with the current literature, and with the theological writings of the day.”

Rev. Joseph McKean

Rev. McKean was born in Ipswitch, MA on April 19, 1776 and, showing a sharp mind, was sent to Andover to prepare for college at age 11. He matriculated at Harvard in 1790 and quickly became part of the social life of the campus. As a freshman he was called upon to host a gathering of students who just liked to get together for food, drink, and socializing and for that occasion, young McKean chose to roast a whole pig. From his successful idea, and probably a fair amount of wine, this later corresponding secretary for the Society for the Suppression of Intemperance became known as the founder of the “pig club,” which became Harvard’s Porcellian Club. The McKean Gate at Harvard pictured here is named for him.

McKean graduated from Harvard in 1794, studied theology, and was ordained at the Congregational Church in Milton in 1797.

Having a frail constitution, he gave up the pulpit in 1804 and traveled for a bit in warmer climates. After returning to Boston he was courted by Harvard as a Professor, first refusing the chair in Mathematics later offered to founder John Farrar but finally accepting the position of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, where he remained for ten years.

Again plagued by ill health, Rev. McKean traveled to Havana, where he died on March 17, 1818 at the age of 42.

Mr. Daniel Mallory

Most of our founders were connected in some way outside as well as inside the Massachusetts Bible Society, and that was certainly true of publishers like Daniel Mallory, whose company D. Mallory & Co. published sermons and works by other founders. One of those was founder Jedidiah Morse, who determined that his son, Samuel F.B. Morse (the inventor of the telegraph and Morse Code), would be a bookbinder, sending him to Mr. Mallory as an apprentice.

A common practice to trim costs in printing was to make a book physically smaller, something that became a challenge with long titles, which were often heavily edited to get them to a smaller size. Mr. Mallory ran into this difficulty with the Waverly novels of Sir Walter Scott. In trying to convince a Philadelphia publisher to join with him in the venture, Mr. Mallory wrote that the novels would be condensed, explaining to his potential partner, “You must be aware that there is a great deal of rubbish—such as the long introductions, &c.”

Daniel Mallory was likely born in Westfield about 1777 and died between 1845-50.

Rev. Charles Lowell

Like several other founders, Rev. Lowell is perhaps better remembered for his son, the poet James Russell Lowell, but the father should be remembered in his own right. Born in Boston on Aug. 15, 1782, Rev. Lowell pastored the West Church in Boston (then a Congregational Church, now a United Methodist congregation) for 55 years. He graduated from Harvard in 1800, studied theology in Edinburgh and was installed at the West Church in 1806.

A memoir of his son by A. Lawrence Lowell records that Rev. Lowell worked so hard among the poor of the city that it undermined his health and his congregation asked him to find a house out in the country. That same memoir declares Rev. Lowell to have been “a man of unusual culture and refinement, possessed a pure and gentle spiritual nature, and a breadth of sympathy which endeared him in no common measure to his parishioners.”

Rev. Lowell’s father, Hon. John Lowell was the U.S. Chief Justice for the New England Circuit and was the author of the clause in the Massachusetts Constitution abolishing slavery. This passion was passed along to his son, who became a social activist and ardent abolitionist, ending the practice of segregated seating in his congregation. He died in Cambridge on Jan. 20, 1861.

Mr. Ensign Lincoln

Like Mr. Larkin, Ensign Lincoln was a printer and publisher. Although not ordained, he was licensed to preach as a Baptist in 1811, which he did frequently both in Boston and beyond. In the year 1813 he preached weekly in a nearby school house. In 1818 he preached the first sermon by a Baptist in Hingham, resulting in the organization of the first Sunday School in that town with 90 students on the first Sunday.

Born on January 8, 1779 in Hingham, Mass., he apprenticed to Manning and Loring at the age of 14 and began his own business as a printer in Boston in 1800. Despite his zeal for preaching, he never left his first profession until his death on Dec. 2, 1832. One of the first works he published was a two-volume set of poems by William Cowper, believed to be the first American edition of these poems.

His son, Brown University Professor John Larkin Lincoln, wrote of his father, “My dear father was one of the best of men, always cheerful and kind, with a wonderful equableness of temper…How loving he was at home, and how I loved to be in his lap in the evening and hear him talk!…I used to go with my father out of town when he went to preach for different churches. How many miles I have driven him out of Boston and back again, and how good and thoughtful he was in talking to me!”

The obituary in The American Magazine said of him: “A purer mind never inhabited a mortal frame. It instinctively shrunk from the approach of vice in all its forms. A love of truth and goodness was the ruling passion of his soul. His manners were frank and open; his deportment was as distant from prudery and affectation as his heart was from hypocrisy. He delighted in the social intercourse of friends, and was always an object around which they might gather to indulge in the pleasures of conversation—to be pleased, improved, and refined.”

Rev. John Lathrop, DD

A neighbor of Benjamin Franklin’s sister in Boston and therefore acquainted with Mr. Franklin in his later years, Rev. Lathrop was born May 17, 1740 in Norwich, Connecticut, intending initially to study medicine but graduated from Princeton in 1763 with his sights set on divinity. He was granted the D.D. degree from Edinburgh in 1784. Rounding out his support of Colleges, he was part of the Corporation of Harvard College for forty years. He was the Vice President of the Massachusetts Bible Society and was a member of many religious and benevolent societies.

He was called to the pulpit of the Mathers in the Second Church in Boston (the other “Old North Church” of Boston, which was burned by the British in 1775) in May of 1768. After the Evacuation, the congregation united with the New Brick Church and upon the death of New Brick’s pastor, Rev. Lathrop took charge of both congregations for a ministry that spanned fifty years.

No stranger to the public square, Rev. Lathrop also served as Chaplain of the House for the Massachusetts legislature. He also had an active interest in science, writing a paper on the effect of lightning on the springs and wells of Boston.

The history of Second Church, in remembering the eulogy for Rev. Lathrop delivered by fellow MBS founder Francis Parkman, praises Rev. Lathrop for “his unfeigned piety, his pure conscientiousness, his amiable temper and most winning spirit of Christian love, his delightful candor, the tenderness and gentleness of his domestic affections, his serene dignity, his public spirit, his devoted attachment to liberty, his unyielding defence of the rights of conscience, his energy and firmness when the cause of truth demanded or the public good required, and his beautiful resignation and triumphant composure in the hour of death.”

Rev. Lathrop died on January 4, 1816.

Mr. Ebenezer Larkin

Ebenezer Larkin was perhaps the most noted bookseller in Boston at the time, although it was his uncle, Deacon John Larkin, who is better remembered, simply for lending his horse for Paul Revere’s famous ride.

Ebenezer Larkin was born in Charelstown on August 14, 1767, the fourth of seventeen children. He was educated in the Charlestown schools and took on adult responsibilities early due to the early death of his father and many younger siblings. He entered the book trade, and at age 21 established a shop at 47 Cornhill in Boston (pictured here).

While successful, the bookselling business was also challenging, and Mr. Larkin found himself more than once in court over monetary disputes, once with fellow founder Samuel Dana over the publication of a newspaper, The Boston Patriot. Mr. Dana won the case.

Like many tradesmen, he was a member of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association who remembered him at his passing on December 1, 1814 by noting: “He was universally respected for the virtues of uprightness and benevolence, and his society was sought and admired for its characteristic pleasantness and good humor.”

Rev. J.T. Kirkland, DD

On July 6, 1809, when our founders first gathered, Rev. John Thornton Kirkland was the pastor of the New South Church in Boston, and had been there for some 16 years. In just a few short months, after the sudden death of fellow founder Samuel Webber, Rev. Kirkland would be selected to succeed Rev. Webber as president of Harvard.

Born with a twin brother in New York on Aug. 17, 1770 while his father was a missionary to the Native Peoples of that state, Rev. Kirkland lived among the Oneida for the first two years of his life. The area then became unsafe for a young family and the boys were removed with their mother to her native home in Windham, Connecticut. Looking for the nearest settlement to the Hudson, the family then purchased a home in Stockbridge, where Rev. Kirkland remained, receiving a frontier education, mostly from his mother. Kicked by a horse at only four years old, he retained the scar on his forehead for the rest of his life.

At age thirteen he went to Phillips Academy in Andover and was placed under the care of fellow MBS founder, Eliphalet Pearson. With no money in the family, young Kirkland was taken in by Samuel Phillips (later Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts) who boarded him and paid his tuition. At fifteen, he began his studies at Harvard College, where his tuition was eleven pounds and five shillings, the lowest tuition allowed by the government. In his junior year, after the death of his mother, he took the summer to join the small army that put down the Shays rebellion. He graduated in 1789 with particular expertise in Latin and metaphysics, returning to tutor in those subjects from 1792-94. In 1793 he became the pastor of the New South Church in Boston. He received his D.D. from Princeton in 1802.

Of his preaching, Alexander Young, in his discourse on the life of President Kirkland, wrote: “He always spoke from a crowded and overflowing mind. Although he said so much, you felt that there was much more behind unsaid. He poured himself forth in a full stream of thought, which evidently flowed from a living and inexhaustible fountain. Chief Justice Parsons used to say that Dr. Kirkland put more thought into one sermon than other ministers did into five. A single sermon of his would sometimes contain a whole body of divinity.”

On November 14, 1810, Rev. Kirkland became the President of Harvard. Of his presidency Young writes: “Under his administration the course of studies was remodeled and enlarged, and the qualifications for admission and the standard of scholarship were raised. The Institution became, for the first time, in reality as well as in name, a University. The Law School was established, the Medical School resuscitated and reorganized, and the Theological School erected into a separate department; and able and learned professors and lecturers were placed in the chairs of the several Faculties. Four permanent professorships were added, endowed, and filled, in the Academic department, and the salaries of all the instructors were augmented.”

After a stroke in 1827, President Kirkland was forced by his health to resign. He died on April 26, 1840.

Rev. Samuel Kendal, DD

Born in Sherborne on July 11, 1753, Rev. Kendal spent his ministry as the pastor of First Parish in Weston, where he was ordained at thirty years of age in the year following his 1772 Harvard graduation. Although his name is listed with two l’s in the founders list, he preferred the spelling with only one. Samuel Willard, then President of Harvard and father of founder Sidney Willard, preached the ordination sermon. He received his D.D. from Yale in 1801.

Like many of the divines of the day, Samuel Kendal tutored young men in the town, either to fit them for College or for ministry. Rev. Kendal did this so successfully that a memoir of a Sudbury lad named Jacob Bigelow speaks of Rev. Kendal’s “powerful frame and military antecedents” and his renown as “a breaker of unruly horses and refractory boys.” He goes on to describe the experience: “A few of us, who constituted a domestic school under his roof, found him genial, kind, and indulgent. He was liberal in his theological views, but not particularly relenting toward political adversaries, or heretical poachers on his parochial domain.”

Rev. Kendal also provided shelter to his father, who being loyal to the American cause, was forced to flee Nova Scotia in his advancing years. It was the father that saved Rev. Kendal and his young family, however, when he awakened in 1791 to a fire. The fire consumed the house and its contents, but thanks to the alertness of the senior Mr. Kendal, the family was spared. The parish quickly built Rev. Kendal a new and better home.

The father left behind six daughters in Nova Scotia, three of whom were unmarried and thus followed their father to Massachusetts, showing up on Rev. Kendal’s doorstep so destitute that they had walked all the way from Boston to Weston. Rev. Kendal’s biographer tells of a wild dog ravaging the sheep of the town. Rev. Kendal chased the dog down and threw a large bone at it with such force that the offending dog was killed on the spot. He also tells of a tramp, who came to Rev. for help, received his hospitality and left with both a full stomach and an apron and silver spoon to which he was not entitled. Rev. Kendal mounted his horse, chased down the thief and, finding him unwilling to admit the crime yet with the apron string sticking out from his coat, grabbed the thief by the collar and brought him back at a brisk walk attached to the horse. The thief was at last repentant and returned the items.

Samuel Kendal died of typhoid in Weston on Feb. 16, 1815, having missed only one Sabbath service in his thirty-one-year pastorate.

Mr. Joseph W. Jenkins

Joseph Jenkins was, like many of our founders, also a member of the Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Since 20^th and 21^st century Humane Societies work for the humane treatment of animals, there should just be a brief explanation of these prior humane societies.

The Humane Society in Massachusetts began through conversations between MBS founder Rev. James Freeman and others in 1786. It was modeled after a British Society which was itself modeled after a Dutch society with the stated goal of for “the recovery of persons who meet with such accidents as to produce in them the appearance of death, and for promoting the cause of humanity, by pursuing such means, from time to time, as shall have for their object the preservation of human life, and the alleviation of its miseries.”

It is notable that forty-six of our founders are on the list of members for the Humane Society of the Commonwealth in 1810, an interest in human welfare naturally combining with the call of the Scriptures to love of neighbor.

Along with founders Josiah Bumstead and Henry Homes, Joseph Jenkins was a founding member of the Society for Mutual Improvement, which began essentially as a group of Christians from various churches who wanted evening worship services and ended as the founders of Park Street Church. Mr. Jenkins served as the Sunday School Superintendent there from 1829-1834.

Joseph W. Jenkins was likely born in Plymouth on March 5, 1787 and died on June 4, 1849 in East Madison, Maine.

Mr. Henderson Inches

A Boston merchant with an “ample fortune” and a member of Old South Church, Henderson Inches was born on February 7, 1774. He graduated from Harvard College in 1792 and went to work at the counting house of the Hon. Thomas Russell. He then began his own business at No. 47 Long Wharf and purchased Mr. Russell’s Wharf upon the latter’s passing.

Along with Samuel and John Adams and MBS President William Phillips, Mr. Inches was one of the Overseers of the Poor in the Town of Boston and also served as a Selectman for the town. With his wife, Susan Brimmer, he had ten children.

The Harvard College Necrology describes Mr. Inches as: “an honorable and upright merchant. He was, in every sense, a gentleman: intelligent, affable, of a genial, social disposition, he was a welcome guest wherever he went; beloved at home as a kind husband and affectionate father, and respected by the community as an estimable and valued citizen.”

Henderson Inches died on September 9, 1857.

Mr. David Hyslop

Along with at least fourteen of our founders, David Hyslop was a member of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Indians, and others, in North America, which had a similar mission to MBS and the other regional Bible Societies before the latter came into existence.

Born on Dec. 28, 1755, Mr. Hyslop was part of the Congregational Church in Brookline, donating the baptismal basin for their new meeting house in 1806.

In 1821 the 86-year-old John Adams expressed a desire to again visit the house where his mother was born. The Brookline home had been purchased by David Hyslop’s father, and thus he had the honor of hosting the grand party for the former President.

A gentleman farmer, Mr. Hyslop is credited with the cultivation of a specific variety of late-ripening peach, which became known as Hyslop’s Clingstone in his honor. Mr. Hyslop died, on August 16, 1822.

Rev. Joshua Huntington

Born January 31, 1786, Joshua Huntington was the son of a General in the Revolutionary Army and by all accounts lived up to the reputation for benevolence established by his father. Rev. Huntington graduated from Yale in 1804 and like fellow founder Horace Holley, studied theology with Yale’s President, Dr. Dwight.

After considering several different unanimous calls to different churches, Rev. Huntington settled on becoming a colleague of founder Joseph Eckley at Old South in Boston and was ordained there on May 18, 1808. Rev. Eckley died just three years later, leaving Rev. Huntington with a large job at a very young age.

During his tenure at Old South he paid particular attention to the poor of the parish, visiting them more frequently than others. He was President of the Boston Society for the Moral and Religious Instruction of the Poor from its founding in 1816 until his death and was also Secretary of the Boston Foreign Mission Society from it’s formation in 1811.

Between the rigors of ministry and his own frail health, Rev. Huntington himself lived only 34 years. He died on September 11, 1809, only a year after his storied father.

Mr. Henry Holmes

On of the founding members of Park Street Church, Henry Homes was born in Boston on October 3, 1776. Becoming a wealthy hardware merchant in the firm Homes, Homer, & Bonner, the foundational meetings of the National Domestic Missionary Society were held in his home in 1826, a passion that was passed to his son Henry Augustus Homes who became a missionary in Constantinople from 1836-1850, later being named as the librarian of the New York State Library. The senior Mr. Homes was the only non-Baptist founder of the Evangelical Tract Society.

Mr. Homes died in 1845.

In the 1848 book The Aristocracy of Boston, the author writes of Henry Homes: “Mr. Homes was an orthodox congregationalist, of most extensive Christian benevolence. His charities and kindness always ready, and liberally in amount for every good object.”

Rev. Abiel Holmes, DD

Abiel Holmes is another of our founders whose original roots were in Connecticut, born in Woodstock on December 24, 1763 to a family that had come nearly a century before. His father was a surgeon in the Revolutionary Army. Rev. Holmes graduated from Yale in 1783 and became a tutor there while he studied theology.

His first pastoral charge was in Midway, Georgia but after six years he resigned that post and came to Cambridge where he accepted the pastorate of the First Parish there in 1792. It was just a little over a month after our founding that Rev. and Mrs. Holmes had their third child, Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Rev. Holmes had a special love for history, delivering a series of lectures on ecclesiastical history and in 1805 publishing the two-volume work Annals of America, which was and is a standard authority.

The common practice of doing pulpit exchanges with other area ministers that caused a stir for Rev. Codman, also caught Rev. Holmes for the same reason. In 1828, After ministering as a Unitarian for more than thirty years at First Parish, Abiel Holmes became more of a strict Calvinist. At that juncture he, like Rev. Codman, stopped inviting exchanges with his more liberal colleagues and his church complained. When he also began preaching five-point Calvinism, Trinitarian doctrine, and starting a series of evening lectures focused on the same, a formal complaint was filed and his removal requested. His response from the pulpit was, “If I seem to disregard the wishes or the taste of my hearers, it is because I am more desirous to save than to please them.”

An Ecclesiastical Council was called in 1829, consisting of area colleagues, including fellow MBS founder Eliphalet Porter. Rev. Holmes declined to recognize the jurisdiction of the Council. They convened and voted anyway that the church did have a right to dismiss Rev. Holmes for his change in theology. In a letter dated June 12, 1829, Rev. Holmes was informed that his services would no longer be required at First Parish.

There were, of course, supporters of Rev. Holmes, and MBS founder William Hilliard was among them, leading the charge to challenge the legality of the proceedings. Later in 1829 the parish committee of the church published a tract of over 100 pages describing the process, objections, and controversy in detail. When Abiel Holmes left First Parish, he took William Hilliard and 59 other parishioners with him. They met for services in the old courthouse on the square.

Rev. Holmes died in Cambridge on June 4, 1837.

Rev. Horace Holley

Born in Salisbury, Connecticut on February 13, 1781 and although his father had designs for him as a merchant, he graduated from Yale in 1803 and entered the study of Law. After only a few months, however, he returned to Yale to study theology with its President, Dr. Dwight. In 1806 he was ordained to a parish in Greenfield Hill, CT, where Dr. Dwight had once served. He received a salary of $560 per year.

Finding the salary too small for his family, Rev. Holley left Greenfield Hill and in March of 1809, was installed at the Hollis St. Church in Boston. He served there just 9 years before being called to become the President of the struggling Transylvania University in Lexington, KY. He and his family were stricken with yellow fever and died on July 31, 1827.

Having adhered to Orthodox Calvinism while at Yale, in Boston his faith became more liberal as he listened to the debates of the age. From Charles Caldwell, M.D., a colleague of Rev. Holley at Transylvania University, we have this description of that shift:

“Arrived in Boston, where all subjects were freely discussed, where truth, not the interests of a sect, was sought for, mixing with the clergy of every denomination and mode of faith, learned and eloquent, and disposed to draw him into debate— a kind of warfare for which he had a taste as well as talent— his mind unfolded to a more extended view of Christianity. He saw that though one set of opinions might be right, another, in many respects different, need not of necessity be wholly wrong— they might agree in fundamentals—and that religion does not consist so much in thinking as in feeling and acting. He believed that men are the creatures of God; that he exercises a moral government over them; that they are bound to worship him; and that they will be happy or miserable in every stage of their existence, according to the state of their affections and conduct. He believed the scriptures to be the rule of faith, but allowed of a variety of interpretation. As they were written for all nations, all climates, and all circumstances, and adapted to each, they could not justly be circumscribed by the peculiar interpretation of any man, or set of men; of a single church, village, or state.”

Mr. Oliver Holden

While many of our founders focused on the spoken word, Oliver Holden’s life revolved around music and hymnody. He was born in Shirley, Massachusetts on September 18, 1765 he moved from there with his parents in 1786 (after serving a year as a marine) to help rebuild Charlestown after the British had burned that city. He acquired the carpenter’s trade and also dealt in real estate.

Who knows if he sang while he hammered and sawed, but his musical talent had become evident enough that when George Washington paid a visit to Boston, it was twenty-four year old Oliver Holden who wrote the music and lyrics to an ode and then trained a choir to sing it at the Old State House for the occasion.

A member of the Baptist church in Charlestown for a time, Mr. Holden soon grew to find them too lax for his taste. So he literally and almost single-handedly built a new “Puritan Church,” which he pastored for 15 years.

While not doing that, he opened a music store, became a prominent Mason, but although in 1792 he published “America’s Harmony,” a collection of songs for religious occasions, he is best known as the composer of the Coronation tune used for the hymn “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” the earliest American hymn tune still in general use. Oliver Holden died in Charlestown on September 4, 1844.

Mr. William Hilliard

When MBS founder and Harvard President Samuel Webber wrote his best-selling Mathematics textbook, it was William Hilliard who printed it. Mr. Hilliard’s father was the Rev. Timothy Hilliard, the minister of the First Parish Church in Cambridge. Before that, Rev. Hilliard pastored on the Cape, and young William was born in Barnstable in 1779, moving to Cambridge when he was five years old.

Although his father, two brothers, and two sons all attended Harvard, William went straight to the printing press to apprentice in the craft. By the time he was 24 years old, Thomas Jefferson had sought him out to buy books for the University of Virginia.

With a shop in Boston and family ties to Harvard, in 1802 the Harvard Corporation sought out William Hilliard to be the printer for their newly established University Press, the first such venture in the United States. Hilliard continued to operate both his own venture and the University Press.

In Max Hall’s Harvard University Press: A History, Willard is described as “innovative, ambitious, restless, prickly, civic-minded, and church-minded.” A deacon in the First Church in Cambridge, he was apparently also quite capable of delivering a speech, as he gave at least one address to the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association on October 4, 1827. He held municipal offices and served once or twice in the legislature. William Hilliard died April 30, 1836.

Mr. Lemuel Hedge

The biography of Mr. Lemuel Hedge remains a mystery. It seems he must be somehow connected to the Lemuel Hedge who was the first settled minister in Warwick, Mass., but that Lemuel Hedge had been dead 30 years at our founding. He had a son Lemuel, but he died in 1801. The most likely person would have been the elder Lemuel’s second son, Levi Hedge, professor of Logic at Harvard and an intimate with many of our founders. Levi is also listed as supporting other regional Massachusetts Bible Societies. There is, however, no way to twist the original writing to make the name say “Levi” rather than “Lemuel.” There was an inventor and organ maker of note named Lemuel Hedge but he seems never to have left his native Windsor, Vermont. If you have information, please let us know!

The Honorable Samuel Haven

Born in Dedham on April 5, 1771, Samuel Haven was a man of many talents, and the home he shared with his wife, Elizabeth Craigie, was known as one of the most hospitable houses in Massachusetts. A lawyer, a judge, a horticulturalist, a mechanic, he entertained Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horace Mann, Oliver Wendell Holmes among many others. His home is now the Dedham Community House.

Judge Haven served as the Register of Probate for Norfolk County from 1793-1833 and was the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas for Norfolk County as well.

Judge Haven died on September 4, 1847 at his daughter’s home in Roxbury.

Rev. Edward D. Griffin, DD

A farmer’s son, Edward Dorr Griffin was born in East Haddam, CT on January 6, 1770, graduated from Yale in 1790 as the school’s first Phi Beta Kappa student. He then studied theology with Jonathan Edwards, son of the better-known theologian who became president of Union College. Rev. Griffin began ministry in Connecticut and was ordained in June, 1796 as pastor of the Congregational Church of New Hartford, where he held a series of revivals. He did the same in the church he accepted in 1801 in Newark, New Jersey, where the revivals would last for weeks at a time.

In 1808 he earned the D.D. degree at Union and early in 1809 accepted a call to the newly formed Andover Seminary in Massachusetts as a Professor of Rhetoric, a position he held until 1811. It was in that year that the newly established Park Street Church called Rev. Griffin to be their first pastor, where his Park Street Lectures gained international acclaim. He returned to his former church in Newark in 1817, and in 1821 was chosen as the President of Williams College, where he remained until 1836. At 6’3” he had an imposing presence and students who did not look him in the eye or who fell asleep during Sunday services were called out on the spot by name. Edward Dorr Griffin died on the eighth of November the next year in Newark, New Jersey.

One of the funeral orations for Rev. Griffin at Williams College, remembered his time at Park Street Church this way: “He felt that he was standing in the breach; a large portion of the community at a distance, felt so too, and he had their sympathy, while he wielded the force of a giant. Many who hated his doctrines, were drawn in by his eloquence, and it not infrequently happened, that those who’ went to scoff, remained to pray.’ As he was the only orthodox congregational clergyman in the city except one, his church was much resorted to by members of the legislature, and by strangers, and he thus became extensively known throughout this State, and indeed throughout the country.”

Mr. John Grew

The elder brother of Rev. Henry Grew, who pastored the First Baptist Church in Hartford, Connecticut, John Grew was born August 15, 1780 and followed his father into the family business, becoming one of Boston’s most influential merchants. The firm of Bolton and Grew manufactured furniture hardware of all types, including brass and plated goods for coaches and cabinets.

Mr. Grew was the assistant Treasurer of the Massachusetts Bible Society in 1816 and died in 1821.

Rev. Thomas Gray

Born in Jamaica Plain on March 16, 1772, Thomas Gray graduated from Harvard College in 1790 and then studied theology with the Baptist preacher, Rev. Samuel Stillman. Apparently he also studied Rev. Stillman’s daughter, and he married her in 1793.

On March 27 that same year he was ordained to the Third Church in Roxbury, a parish that had been struggling for seven years without a settled minister. Rev. Gray remained in that parish for 50 years, bringing it back to health and prosperity.

Francis Drake in his publication on the Town of Roxbury describes Rev. Gray this way: “Social and full of anecdote, Dr. Gray was greatly beloved by his parishioners. As a preacher he was practical, agreeable, and often effective. But it was as a pastor, in the faithful and affectionate oversight of his flock, that his chief excellence lay.” He was known even after his retirement as “the Shepherd of the Plain.”

Thomas Gray retired from the parish in 1843 and died on the first of June, 1847.

Moses Grant, Jr.

Like his father, Moses Grant, Jr. was also a Deacon at the Brattle Street Church, as well as the President of the Boston Temperance Society. For a time he taught in fellow founder Samuel T. Armstrong’s Sunday School at Old South, but the setting proved too conservative for his tastes. The younger Moses Grant was born in Boston on July 25, 1785.

From a book called Tact, Push, and Principle by William M. Thayer (London, 1882) we read this about the character of Moses Grant, Jr.:

“Deacon Moses Grant was another of the successful men of Boston, whose benevolent spirit fell like a benediction from the skies upon the poor of the city. With the pressure of an extensive and profitable business on his hands, he found time to engage in all the philanthropic movements of the day. His great sympathy was easily enlisted in any and every enterprise designed to ameliorate the condition of the unfortunate and indigent. He, too, kept a room in his house for the storage of articles necessary and useful to these classes. With his own hand he dealt out groceries and measured cloth, and hundreds of families were made the happier by his generous ministrations. His benevolence became an element of his success, by creating public respect and confidence, and attracting to himself that love and well-wishing which are sure to follow him who is not seeking personal aggrandizement.”

Moses Grant, Jr. died in July 22, 1861.

Deacon M. Grant

Without a first name listed, this founder is a bit difficult to identify with certainty. A Deacon M. Grant appears on a list of guests at a collation for the American Unitarian Association and with so many of our founders among their number, it seems likely that this is the same person.

The presence of our next founder, Moses Grant, Jr. points to the possibility that this might be Deacon Moses Grant, a deacon in the Brattle Street Church, where founder Joseph Buckminster was the minister. That Moses Grant did have a son named Moses. If this is our man, he was born in Boston on March 13, 1743 and he had an upholstery business. Moses Jr. became a partner with him in that business.

Moses Grant the elder was a fierce patriot, participating in several acts of rebellion in the time leading up to the Revolution, including the Boston Tea Party.

We read some of the details of his role in this event in The Good Man, a sermon preached in Brattle Square in 1842:

“In this work the party was organized in three divisions, each of which kept to its assigned duty. There was one division to raise the chests to the deck, another to break them open, and a third to throw their contents overboard. Mr. Grant's place was in the second division, whose function it was to break open the chests, which was done chiefly by ‘catsticks’ taken from a woodpile close at hand on the wharf. Mr. Grant used to relate an interesting incident connected with this important Tea- party. The people in the neighborhood, seeing the fatigue they were undergoing, prepared and brought to them some pailfuls of punch. It was received courteously, but not drank. The pails were passed along over the deck; and their contents, like those of the opened chests, poured into the sea. The patriots needed no such stimulants, and scorned to use them. The lofty principles, and the indomitable purpose in their hearts, were an adequate inspiration and an all-sufficing strength.”

A London newspaper of 1774 contained a letter from Boston noting that Deacon Moses Grant was “a fiery deacon indeed!”

Moses Grant was a member of the company of cadets led by Colonel John Hancock and died December 22, 1817.

Deacon David Goodwin

A member of the Baptist Missionary Society of Massachusetts, Deacon David Goodwin was born about 1744 and was a builder by trade, living and working primarily in Charlestown. He was active in the municipal life of the town, holding a number of town offices and was elected as a state representative in 1804, 1810, and 1813. He was also a school trustee.

A history of Charlestown written in 1902 describes him as “a dignified, precise man, who expected to be looked up to, especially by the children and youth of the town.”

Deacon Goodwin died in his Charlestown home on Jan. 25, 1825.

Rev. Samuel Gile

When fellow founder Joseph McKean left his Milton parish to become a Harvard Professor, Samuel Gile took over the parish and was ordained February 18, 1807.

Born on July 23, 1778, Rev. Gile graduated from Dartmouth College in 1804 and actually pastored two churches in Milton. First Parish was the church vacated by Joseph McKean, and is where Rev. Gile was serving when the Massachusetts Bible Society was founded. As the theological battles of the day raged on, however, Rev. Gile cast his lot with the evangelicals and left with a number of members of the First Parish congregation to form the First Evangelical Society in Milton in 1834. Rev. Gile died in-between the morning and afternoon services on Sunday, October 16, 1836. Fellow MBS founder and fellow evangelical John Codman preached his funeral sermon.

Mr. Caleb Gannett, Esq.

A member of First Church in Cambridge, Caleb Gannett was born in Bridgewater on Aug. 22, 1745. Although he married the daughter of Yale’s President, Ruth Stiles, it was Harvard College that kept Mr. Gannett’s loyalty. After graduating from Harvard in 1763, he served Harvard as a tutor in mathematics from 1773-1780 and as a Steward of the College from 1779 until his death in May of 1818. The Gannett House at Harvard, pictured here, is named for him.

Mr. Gannett began his career as a Congregational minister and tried to minister in Nova Scotia, only to be driven out by the Episcopalians. We have the papers of John Adams to thank for this information as upon Mr. Gannett’s return from Nova Scotia in 1771, he enlisted the help of John Adams to retain the 500 acres of land around Ft. Cumberland that he had been given in 1768 as the first settled Congregational minister in that region. The rival Anglican missionary subsequently had taken the land. It does not seem that they were successful in returning the land to Mr. Gannett.

In a biography of his better-known son, Ezra Stiles Gannett, the home of Caleb and Ruth was described as a “grave Puritan home” and mentions that the younger Stiles’ humor and poetic bent were inherited from neither parent. Perhaps the rigorous duties of a Steward at Harvard were more suited to his personality than his initial career choice.

Mr. Thomas Furber

Thomas Furber undoubtedly had many good qualities. He was apparently quite likable. However, the only real record we have is of his failure in the newspaper business. We have American newspaper publisher and author Isaiah Thomas to thank for the following account:

“Thomas Furber was born in Portsmouth, and served his apprenticeship with Daniel Fowle. Some zealous whigs, who thought the Fowles were too timid in the cause of liberty, or their press too much under the influence of the officers of the crown, encouraged Furber to set up a second press in the province. He in consequence opened a printing house in Portsmouth, toward the end of 1764, and soon after published a newspaper. In 1765 he received as a partner Ezekiel Russell. Their firm was Furber & Russell. Excepting the newspaper, they printed only a few hand-bills and blanks. The company became embarrassed, and in less than a year its concerns terminated, and the partnership was dissolved. Upon the dissolution of the firm, the press and types were purchased by the Fowles. Furber became their journeyman, and Russell went to Boston.

“Furber had been taught plain binding, and undertook to connect it with printing. Although he was not very skillful, either as a printer or as a binder, he began the world under favorable circumstances; and, had he been attentive to his affairs, he might have been successful. He was good natured and friendly, but naturally indolent; and, like too many others, gave himself up to the enjoyment of a companion, when he should have been attending to his business. He died in Baltimore, at the house of William Goddard, who had employed him for a long time and shown him much friendship. He left a widow and several children.”

Thomas Furber was born in Portmouth, NH on April 10, 1742 and the above “companion” that Thomas seems to credit for the demise of the newspaper was Sarah Frost Blunt, whom Furber married October 4, 1765.

[N.B. It is not entirely certain that this is the correct Thomas Furber. This Mr. Furber also had a son of the same name. Another Thomas Furber was a silversmith but would have only been 10 years old in 1809. Because of his connection with printing and the several other book printers and binders among our founders and because of the presence of this Thomas Furber on the 1810 census records in Boston, I believe this is the correct choice.]

Rev. James Freeman

James Freeman is noted as being the first avowed Unitarian minister in the United States, making the first Episcopal Church in New England into the first Unitarian Church in the United States.

Rev. Freeman was born in Charlestown on April 22, 1759, graduated from Harvard in 1777 and after several years studying theology, prepared a group of men in Cape Cod for service in the Army. While sailing to Quebec for peaceful purposes in 1780, he was captured by a privateer and held in a Quebec prison ship for several months. Once released from the ship he remained in the city on parole for two more years.

Returning to Boston, Freeman became a Lay Reader at King’s Chapel, popularly known as “Stone Chapel” because of anti-British sentiment. After six weeks as a reader, Rev. Freeman was asked to be the pastor, although before accepting, he made an unusual request. He asked to have the liturgy free of the Athanasian Creed, as he could not in good conscience say it. As it turns out, the congregation wasn’t fond of it anyway, and his wish was granted.

As Rev. Freeman continued his theological reading, he became more and more discontented with the liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer and the doctrine of the Trinity to the point where he suggested that he resign his post. To explain his position, he preached a series of sermons, believing that they would be his last. Again, however, the congregation surprised him, removed Trinitarian language from the liturgy and eliminated references to God the Father, becoming the first church in the United States to do so.

The church did, however, want to remain Episcopalian and petitioned the Bishop to ordain James Freeman as their rector. He would not. The church then arranged for a lay ordination, naming Rev. Freeman “Rector, Minister, Priest, Pastor, and Ruling Elder” of Stone Chapel.

He was later appointed to a committee to consider the creation of a formal body and in 1825 the American Unitarian Association was formed.

Freeman served in many benevolent, literary and historical societies and was a delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention. Ill health forced his retirement to Newton in 1826 where he died on November 14, 1835.

Mr. Abel Fox

One of several founders who began their lives in the wilds outside of Boston, Abel Fox was born in Fitchburg on December 25, 1782. He received his degree from Harvard in 1801, going on to embark on studies in medicine, getting his medical degree from Harvard in 1811, the first year degrees in medicine were granted there.

A member of the Calvinistic Congregational Church in Fitchburg, he practiced in Charlestown and also in Savannah, Georgia. Abel Fox died July 30, 1849 in an insane asylum in Worcester, Mass.

Rev. John Foster

A Dartmouth College graduate, Rev. John Foster was born in Warren, Mass. on April 19, 1763. After his graduation in 1783 he married Hannah Webster of Boston, author of one of the first American novels.

He did become one of Harvard’s Overseers (where he received his D.D. in 1815), and when in 1783 a church was organized in the area now known as Brighton (first called the Third Church of Christ in Cambridge), Rev. Foster became their first pastor, installed Nov. 1, 1784. In 1809 he is recorded as delivering the election sermon for the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts, and preached for a number of public occasions.

He enjoyed a ministry in Brighton of 43 years, and published twenty-two of his sermons. He died in Brighton on Sept. 25, 1829.

Mr. John Farrar

At the time of our founding, Mr. Farrar was the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard College, assuming that position in 1807 when the former Hollis Professor, fellow founder Samuel Webber, became Harvard’s President. In fact, of the ten formal professors at Harvard in 1810, four of them (plus, of course, Harvard’s President) were founders of the Massachusetts Bible Society.

Mr. Farrar was born in Lincoln, Mass. on July 1, 1779 and, yes of course, he graduated from Harvard in 1803. But for his theological training, Mr. Farrar jumped ship to the more conservative Andover Seminary.

Of his strict upbringing, a tribute to him in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences recalls that as a young man he went out dancing and was thrown from his horse, breaking his arm, on the way home. He kept his secret throughout the night. When the next day the pain was great and he let his secret be known, his parents confirmed that his broken arm was a just chastisement for an errant child.

Although licensed to preach, he felt the disputes within the Congregational church too acutely to accept a position and instead became a Greek tutor at Harvard. He then was granted the Hollis chair, where he remained until illness forced his resignation in 1836. His book, Elements of Algebra was used as a text at Harvard and the US Military Academy as well as a number of other institutions.

He published his observations of the Great Comet of 1811, a comet that was observable by the naked eye for 260 days, a record held until the appearance of Hale-Bopp in 1997. Along with many other MBS founders, Mr. Farrar was an original member of the Christian Examiner Society. John Farrar died in Cambridge on May 8, 1853.

Rev. William Emerson

William Emerson was born in Concord, Mass. on May 6, 1769. His father, also Rev. William Emerson, recorded in his diary the opening shots of the American Revolution in Concord and was the first to appear after the alarm was sounded, gun in hand. The senior Rev. Emerson contracted fever on the field of battle and died on a homeward march when the younger Rev. Emerson was only seven.

Young Rev. Emerson entered Harvard at age 16 and was once suspended for refusing to testify about the misbehavior of others. He graduated from Harvard in 1789 and taught school in Roxbury for a couple of years before embarking on theological study. He also played the bass violin, but gave it up upon entering ministry. In 1792 he accepted a call to preach for the Society at Harvard.

He was hired away to be the minister of First Church, Boston on October 16, 1799, with the church purchasing his services from Harvard for $1,000. While there, his intellectual and literary pursuits took flight and he both started and largely maintained the Christian Monitor and was a member of most of the prominent literary and religious societies of Boston.

His son, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote of his father’s faith: “My father inclined obviously to what is ethical and universal in Christianity; very little to the personal and historical. Indeed, what I found nearest approaching what would be called his creed is in a printed sermon ' at the Ordination of Mr. Bedee, of Wilton, N. H.' I think I observe in his writings, as in the writings of Unitarians down to a recent date, a studied reserve on the subject of the nature and offices of Jesus. They had not made up their own minds on it. It was a mystery to them, and they let it remain so.”

Just days after the death of fellow founder Rev. Joseph Eckley, William Emerson joined him in death on May 12, 1811. Fellow founder Joseph Buckminster preached his funeral sermon.

Rev. John Eliot, DD

No relation to the 17^th century John Eliot, who was known as the “apostle to the Indians,” our John Eliot was born in Boston on May 31, 1754, living in the house built by Rev. Increase Mather. After graduating from Harvard in 1772, he succeeded his father as pastor of the New North Church in 1779, two years after the University of Edinburgh conferred upon him the degree of S.T.D. Keeping his connection with Harvard, he was a fellow there from 1804 until his death on Feb. 14, 1813.

Not only was Rev. Eliot a founder of the Massachusetts Bible Society, but he also was a founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society and a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. He published two addresses to the Freemasons and in 1779, along with one other minister from the town, had the Masonic degrees conferred upon them “quietly and gratuitously” at a special meeting. But neither became members.

The Memorial History of Boston published in 1882 says of Rev. Eliot: “He was well known in connection with historical researches and labors, and at the same time had in his special calling a reputation for superior attainments as a scholar and ability as a writer, while his social gifts and the qualities of his character made his presence always welcome, whether in literary circles or in the homes of his parishioners.”

Rev. Joseph Eckley, DD

Joseph Eckley had a slightly different background than many of his fellows. He was born in England in 1750 and graduated from Princeton in 1772, earning his D.D. also from Princeton in 1793, making his way to Boston to become the pastor of Old South Church in 1779. In 1787 he helped found The Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians, making it no surprise that he would gravitate to the Massachusetts Bible Society at its founding.

Decades after his April 30, 1811 passing, one Dr. Lowell wrote of Rev. Eckley: “I never witnessed his indignation at anything but bigots and bigotry; and then it was expressed emphatically. I do not remember his ever talking on points of theological controversy, — not even on the subject of the Trinity; though that was a subject which, in his day, was but little discussed among us. His relations were certainly more intimate with the 'liberal party,' as they were termed, than with the Calvinistic party. It was not so with his young colleague, Mr. Huntington, with whom I enjoyed pleasant, personal and ministerial intercourse during his life; but he was most kind, gentlemanly, and Christian-like, in his treatment of those from whom he differed in sentiment.”

Rev. Asa Eaton

Christ Church, Boston (pictured here) is better known as the Old North Church, famous for the location of Paul Revere’s signal beacon. It was there that young Asa Eaton served for two or three years as a lay reader as he pursued his theological studies after graduating from Harvard in 1803.

Rev. Eaton was born in Plaistow, NH on July 25, 1778 and after obtaining his theological education went to New York, where he was ordained by Episcopal Bishop Benjamin Moore at Trinity Church. Returning quickly to Massachusetts, he began his ministry in earnest back at Christ Church where only a failing voice necessitated his resignation in 1829. He obtained his D.D. from Columbia in 1828 and that same year published a history of Christ Church.

He continued to work on behalf of the poor with the Free Church City Mission and in 1837 ventured to New Jersey for a four-year commitment to St. Mary’s school in Burlington. He returned to Boston thereafter and accepted the charge at Trinity Church in Bridgewater, Mass., a position he still held at the time of his death on March 24, 1858.

Mr. Edward Dow

Unfortunately I was able to find no trace of a Mr. Edward Dow in this time period, not even in genealogical records. He is situated on the list with several merchants, and thus may have been a tradesman of some sort.

The Honorable Thomas Dawes

A member of the Harvard class of 1777 and son of Col. Thomas Dawes, Thomas Dawes was born in Boston on July 8, 1757. A noted jurist who served on the Massachusetts Supreme Court from 1792 to 1803, he was also a member of the state constitutional conventions of 1780 and 1820 and of the convention which adopted the federal constitution in 1789.

After leaving the state Supreme Court he was judge of the municipal court until 1823 and then remained a probate court judge until his death on July 22, 1825.

Judge Dawes was known for hit oratory as well as his judgments, being appointed as a public orator for the City of Boston for several historic occasions including the 1781 remembrance of the Boston Massacre and the 1787 remembrance of July 4, 1776. He connected the two best skills with the faith instilled at Old South Church (where his father was a Senior Deacon) in his oration on the Law Given on Mt Sinai in 1777.

Mr. William Davis, Esq.

A merchant who was involved in the municipal life of Plymouth, Mass., William Davis was born on July 13, 1758. Remembered for his empathy and industry, Mr. Davis was one of the founders of the Pilgrim Society and its first Vice President, belonged to the Humane Society of Massachusetts, and was the second President of the Plymouth Bank. Mr. Davis died Jan. 5, 1826 in Plymouth.

[William Davis also had a son named William Davis, Esq. who would have been of age in 1809, so it is not entirely certain that this biography of the elder Mr. Davis is the correct one for our founder. I have chosen him over his son because of his Pilgrim Society association with MBS founder Alden Bradford, his committee work with founder Rev. James Freeman, and because I found him on the list of subscribers to support theological education at Harvard. The senior William Davis is listed in various places as “William Davis, Esq.” and “Hon. William Davis.” Given the position of William Davis, Esq. on the founders list, right after Hon. Samuel Haven and right before Hon. John Quincy Adams, I believe the senior Mr. Davis to be the correct biography.]

The Honorable John Davis

It was on a Northborough, Mass. farm that John Davis was born on January 13, 1787. At our fouding, Mr. Davis was still a law student at Yale (where in 1835 he would become a founder of the famed Skull and Bones society), graduating in 1812. He was admitted to the bar in Worcester in 1815.

In ten years’ time, he was a Representative to the US Congress and by 1834 he was elected Governor of the Commonwealth. At the conclusion of that term he went to the U.S. Senate and then was elected again as Massachusetts Governor. After a brief time in private life, he again was elected United States Senator, where he served until his retirement in 1853.

In Congress, Mr. Davis was a noted and successful promoter of business protections (chairing the Commerce Committee), protested against the war with Mexico, and fought the introduction of slavery into the U.S. territories. He became known as “honest John Davis,” and it was in one of his speeches, where he claimed President James Buchanan was in favor of reducing the wages of American workers to ten cents a day, that the cry of “Tencent Jimmy” was given to Buchanan’s opponents.

His early interest in the work of the Massachusetts Bible Society never waned and when the American Bible Society formed in 1816, he supported them, eventually becoming President of the Worcester Auxiliary Bible Society. He died at his home in Worcester on April 19, 1854.

The Honorable Samuel Dana

The son of a minister in Groton, Samuel Dana was born on June 26, 1767 in that town. He was educated by his father, himself a Harvard graduate, and became the postmaster in Groton from 1800-1804. In the year 1800 the quarterly receipts of his office amounted to $3.00!

Across his 68 years, Samuel Dana turned to politics and law, serving a number of years as a state representative, then a state senator, then as a Representative in Congress and as a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1820. Despite never having a formal education, he became the Chief Justice of the Circuit Court of Common Pleas from 1816 onward. An active Mason, Mr. Dana also had an acute interest in horses, but for some reason would never allow an image of himself to be created. It is reported that “he was six feet and one inch in height, and a gentleman in the most liberal interpretation of the character.”

Samuel Dana’s son, General James Dana, sponsored the Masonic funeral rite for President George Washington in 1799. Samuel Dana’s minister father, however, was dismissed from his pulpit when he refused to support the American Revolution and after a few more years in Groton removed himself to Amherst, NH.

Although Samuel Dana spent a good part of his career in Charlestown with a mansion overlooking Bunker Hill, he returned to Groton where he died on Nov. 20, 1835.

Rev. John Codman

The son of a successful merchant, John Codman was born in Boston on August 3, 1782. Like so many others he graduated from Harvard in 1802 and turned to the study of law. Upon his father’s deathbed, however, the man asked his son to take up the study of theology instead, and young John obliged, turning to study with fellow MBS founder Henry Ware, then pastoring the church in Hingham.

Through his reading he came to be attracted to the more evangelical form of Congregationalism and in 1805 he traveled to Scotland to better understand that brand of Calvinism through study at Edinburgh. He remained there a year, during which time he came to know Amazing Grace writer John Newton amongst others.

Upon his return to the United States, he accepted a call to the Second Church in Dorchester, where both Daniel Webster and John Adams frequented services, in December, 1808. Just a few months into his ministry, his pastorate was challenged, not for any lack of duty or doctrine but because “he disclaimed ministerial fellowship with men who ‘brought another doctrine’ to the ears of the people than that which he believed to symbolize with the inculcations of Christ and the Apostles.”

Rev. Codman kept both his pulpit and his evangelical faith through the conflict and, like so many others, still managed to join the avowed liberal Rev. Dr. Henry Ware, as a founder of the Massachusetts Bible Society. He might have “disclaimed ministerial fellowship” with his erstwhile tutor, now Harvard professor, but they came together for the sake of the Bible.

Rev. John Codman died just short weeks after leaving the pulpit on December 23, 1847.

Rev. Joseph Chickering

Rev. Chickering was born in Norwood, Mass. on April 30, 1780, the son of a Congregational minister. He graduated from Harvard College in 1799 and spent several more years studying theology before being ordained to the First Congregational Church in Woburn on March 28, 1804. There he received an annual salary of $650 and 15 cords of “good hard wood.”

The History of Middlesex County describes a successful ministry until an “unfortunate business transaction” between himself and a member of the congregation led to his resignation in 1821 amidst the great sorrow of the congregation. One hundred sixty four members had been added to the Woburn rolls under his ministry with 270 baptisms.

As the Woburn congregation was still willing to recommend Rev. Chickering, he was installed on July 10, 1822 as pastor of the church in Phillipston, Mass. where he remained until ill health forced his resignation in 1835. He died in Phillipston on Jan. 27, 1844.

Mr. Henry Chapman

Born in Salem in 1771 and owner of Henry Chapman & Co., Henry Chapman was a ship chandler who is better known for his daughter-in-law’s accomplishments than his own. Maria Weston Chapman was an esteemed part of the Female Anti-Slavery Society in Boston. An 1840 annual report of that Society describes Mrs. Chapman: “A woman of genius like hers cannot but take the lead wherever she acts at all; and she is the life and soul of the enterprise in Boston. The foes of the cause have nicknamed her "Captain Chapman;" and the name passes from mouth to mouth as she walks up Washington-street,—not less admired, perhaps, all the while, than if she were only the most beautiful woman in the city.” She was known as William Lloyd Garrison’s chief lieutenant.

The Female Anti-Slavery Society credits Maria Chapman with convincing MBS founder and later President John Quincy Adams to take up the abolitionist cause. Perhaps she had access to John Quincy Adams through the Massachusetts Bible Society.

Perhaps she was drawn to Mr. Chapman’s son—also Henry—because of the commitment of the elder Mr. Chapman, who notably gave away all his southern business connections when they were found to have connection to the slave trade. The senior Mr. Chapman died in 1846.

Mr. Francis D. Channing, Esq.

The oldest of a remarkable group of brothers, Mr. Channing was born on August 16, 1775 in Newport, RI and was the brother of Rev. William Ellery Channing. The latter, while not at the founding ceremony on July 6 was present at Massachusetts Bible Society meetings beginning later that month and went on to play a prominent role in the Society.

Graduating from Harvard in 1794 where he gave the salutatory oration in Latin. He became a lawyer, a State representative and Secretary of the Boston Social Law Library. Known for his oratory, he was appointed a public orator for the City of Boston for their July 4 celebrations in 1806, an honor shared in various years by six of our founders. He died at sea, while on a passage to Rio de Janeiro on Nov. 5, 1810 at the tender age of 35, leaving an infant son.

Rev. Samuel Cary

Rev. Cary was born in Newburyport on Nov. 24, 1785 and graduated from Harvard College in 1804, studying divinity for three years following that. He was ordained at King’s Chapel on Jan. 1, 1809 and served that parish along with fellow MBS founder, Rev. Dr. James Freeman.

Rev. Freeman had sought a young colleague to assist him in his ailing years and eventually to carry on in his stead at King’s Chapel. At Samuel Cary’s ordination service the words were spoken, “You are still young, but death will soon overtake you.” This proved prophetic and after taking a cold which grew progressively worse, Rev. Cary died on Oct. 22, 1815, not quite to his 30^th birthday.

Mr. Joseph Callender

One of the members of Old South that put aside differences for the sake of the Bible, Joseph Callender was an engraver and die-sinker who made dies for the Massachusetts mint. He also engraved book plates and designed the first sunburst seal for the President of Bowdoin College in 1798.

The item pictured here is considered the greatest treasure of the numismatic collection at the Massachusetts Historical Society. It is the Columbia and Washington Medal in copper, engraved by Callender with the edges specially finessed by Paul Revere.

He was born in Boston on May 6, 1751 and was an apprentice to Paul Revere before opening his State Street die shop. The latter provided engravings for the Royal American Magazine among others. Joseph Callender died Nov. 10, 1821.

Mr. Andrew Calhoun

Andrew Calhoun was born in Donegal County, Ireland on March 27, 1764, although his parents were from Scotland. After his emigration to America in 1790, he first became a member of Old West Congregational Church, where the first of his 9 children was baptized. He became a Boston merchant. When Park Street Church was formed in Feb. 1809, Andrew Calhoun became an original deed holder and member, donating a large communion tablecloth at the church’s founding, perhaps suggesting that his trade was in textiles. In 1814 he abandoned his shop and took up farming first in New Hampshire and then in New York with his wife and children, one of whom became a noted missionary. The well-known southern statesman John C. Calhoun was Andrew Calhoun’s cousin. He died on April 14, 1842.

The presence of Mr. Calhoun as a founder of MBS, along with fellow Park Street founders Josiah Bumstead and Rev. Edward Dorr Griffin, illustrate the way a focus on the Bible brought together those who, outside of the Society, would share at least suspicion if not animosity.

From the history of Old South Church, which out of principle would not participate in the founding celebrations of Park Street Church, we read the following: “Until this time, the terms of admission to membership in the churches of Boston had been plain and simple — repentance towards God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. Candidates had been required, not to give definite and particular assent to a system of divinity embodied in a dogmatic creed, but to enter into a covenant in the exercise of a living faith, and in a spirit of holy consecration, in solemn and beautiful language adopted by the fathers when the broad foundations of New England Congregationalism were laid.

It has been well said, that creeds are for testimony, not for tests; but the new church was established on the principle that they are for tests, as well as testimony. It not only declared its adherence to the doctrines of religion, as they are ‘in general clearly and happily expressed’ in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, and in the Confession of Faith of 1680, but it formulated these doctrines in a symbol of its own, emphasizing especially the tri- personality of the Godhead, election (with its necessary corollary — reprobation), and imputed righteousness. And it went further: it required subscription both to the general statements and to its own particular confession, as a condition precedent to membership. It thus erected a barrier which would inevitably separate its minister, whoever he might be, from most of the ministers of the long-established churches, who were either negatively Calvinistic or positively Arminian.”

Members of Old South would not celebrate with Park Street Church, and yet both of their pastors as well as deacons and members from each church came together for common purpose to found The Massachusetts Bible Society.

The Honorable George Cabot

George Cabot was born Dec. 3, 1751 and like so many of his peers entered Harvard. Unlike his peers, however, he left Harvard in his sophomore year to follow the call of the sea. Beginning as a cabin boy, George Cabot was master of a ship by age 21, making several successful voyages.

Perhaps it was the long hours on the ocean that gave him the time to develop his acute mind, which he began to turn towards the political and economic issues of the day. At just 25 years of age he was chosen for the Massachusetts provincial congress. This provisional government of Massachusetts was established in direct violation of the King’s orders and was led by John Hancock. They moved from town to town to avoid capture and served as the government of the state outside of Boston in all matters.

From there his stature grew and in 1788 he became a member of the constitutional convention for the state. Then senate was the next likely step and he served in the United States Senate from 1791-96 then moving to put his early knowledge of seafaring to work as Secretary of the Navy in 1798, the first person to fill that new post.

Working closely with his personal friends, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, George Cabot was recognized as one of the best thinkers about political economy of his time. This earned him the presidency of the Hartford Convention, formed during the war of 1812 to discuss constitutional amendments that would protect the interests of the New England states.

George Cabot was the great-grandfather of Henry Cabot Lodge.

On his death on April 18, 1823, George Cabot was eulogized by fellow MBS Trustee, then Harvard President, and at one time his pastor at New South Church, John T Kirkland who described him in this way:

“This was the great charm about him—that while he made men wiser, he made them better; and if in all that he did there seemed to be no labour, it was, that the strength, with which he grasped every subject, was accompanied by a grace and a sweetness of discourse, by which the effort was hidden.”

Major Thomas Bumstead

Born in 1739/40, Thomas Bumstead attained the rank of Major in the Artillery Company during the Revolutionary War. A member of Old South Church since 1763, in the post war period Major Bumstead devoted himself to civic pursuits and was voted a Warden for the Town of Boston in 1781. He also purchased land across from the Granary Burying Ground where he opened a coach shop. Abigail Adams purchased one of his coaches, although the high price entailed much wailing and gnashing of teeth in correspondence between Abigail and John Adams.

Major Bumstead died on May 8, 1828 at the age of 88 years.

Mr. Josiah Bumstead

The lives of our founders were multi-faceted and Josiah F. Bumstead is a good example of that. On the religious front, he was a founder of Park Street Church in Feb. 1809 and remained a deacon there for 50 years.

At that point in his life he was tending to his wallpaper manufacturing business in Roxbury, a trade shared with fellow founder, Moses Grant. But somewhere along the way, Josiah Bumstead became interested in the new developments in education and turned his focus toward young children learning to read.

With the invention of the blackboard in 1801, learning became more visual and its importance was not lost on Mr. Bumstead, who wrote in 1841, “The inventor or introducer of the blackboard system deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not among the greatest benefactors of mankind.”

As he thought about the pedagogy of reading, Josiah Bumstead became a fierce advocate of the new word-method of teaching, publishing a series of readers between 1840-1843 that were used in all the primary schools in Boston. The first in that series, My Little Primer (1840) was the first reader anywhere to be specifically based on the word method.

In the 1934 book American Reading Instruction by Nila Banton Smith, Bumstead is quoted as saying about this method: “In teaching reading, the general practice has been to begin with the alphabet and drill the child upon the letters, month after month, until he is supposed to have acquired them. This method, so irksome and vexatious to both teacher and scholar, is now giving place to another, which experience has proved to be more philosophical, intelligent, pleasant, and rapid. It is that of beginning with familiar and easy words, instead of letters.”

Josiah Bumstead’s only actual teaching experience was as the superintendent of a Sunday School for Negroes.

Rev. Joseph S. Buckminster

Born in Portsmouth, NH on May 26, 1784, Joseph S. Buckminster came from a preacher’s family. Like so many other divines of the day, he studied at Harvard, graduating in 1800 with studies in theology and general literature. For a time he was an assistant at Phillips Exeter Academy where he counted Daniel Webster amongst his pupils.

In 1805 he received an invitation from the Brattle Street Society to lead that congregation. He published a book of hymns for them in 1808. Known as “The Chrysostom of America,” Buckminster was a celebrated preacher and contributed to many periodicals. He received the first appointment as a lecturer on biblical criticism at Harvard in 1811 but never was able to fulfill that appointment due to a life-long battle with epilepsy, which took his life shortly thereafter. Joseph S. Buckminster died on June 9, 1812, but even with such a short career, his published works fill two volumes. At the time of his death he was considered the best biblical scholar of his time.

Mr. William Brown, Jr.

Perhaps no other founder so aptly represents the religious turmoil of 1809 than William Brown. He was the editor of the Salem Gazette and used his considerable musical gifts to lead the choir at the Tabernacle Congregational Church in Salem, which was the position he held at our founding.

He was recruited away from the Tabernacle Church choir to lead music at First Congregational Church in Salem, a church that was leaning toward the new Unitarian movement. Mr. Brown indicated to the Tabernacle Church that while he was employed at First Church, he intended to keep his membership at Tabernacle Church, which had been his home for so many years.

Well, soon a notice came from the Tabernacle Church that Mr. Brown had been removed from their rolls on the grounds that he had been seen to attend the theater and was known to be “neglecting family prayers.” Thus rebuffed, Mr. Brown applied for membership at First Church. Their board duly sent for a letter of transfer to the Tabernacle Church and was told that Mr. Brown was not a member in good standing at Tabernacle so they could not provide a letter.

First Church then brought Mr. Brown into membership as a professing believer, as if he were coming with no church affiliation. Tabernacle Church hit the roof, believing that Mr. Brown’s activities should be censored by one and all and disbar him from church membership anywhere.

There ensued a heated debate in letters traded between the two churches over theology, ex-communication, church membership, church doctrine, and the activities of poor Mr. Brown. Those letters were collected and published under the name: Correspondence between the First Church and the Tabernacle Church in Salem. In which the duties of churches are discussed, and the rights of conscience vindicated. [Salem: Press of Foote and Brown, 1832.

A quote appearing on the title page reads: "How vain then are those, that, assuming a liberty to themselves, would yet tie all men to their tenets ; conjuring all men to the trace of their steps, when it may be, what is truth to them, is error to another as wise." Felltham's Resolves.

For the record, Mr. Brown remained a member in good standing at First Congregational Church in Salem.

Mr. Alden Bradford, Esq.

A descendant of William Bradford of Plymouth Colony, Alden Bradford was born in Duxbury in 1765. He graduated from Harvard College in 1786 and was a tutor at Cambridge for several years before undertaking theological studies. In 1793 he was ordained to the charge of the Congregational Church in Wicasset, Maine, where he remained for eight years.

With failing health forcing him to lead a less grueling life, he turned to politics and his considerable writing skills on the topic earned him the appointment as Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1812. He remained in that post for twelve years and, with a change of political parties in the State House, he retired to New Bedford as a Justice of the Peace.

He wrote several books on the history of Massachusetts as well as a theological treatise on the four Gospels and other theological writing. His obituary described him as a person with the kindest affections, an eminently social disposition, and a tenderness of sensibility which is rarely seen to outlast so much experience.

Mr. Elam Bliss

A bachelor trained as an apothecary in Springfield, Mass., Elam Bliss was born on Dec. 6, 1779. He combined his Springfield druggist shop with books and became a publisher and bookseller first in Boston and then in New York. He published a poetry collection by Edgar Allen Poe along with Bibles and other texts. His great-grandmother was a sister of Jonathan Edwards, perhaps giving him the religious bent that led him to the Massachusetts Bible Society. He died in New York on March 30, 1848.

Rev. Joshua Bates, D.D.

Rev. Joshua Bates was born in Cohasset on March 20, 1776 and graduated from Harvard College in 1797. Three years later he was ordained as the pastor of the Congregational Church in Dedham, also teaching at Phillips Andover Academy.

In 1818 he left parish ministry to become the third President of Middlebury College, presiding over the construction of the Old Chapel, now on the National Register of Historic Places. He remained in that post until 1839, after which he continued to travel, write, and preach until his death on Jan 14, 1854.

Mr. Samuel Bartlett, Esq.

Born Nov. 17, 1752, Samuel Bartlett was a silversmith in Concord, Mass. for 20 years. His work was known to equal the best Boston makers and much (like the pitcher pictured here) is now on display in the Concord museum. In 1795 he was elected Reigster of Deeds for Middlesex County and made a complete career shift, spending the next 25 years in that pursuit. He was also a member of the Cambridge Humane Society, caring for the poor of the area.

Troubled by the theological trials of the day, but wanting to help his church with his considerable means, he endowed the Second Ecclesiastical Society in East Windsor, but the funds could only be used so long as the church continued to have an “orthodox” minister. He also lent his crafting abilities to the work of Christ and in 1792 made five chalices for a church in Groton. He died Sept. 29, 1821.

Mr. John Bartlett

Born in Concord, Mass. on May 22, 1784, John Bartlett was the fourth in a family of twelve children. The Annals of the American Unitarian Pulpit relate the following incident from his childhood: It is related of him that he was sent to school wearing a pair of new shoes, but that he went home without them, and, on being questioned in regard to the matter, he said that he had given them to a poor boy whom he met in the street.

His family sent him to Maine to learn mercantile pursuits, but John Bartlett was more inclined to scholarship and so he returned to Massachusetts to prepare for college. He graduated from Harvard in 1805, remaining there for two additional years to study theology.

He was offered the Chaplaincy of the Boston Almshouse, so increasing its ministry that it became virtually the first ministry at large in Boston. He studied medicine so that he could better determine how to alleviate the suffering of those he encountered, which led him to realize the needs of those suffering from mental illness. This led to the establishment of the McLean Insane Hospital at Somerville.

It was during his time at the Boston Almshouse that he became a founder of the Massachusetts Bible Society, which is why he is listed in the records only as Mr. John Bartlett. But after study with MBS member William Ellery Channing, he accepted a call to become the Pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Marblehead and became the Rev. John Bartlett on May 22, 1811. He served in that capacity for 38 years and died on Feb. 23, 1849.

Mr. Samuel T. Armstrong

Also in the bookselling business, Samuel T. Armstrong was born in 1784. His Boston business was very successful and included a stereotype of Scott’s Family Bible, which was widely circulated at the time. He later became mayor of Boston in 1836, perhaps receiving pointers from fellow founder John Phillips, who became the city’s first mayor.

After a year as Mayor, Mr. Armstrong moved up to become Lieutenant Governor and when Governor Davis (another MBS founder) was elected to the US Senate, Samuel Armstrong became Governor for the remainder of that term. A deacon at Old South Church, he was also a member of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.

With no children, it was said that Mr. Armstrong’s considerable fortune was to be left to charitable institutions, but sudden death took him on March 26, 1850 before such intentions could be formalized. A double-loss to the Massachusetts Bible Society!

Mr. William Andrews

Another veteran of the Revolutionary War, William Andrews was taken prisoner at Ft. LaFayette on June 1, 1779. He was part of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, the nation’s oldest patriotic organization. Born in Dorchester on Oct. 18, 1747, he opened the Boston Bookbindery on Marlborough St. in Boston in 1796. Thrice a widower, he died at Cambridgeport, Mass. on March 14, 1816.

Rev. Thomas Allen

Rev. Allen gets the award for traveling the farthest to create the Massachusetts Bible Society. He was born in Northampton, Mass. on January 17, 1743, graduated from Harvard College in 1762, and in 1764 became the first minister of Pittsfield, where he was ordained in 1764 with a salary of 60 pounds per year plus firewood. He served that congregation for forty-six years. Twice he served as a volunteer chaplain during the Revolutionary War and fought himself as a combatant in the battle of Bennington, earning himself the nickname “The Fighting Parson.”

Both a Jeffersonian and a Calvinist, no one understood how he could be a social/political liberal and religious conservative all at once. And yet the logical inconsistencies never seemed to trouble him, allowing him to keep his respected place as orthodox clergy in an area that had no Unitarian church until 1890 and yet rattle the federalists with his cries for social justice.

After his revolutionary activism, he became an activist for the oppressed, railing against slavery and capital punishment in his sermons. He brought his nephew to town to begin publication of the Pittsfield Sun, for which Allen wrote many of the editorials. His open political activism eventually caused a split in his church, yet he continued to lead the diminished parish until seven days before his death on Feb. 11, 1810.

Being the oldest clergyman present, Rev. Allen was afforded the honor of “addressing the Throne of Grace” at the opening of our founding meeting on July 6, 1809.

Rev. Timothy Alden, Jr.

Timothy Alden was born in Yarmouth, Mass. on Aug. 28, 1771. Like many of our founders he studied at Harvard College, where he excelled at the Oriental Languages, a category that included biblical Hebrew. He entered ministry and became the pastor of the Congregational Church in Portsmouth, NH in 1799 and while he was there also taught school.

He developed a strong commitment to education, leaving Portsmouth in 1808 to return to Massachusetts to found a school for young ladies in Boston. With that success he went on to found similar schools in Newark, Cincinnati, and East Liberty, Pennsylvania. In 1817 he founded Allegheny College, becoming its first President. He retired in 1831. Rev. Timothy Alden died in Pittsburgh on July 5, 1839.

The Honorable John Quincy Adams

We know him best as the sixth president of the United States, but at our founding in 1809 that prospect seemed unlikely. Born in Braintree, Mass. on July 11, 1767, John Quincy Adams had studied in Paris and the University of Leyden and had served as the secretary to the US minister of Russia all by the age of thirteen.

At age eighteen, he returned to the US to attend Harvard College and then studied law, being admitted to the Suffolk bar in 1791 at the age of 24. Washington (as in George) appointed him minister to Holland and then to Portugal, at which time his father, John Adams, became president and sent him to Berlin. When Jefferson became President, John Q. came back to Massachusetts and was elected to the US Senate in 1802.

By March of 1809, John Quincy Adams had become so reviled in the Senate for his refusal to follow the party line (a trait common to his father as well) that he resigned the Senate. He still retained his Harvard post, begun in 1806, as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory; and as soon as James Madison ascended to the Presidency in 1809, one of his first acts was to name John Quincy Adams as minister to Russia. In the midst of all that, he came to the Massachusetts State House to sign on as a founder of the Massachusetts Bible Society, of which he remained a life-long member.

The site Virtual American Biographies describes the faith of John Quincy Adams this way: a Puritan of the sternest and most uncompromising sort, who seemed to take a grim enjoyment in the performance of duty, especially when disagreeable. Perhaps that is what allowed him to continue serving his country until President James Monroe appointed him Secretary of State. Although desiring the Presidency, John Quincy Adams, did nothing to campaign for the office that he sought. General Andrew Jackson ended up with the most votes, but the vote was close enough that it went to the House of Representatives to be decided, and the efforts of Henry Clay enabled John Quincy Adams to be declared the victor.

Ironically, it was his Christian faith that made John Quincy Adams decide not to swear on the Bible in taking his oath of office in March of 1825. The Bible, he believed, should be used strictly for religious purposes. He instead took the Oath of Office on a book of laws, the Constitution and American laws.

After losing his bid for re-election, he was elected to the House of Representatives where he served for 17 years, fiercely representing the cause of abolition. John Quincy Adams died Feb. 28, 1848.