Thomas Handasyd Perkins (December 15, 1764-January 11, 1854) was a successful China trade merchant, a philanthropist, an important Boston Federalist, a leader in the cultural life of Boston, and the founding patron of the world-renowned Perkins School for the Blind. He was a faithful member of the congregation of the Federal Street Church during the ministries of Jeremy Belknap, William Ellery Channing, and Ezra Stiles Gannett.…
John Boyden (May 14, 1809-September 28, 1869), a Universalist minister, politician, and social reformer, was a disciple of Hosea Balou and the longtime pastor of the First Universalist Church of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. He worked prominently there for public education, temperance, abolition, and new forms of medical treatment.
Ada Harriet Miser Kepley (February 11, 1847-June 13, 1925), an energetic women’s suffragist, temperance advocate, and Unitarian minister, was the first American woman to graduate from law school. A friend of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) president Frances E.
Mary Augusta Arnold (Mrs Humphry Ward) (June 11, 1851-March 26, 1920) was an enormously successful novelist in her time, whose work is largely concerned with religious and political issues. She also pioneered modern child day-care. Never affiliated with the Unitarians, she nevertheless lectured at their churches, attended liberal services, and discussed with Unitarians their style of worship and the content of their faith.…
Henry Whitney Bellows (June 11, 1814-January 30, 1882) was minister of the First Congregational Church of New York City (now the Unitarian Church of All Souls), 1838-82. During the Civil War he was president of the United States Sanitary Commission. In the course of traveling for the Sanitary Commission he visited a great many Unitarian churches and recognized that Unitarian congregations’ traditionally informal modes of cooperation no longer met the needs of a fast-changing American society.…
Dana McLean Greeley (July 5, 1908-June 13, 1986), a Unitarian minister, peace activist, and civil rights leader, was the last president of the American Unitarian Association (AUA) and the founding president of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA).
Dana was born in Lexington, Massachusetts into a longtime Unitarian family.
Raymond Bennett Bragg (October 10, 1902-February 15, 1979), a Unitarian minister and civic leader, played a key role in the making of the Humanist Manifesto and served as Director of the Unitarian Service Committee during the years following World War II.…
Caroline Wells Healey Dall (June 22, 1822-December 17, 1912), author, journalist, lecturer and champion of women’s rights, was a Unitarian community service worker, minister’s wife and lay preacher. She left valuable memoirs of her elders in the Transcendentalist movement and was heir to the mantle of Margaret Fuller as spokesperson for woman’s access to education and employment.
George Mortimer Pullman (March 3, 1831-October 19, 1897), best known for the palatial railroad sleeping and dining cars that bore his name, was a lifelong Universalist, a leading industrialist and one of the consummate industrial managers of the 19th century.
Johannes Abraham Christoffel Fagginger Auer (August 6, 1882-March 3, 1964) was a Unitarian minister, author, professor of Church History and of the Philosophy of Religion at the Tufts College School of Religion, and Parkman Professor of Theology at the Harvard Divinity School.
Ezra Stiles Gannett (May 4, 1801-August 26, 1871) was a prominent Unitarian minister, editor, and a founder of the American Unitarian Association (AUA). He was the colleague pastor, and successor, to William Ellery Channing at the Federal Street Church in Boston, Massachusetts.
William Ellery Channing (April 7, 1780-October 2, 1842), minister of the Federal Street Church in Boston, Massachusetts, 1803-42, was a spokesman during the Unitarian controversy for those liberal—or Unitarian—churches within Massachusetts’ Standing Order of churches. His published sermons, lighting a path between orthodoxy and infidelity, were widely influential abroad as well as throughout the United States.…