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.
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.
Charles Nelson Vickery (February 10, 1920-March 26, 1972) was a Universalist and Unitarian Universalist minister, a social worker in the United States and post-World War II Europe. As Program Director of Volunteer Services for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee he thought “We can be the fulcrum, the dreamers, the economic resources to help remake a shattered world where [people] can find meaning to existence as well as merely survival.”
Richard Eddy (June 21, 1828-August 16, 1906), a Universalist minister, wrote an enduringly valuable two-volume history, Universalism in America, 1884-86.
Born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, Richard was the son of Martha James and shoemaker Richard Eddy. His family belonged to the First Universalist Church in Providence.…
Clara Barton (December 25, 1821-April 12, 1912) was both famous and honored in her lifetime—and has a well-earned place in American history—as the angel of Civil War battlefields and founder of the American Red Cross.
Clarissa Harlowe Barton, the fifth and youngest child of Sarah Stone and Stephen Barton, was born on Christmas Day, 1821, in Oxford, Massachusetts, a small farming community.
Hosea Ballou 2d (October 18, 1796-May 27, 1861), Universalist minister, scholar, educator, and journalist, was the grandnephew of the theologian and denominational leader Hosea Ballou. Ballou 2d played a crucial role defending the elder Ballou in the Restorationist controversy.
George de Benneville (July 26, 1703-March 19, 1793), a physician, was a universalist evangelist in Europe and an early advocate of the doctrine of universal salvation in the American colonies. He transmitted the heritage of German Pietist religious communities and the European Radical Reformation to a wider American public.
Abel Charles Thomas (July 11, 1807-September 27, 1880) was a Universalist evangelist, minister, journalist, and historian. Although he served the Universalist church in Philadelphia in two separate pastorates totaling nearly twenty-five years and there wrote two of the most celebrated pieces of nineteenth-century Universalist controversial literature, he is most remembered for his short pastorate in Lowell, Massachusetts, where, as one of the founders and editor of the literary magazine, the Lowell Offering, he was a mentor to aspiring writers amongst the young women working in the textile mills.
Thomas E. Wise (b.July 25, 1868) was the second African American Universalist minister. After serving with the first African American Universalist minister, Joseph Jordan, at the First Universalist Church and school of Norfolk, Virginia, he founded two other Universalist missions in southeastern Virginia.…
Phineas Taylor Barnum (July 5, 1810-April 7, 1891), known as P. T. Barnum, a prominent Universalist, the most influential American showman of the nineteenth century, was the founder of the first financially successful museum in America to gain wide public support and creator of the modern three-ring circus.…
Alice Cary (April 26, 1820-February 12, 1871) and Phoebe Cary (September 4, 1824-July 31, 1871) were in their day well known and loved for their poetry and other writings. Alice also wrote prose sketches of rural Ohio and short stories.
Joseph Jordan (1842-1901), the first African American to be ordained as a minister by the Universalist denomination, founded the First Universalist Church of Norfolk, Virginia in 1887 and initiated an educational effort for African American children in Norfolk and vicinity.