Rev. Jeremiah Taylor (1817-1898)

He was born at Hawley, Massachusetts. He was educated at Academies in Worthington and Cummington, Connecticut. In 1843, he became Principal of Amherst College and in 1845 chose to pursue a career in the church. He graduated from the Theological Seminaries at Princeton and Andover and was ordained as a Pastor in the First Congregational Church at Wenham in 1847. From 1856 to 1872 he was Pastor of Middletown and Killingly, Connecticut, and from 1872 to 1876 he was Pastor of the Elmwood Church at Providence, Rhode Island. He became Secretary of the Rhode Island Home Missionary Society and New England Secretary of the American Tract Society. He was the author of several well-known memorial discourses (notably The Sacrifice Consumed; Life of Edward Hamilton Brewer, Boston, 1863) and in 1863, Amherst College awarded him a Doctorate in Divinity. In 1849, he married Elizabeth, daughter of William Pride, M.D., of Springfield, Pennsylvania. They were the parents of five children including the Wisconsin Assemblyman and book collector, George W. Taylor. Jeremiah died at his daughter's home in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he lived for the last twelve years of his life while serving as Assistant Pastor of the Harvard Congregational Church.