History: Clergyman who had a national pulpit got his start in Springfield, VT

At the time of his death, the Rev. Dr. Ozora S. Davis was the nation’s best known and most revered Protestant clergyman.
More: Ozora Stearns Davis, his life and poems   and   A hymn by him 

http://www.newbritainherald.com/articles/2013/12/20/news/doc52b507b9d5922567227034.txt

Ozora Stearns Davis

his life and poems

by Grace Tinker Davis.

Published 1932 by The Pilgrim press in Boston, Chicago 

About the Book

A competent and delightful narrative of a greatly loved Congregational leader.
Descendant of vigorous pioneers, son of a soldier of the Civil War, born in a humble home in Wheelock, Vermont - by his own efforts securing an education in St. Johnsbury Academy, Dartmouth College, Hartford Theological Seminary and Leipzig. Pastor at Springfield, Vermont; Newtonville, Massachusetts; and New Britain, Connecticut. Author of significant and scholarly volumes. President of Chicago Theological Seminary from 1909 to 1930. A career of pulpit power, literary and administrative achievement. As president, he increased the prestige, enlarged the curriculum, secured great teachers, gained a new site for the Seminary and housed it in dignified and imposing buildings. Moderator of the National Council of Congregational Churches, he made friends for Christ and the Church in his travels throughout the United States and in the Hawaiian Islands by his brotherly nature.
Written by his wife, this volume is straightforward, intimate and satisfying. All who knew and loved Ozora Davis will be happy to have his book.

First Sentence

The history of New England is full of romance and the ancestry of Ozora Davis went far back into those years of the early pioneers.

Table of Contents

I	Dim Distant Sires	2
II	A Little Boy at Home	9
III	The World of Play	15
IV	Finding a Friend and a Faith	23
V	A Night of Failure and a Dawn of World Consciousness	39
VI	Two Years of a Scholar's Life	47
VII	The Young Minister in the Old White Church	51
VII	The Newtonville Parish	57
IX	In the Strength of His Ministry	72
XI	Lands of the Far Away and Long Ago	83
XII	His Great Task	89
XIII	As Moderator of the National Council	108
XIV	Facing the Great Adventure	114

Edition Notes

Ozora was my great grandfather whom I have never met but have heard many stories about from my grandfather. He seems to make a very lasting impression on all who knew him. How I wish I could have heard him speak. He has some wonderful poetry in here.

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A Personality Sketch of Ozora S. Davis 

By William Byron Forbush 

To anyone whose conception of a minister is that of a slender, knock-kneed ascetic, dressed in black, wearing a shovel hat. and carrying a blue cotton umbrella. President Davis may be a disappointment. A sturdy body, attached to Chippendale legs, and surmounted by a bulldog profile—thai is your first impression of him. Afterward his twinkling eyes and his gigantic laughter would attract you. But you could never guess his profession. On a long train-ride, it would be he who would be taking care of some tired woman's baby, or fathering a seatfull of stray boys and girls. He would never think of calling anybody "Brother," but before the Limited reached San Francisco he would have proved himself the brother of everybody who was riding behind the engine. That's Davis, and I have been asked to "break the news" about him, that an honest-to-goodness, regular fellow has been discovered in a theological seminary. He was born that way. His life has been called "A Horatio Alger, Jr., story." His father was a baggage smasher in White River Junction. Vt.. the capital of the pic belt. When he was a boy, he swept out the baggage room, delivered telegrams, and ran errands for the train men, and went to school if there was time. When he was sixteen he had mastered telegraphy, and I have heard him say. twenty years later when we were walking one night under the eaves of the old station, that he could go upstairs that moment and send a message as rapidly as any man in the telegraph room. Principal Putney dug him out of his trade, and took him along up to St. Johnshury Academy, whence it was but a short step to Dartmouth College. "I knew him when" he was a great student, a mighty reader, a worse poet than I, and always ready for an intellectual "rastle." Money was more than gone when he had got his Phi Beta Kappa key, and he went to teaching in his home town for a couple of years. But he was finding his way. So he went to Hartford Theological Seminary, led his class, and won the fellowship that took him around the circuit of three German universities. One day he borrowed a silk hat and a gown, and got his Ph.D. President of the Chicago Theological Seminary Moderator of the National Council of Congregational Churches.

At his first church he became my mother's pastor. That godly woman had been stricken with a lingering, anguished disease, and can I ever forget how often he was beside her, and how steadily he walked with her far down into the Valley of the Shadow? We used to say he was "moody" in those days. I think be was. Probably he was sometimes guilty of self-pity, as are most of us. But he outgrew it. He laid his life alongside so many others that he has not had much time for forty years to be thinking about himself. He came to Newtonville, where the church was so deep in a mortgage that you could see only Davis' ears. They say that he was called because he had such a funny name. That church is fond of such names. They had had Gunsaulus and Pleasant Hunter, and since then they have had Muste and Lichliter. The legend is that the chairman of the supply committee one night read a lot of letters about men, and finally one about Ozora Davis. "Ora ? That's the funniest name of them all." said one of the deacons, "let's call him." Later the church had better reasons for "Aurora." as he was irreverently called, because his hair was pink and he had a morning disposition. One winter day Davis and I walked out through the snow from the end of a car-line near Boston. The small news stand had sold out its morning papers, and Davis insisted on our buying dime novels. So all day we relaxed beside the campfire and read those novels, and as a result he became quite a commentator on that kind of literature. Everything fed his grist. About so often in the springtime, in his classroom, there comes a far-away look in his eyes, and his reverent students wonder if their master is thinking of a better land. Yes, he is. It is at Sunapee Lake, in New Hampshire, and he wants to go fishing. But every summer when he goes up to Sunapee he gathers in all the neighboring fishers —of men and, after they have eaten some of his fish. these rural ministers tell him their problems. One evening we were giving a dinner at our church, and the young matrons were preparing it. As I was showing him the parish house, we passed the kitchen, where we overheard a complaint that the carver had not arrived. In an instant he had whipped off his coat and was at work. It was later that the young ladies recognized the Ph.D.. D.D.. .L.D.. who was the guest of the evening, as the man who had carved their roast. Then Davis went to New Britain, Ct. It was there that Davis induced the parishioners to undertake a work for the resident Persians, which consisted not in opening a mission for them, but in welcoming them to their own seats in their beautiful church. It was a pleasant moment in Davis' life when once he received a newspaper from a village in far-off Persia, telling of the honor that had been conferred upon it. That a distinguished New England clergyman led spoken a eulogy of one of their sons who had died in New Britain. Davis went to Chicago Theological Seminary, perhaps because no other strong man was willing to go. He had to go after his students, to those discouraged little prairie towns, where Congregationalism was thought of as a disease, but was not even contagious, he wandered; he braved the turbulent blasts of Minnesota in midwinter, He looked for recruits in the Southland. He traveled farther than any secular salesman. He was home so little that he almost had to be introduced to his own children, and he usually got home so late that he slept in the dormitory. Jacob's pillow was stone, but Davis' was a railroad time table. There were personal sorrows. Within two weeks of his inaugural, a beloved and leading professor was killed by a street car. and a little later, two others were suddenly crippled. Not long after, his own home became the center of anxious and affectionate interest, owing to the desperate illness of one of his own children. His own health has at times shaken. "I have had to eat so much bran." he Wrote not long ago, "that I whinny every time I go past a feed store!" His work is by no means finished. He has laid good foundations, but there is yet much to do. I should think the Middle West, of which he is such a congenial step-son, would enjoy giving him what he needs for Chicago Theological Seminary. I should think that if a young man today wanted to be a real preacher he would regard Dr. Davis himself, as about all the attraction he wants, to decide him to go to Chicago Seminary and I should think that, before waiting to canonize him as Saint Ozora, his many friends and the great host to whom he has brought his brave and sunny gospel would insist on giving him a little more liberty and opportunity and respite.

Hardware City History: City clergyman had a national pulpit New Britain Herald Friday, December 20, 2013 10:22 PM EST By Bart Fisher At the time of his death in 1931, the Rev. Dr. Ozora S. Davis was the nation’s best known and most revered Protestant clergyman. He was a prolific author and sought-after speaker whose influence extended far beyond the realm of the written and spoken word. For two decades after leaving the pulpit at New Britain’s South Congregational Church, Davis revitalized and essentially reinvented the iconic Chicago Theological Seminary. In so doing he impacted the lives of thousands of clergy men and women, and by extension millions of Protestant parishioners around the world. Commenting on the life and death of the 64-year-old humanitarian and religious leader, Rev. Dr. George W.C. Hill, pastor at the local church Davis once led and always loved, called his predecessor one of the greatest influences for good in the history of the Chicago seminary. “Until Dr. Davis became president the seminary had been marking time. Immediately upon his arrival … its prospects brightened. He put new life and new spirit into the institution. From that time on it prospered.” Forced to retire in 1929 because of ill health, the then president emeritus of the seminary continued to serve as an advocate, benefactor and positive role model for its students and faculty. During his time in Chicago he also maintained close ties with his many friends here and was said to have been delighted when he was asked to return to the city in 1927 to deliver the principal address at the cornerstone dedication of the World War I memorial in Walnut Hill Park. Before speaking on the subject of “Patriotism for a world in Reconstruction,” he said, “I must crave the privilege of expressing my personal joy and satisfaction in the fact that the place which I always called my Mount of Vision is now to be fittingly crowned by what I believe will be one of the noblest and most enduring monuments in the United States.” Davis also spoke of his fond memories of New Britain and of his Sunday morning ritual of coming to the park, the city’s highest plateau for “uplift and encouragement” before conducting his services. Often he would return in the evening, “when the sun was casting long shadows across the snow or when the sounds of the city were softened by distance through the summer air, to reckon upon my day’s work.” The park, like New Britain itself, was clearly a place the man unabashedly loved. He was a frequent visitor to this newspaper because he also loved to listen to the incessant and frenetic clicking and clacking of the Herald’s telegraph machines as they brought news from around the world into the local newsroom. The sound stirred up memories of his Vermont childhood, he confided. Born poor (his father was the baggage master at the local train station), the future clergyman helped keep the place clean as a young man and also became a skilled telegrapher, using the funds he made at that job to help pay his Dartmouth College tuition. A gifted student, he later earned graduate degrees at the Hartford Theological Seminary in 1894 and Leipzig University in 1896. That same year he was ordained as a Congregational minister and married Grace Tinker of White River Junction, Vt. The couple moved to Springfield, Vt., where he was the young, but already highly admired, spiritual leader of that town’s First Church congregation. Davis’s next pastorate took him to the Central Church in Newtonville, Mass. He left there in 1904 to come to New Britain. Upon his death a Herald editorial stated, “Dr. Davis was beloved here because of his attributes of sympathy, interest and energy to all good causes. His personality endeared him to all.” This article was originally published May 15, 2009. The late Bart Fisher was a columnist for the Herald as well as its longtime sports editor.