Hezekiah Balch
Hezekiah Balch, D.D. (1741–1810) was a Presbyterian minister and one of the co-founders of Tusculum College, originally called Greeneville College.
Early life and education
He was born in 1741 in Harford County, Maryland along Deer Creek.[1][2] There is very little information about Balch's early life. The names of his parents are unknown. Family tradition states that Balch was named after his father.[1] Other sources disagree that the elder Hezekiah Balch was his father referring to the man as his cousin.[3] While he was still a child, Balch's family moved south to Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.[2] Due to the recommendation of a local preacher, he attended Princeton starting in 1758.[1] In 1766, Balch received his Master of Arts from Princeton and was ordained in 1770.[4]
Work
Balch's first acts as a pastor were as a missionary in the rural areas of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.[2] After his travels as a missionary, he settled in Greeneville, Tennessee and then founded a church in 1783. Balch was a part of a group of Presbyterian preachers in Eastern Tennessee who taught a form of abolitionist Evangelicalism.[5] This formed the basis of the abolitionist movement in the state in the 1830s. Due to the growth in the number of congregations in the area, Balch worked to establish a presbytery in Greeneville in 1800.[6]
In 1795 he helped found Greeneville College, the first college west of the Appalachian Mountains, in Greeneville, Tennessee.[7] The school's first location was a frame building on Balch's farm. At the first meeting of the school's board of trustees, on 18 February 1795, Balch was chosen as the college's president.[8] He stayed in the position until his death in 1810. After being named the college president, Balch traveled through New England raising money for the new college.[9] In 1805, Balch received a Doctor of Divinity from Williams College.[4]
Death
The last years of Balch's life were plagued with illness, but in April 1810, Balch came down with "brief but most distressing illness" and died.[6] He was buried in Harmony Graveyard in Greeneville, Tennessee.[8]
References
Footnotes
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- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Balch 1897, p. 507
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Sprague 1857, p. 308
- ↑ Temple 1912, p. 11
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Balch 1907, p. 375
- ↑ Drake 2003, p. 87
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Sprague 1857, p. 311
- ↑ Balch 1897, p. 508
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Wheeler 2000, p. 10
- ↑ Sprague 1857, p. 310
