Philo Penefield Stewart is the second Indian missionary in our family. David Brainerd is the first on the Smith side of family. Be sure and take a look at David Brainerd on our site. I was able to find a painted picture of him and his grave.
PHILO PENFIELD STEWART (1798-1868), STOVE DESIGNER AND RELIGIOUS REFORMER - From the History of Rensselaer County NY- Just a century ago, in 1868, there died in a house on Fifth Avenue in Troy a man who occupies an unusual place, not only - in Troy's, but also in our national history. The man was Philo Penfield Stewart, and he exemplified, as did many others of his time, the various types of men who lived and labored in Troy during that period of great activity and growth in the city's history. Like many others at the time, Emma Willard, General John Wool, Amos Eaton, and William Marcy, to name only a few, Philo Stewart was not a Trojan by birth. Born in Connecticut, like others of Troy's early leaders, Philo Stewart grew up in Vermont, at Pittsford, where he lived with his grandfather and was apprenticed to his uncle, a harness maker at Pawlet, Vermont. He showed early talent for mechanical inventiveness and he expressed it in a wide variety of whittling devices.
Young Philo also developed strong religious interests, although he was never ordained to the ministry. He was converted to many of the reform movements of his time, among them temperance, anti-tobacco, abolition, and the like. At the age of 23, he enrolled with the American Missionary Board and departed on a long horseback ride for Mississippi, where he engaged in missionary work among the Choctaw Indians, teaching school, preaching, and performing many other useful labors.
Here, in Mississippi, young Stewart married a fellow-missionary, also from Vermont, and the couple, remaining childless, jointly dedicated their lives to many good causes. They made their way to Elyria, Ohio, where they found Philo's schoolmate, the Reverend John Jay Shipherd, serving as a minister there. The two men now embarked on an ambitious venture, no less than the foundation of a college and colony. It was to be no' ordinary college, but a novel and radical experiment in education. This was "Oberlin Collegiate Institute," now Oberlin College, established in 1833, in Ohio's Western Reserve. It was the first school to adopt a system of full co-education for both sexes, and it accepted Negro students in a program of complete integration. Stewart also sponsored the idea of combining education with labor for the support of the students. For several years Stewart and his wife headed the boarding and labor department of the new college, like the
students, working only for their keep.
At this time, too, in connection with his work in Ohio, Stewart applied his mechanical ingenuity to practical purposes. He developed a planning machine, and he particularly began. work on an improved stove, which was at first called the "Oberlin Stove." In 1837, Stewart left Oberlin College and came east again, somewhat disappointed with Oberlin's lack of what he considered proper zeal and dedication. It was a year of great depression, and the Stewart couple experienced poverty and deprivation. Stewart, however, became the more determined to improve his earlier stove design and to make it most economical for the poor to use, He succeeded with what was now called the "P.P. Stewart Summer and Winter Cooking Stove." Then arose the problem of its manufacture and distribution, for which Stewart lacked the means and facilities.
It was in 1838 that Stewart "fixed on Troy as the place for making his stoves." Troy was already then a stove-manufacturing center of some importance, and it was, indeed, developing a reputation as a growing industrial city, especially in the metal field. Stewart, too, knew Troy, since he had visited it previously on his trips to and from Vermont. Here he settled in 1838 and remained for the remainder of his life, until his death in 1868. He entered into an agreement with Fuller, Warren and Company for the manufacture and distribution of the stove. It was a successful arrangement, and both parties prospered. Over the thirty years of Stewart's business career,
The firm made more than ninety- thousand stoves in its Clinton Foundry, still standing south on River Street and now occupied by several small industries. The Stewart stove became nationally known, and President Eliphalet Nott of Union College, himself a stove designer, praised it highly: "All that is of value in other stoves is taken from the Stewart." After Stewart's death, his stove continued to be the basis of Fuller, Warren's prosperity.
For Stewart, however, the successful manufacture of his stove was not the end hut a means toward a higher purpose. His object, as he put it was "not to make money for himself, but to provide a boon that cannot be reached by dollars and cents." He lived simply and sparingly in a house on Fifth Avenue, recently razed in connection with urban renewal. His profits from the stove were largely distributed among many good causes, including in particular the continued support of Oberlin College. He was concerned with right living as well as right doing, and he espoused many reform movements. His house in Troy was "open wide to care for all visiting missionaries, Christian agents, ... and to God's poor and sick of whatever race or creed, though I divide my last loaf." He maintained there a school for the education of illiterate servant girls. His religious zeal extended to embrace such aspects of "right living" as "proper diet, modes of dress, and all habits and
practices of body, soul, and spirit."
Although, or perhaps because both Stewarts were sickly, they developed great interest in "diet, rest, and exercise. " Stewart even established for a time in Troy a "hygienic institute" which relied on a "water cure" as a "depurator or cleanser" of the body's ills. He developed an unusual system and philosophy of gymnastics, which anticipated modern theories of exercise in some -respects. Altogether this was an unusual couple living in Troy a century ago, combining business with religion and reform.
His death, on December 13, 1868, was mourned by many.
This article is from the Good Time Stove Company.(http://www.goodtimestove.com/)
Link to Oberlin College:
http://new.oberlin.edu/about/history.dot
Philo Penfield Stewart
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