biography
| name: |
Conwell, Russell (Herman)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1843–1925)
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| biography:
| Lawyer, Baptist minister, and lecturer, born in South Worthington, Massachusetts, USA. Raised on the family farm, which was a station on the Underground Railroad, even as a youth he was an impassioned orator on the rights of all men and women. He volunteered for the Union army and was commissioned as ‘the boy Captain’ at age 19. Severely wounded at the battle of Kenesaw Mountain (Jun 1864), he was left for dead, and later credited the experience with converting him to Christianity. He was admitted to the bar (1865) and moved to Minneapolis, where he established a law practice and founded a daily newspaper. Returning to Massachusetts, he became pastor of a moribund Baptist church in Lexington, but in 1882 took charge of the Grace Baptist Church in Philadelphia and later opened his enormous Baptist Temple (1891). In 1888 the night school he founded under the church auspices became Temple College. A well-known lecturer on the Chautauqua circuit, his most famous lecture was his optimistic, platitudinous ‘Acres of Diamonds’, which he delivered some 6000 times, thereby earning millions of dollars that he left to endow Temple College. |
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