HOVEY-Horace Carter - Fountain County INGenWeb Project

Horace Carter Hovey, son of Professor Edmund Otis Hovey, D. D., and Mary Carter Hovey, was born near Rob Roy, Indiana, January 28, 1833. They moved to Crawfordsville in 1835 and for two years lived in the "Old Brick House," till, in 1837, they built the dwelling on a lot of the "College Reserve," which remained in the family till 1898, when sold for the site of a presidential residence. Among Mr. Hoveys earliest recollections are the felling of the great trees and the raising of the frame-house. He was baptized by Father John Thomson and joined the Center church, March 30, 1845. When only twelve years old he took a class in Sunday school which he kept for seven years, being absent only six times in that period. When sixteen years old he was chosen to lead the chorus choir, in which he had previously been a singer and flute-player. He was a member of the college band, and has kept up his flute-playing all his life. He belonged to the Euphronean society and the Lyceum, and was an honorary member of the Calliopean society. Subsequent to graduation he was made a member, and for three years the vice-president of the Phi Beta Kappa society, which he was appointed to represent at the Ninth Triennial Council of the United Chapters at Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1907. For about two years after graduating with the degree of A. B., in 1853, he was tutor in the preparatory department of Wabash College; and he served one summer as Sunday school missionary in Fountain county, where he organized twenty schools, and devised a system of Sunday school mapping that has been since adopted generally. In 1857 he was graduated from Lane Theological Seminary, at Cincinnati; where he mainly supported himself by teaching music in the public schools. He also led a chorus choir, mornings and evenings, in the Eighth (now the Third) Presbyterian church, and sang in a quartette choir afternoons in a church of which Dr. H. M. Storrs was pastor. In the former church he preached his first sermon, November 20, 1856, on "Church Music," which was af terwards published in the Christian Herald. He was licensed by the Presbytery of Crawfordsville, July 11, 1857, and ordained by the Presbytery of Madison, April 16, 1858, his father preaching the sermon on the occasion. He served as home missionary at North Madison, Bryansburg and Vevay, and for a year as secretary of the American and Foreign Christian Union. While considering a call to the Presbyterian church at Coldwater, Michigan, the Civil War began. His sermons in that city on the National Fast-Day (January 4, 1861), and on the firing on Sumpter, in April, caused such agitation that the pastoral call was declined, and Mr. Hovey accepted a call to the Florence church in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he stayed four years. While there he served twice as delegate of the United States Christian Commission, during "battlefield duty" during his first term, at the Wilderness, North Anna and Cold Harbor; and in the second term, after six weeks work in camps and hospitals at Washington, D. C., he went to Richmond, just after its surrender, and had the task of superintending the feeding of the starving people. His other pastorates were: Second Presbyterian church in New Albany, Indiana (1866-1869); Fulton Street Presbyterian Church, Peoria, Illinois (1869-1873); First Presbyterian Church, Kansas City, Missouri (1873-1875); Pilgrim Congregational, New Haven, Connecticut (1876-1883); Park Avenue Congregational, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1883-1887); Park Street Congregational, Bridgeport, Connecticut (1887-1891); South Congregational, Middletown, Connecticut, as supply (1892); and First Presbyterian church in Newburyport, Massachusetts (1893-1909). Dr. Hovey's ministerial labors have been rewarded by large accessions to the churches to which he has ministered, especially at New Albany, New Haven, Minneapolis and Bridgeport, in each of which places there were remarkable revivals. He retired from active pastoral labors at the ripe age of seventy-five years; and since then has done occasional preaching, and considerable literary and scientific work. First and last he has made his mark as a lecturer on popular and scientific subjects, having filled engagements in many of the principal cities in the United States and Canada, and at numerous Chautauqua assemblies, as well as with colleges and seminaries. He received the degree of Master of Arts from Wabash College in 1857. Twice he has been honored with the degree of Doctor of Divinity, from Gale College (Wisconsin) in 1883, and from Wabash College in 1907. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; a member of the Geological Society of America, of the National Geographic Society, of the International Geological Congress, of La Sociètè de Spèleologie (France), and a charter member of the Connecticut Sons of the American Revolution. He has been for fourteen years the president of the Merrimack Bible Society, and of the Daniel Hovey Association for nearly as long a period. He has also held numerous offices in the ecclesiastical bodies with which he has been identified. From boyhood Dr. Hovey has been interested in scientific matters. When but nine years old he found the first of the myriads of "Crawfordsville Crinoids" that have enriched the museums of this and other lands, and for many years he owned the most noted of the Crinoid banks, known as Corey's Bluff. In 1871 he gave his cabinet to Wabash College, the gift being valued at one thousand dollars, and in 1887 he disposed of a collection of equal value to Carleton College in Minnesota. In the summer of 1854 he made an independent geological reconnaissance of a considerable portion of Southern Indiana, reporting the result to the Indiana Geological Society and also sending a report to the New Orleans Academy of Science. In it he called attention to the now noted marble quarries, bituminous coal-fields, remarkable fossils of Spergen Hill, and the numerous caverns found in the Mountain Limestone. He explored that same year the wonderful Wyandotte Cave, of which he made a map, and he published his description in the Indianapolis Journal and the New York Tribune. Since that time he has visited more than three hundred caves and grottoes and gained especial distinction by his works on Mammoth Cave. In 1897 he joined a party that explored numerous canyons and caverns in France, and he also visited Russia with a geological party that year, who were guests of the Tsar. Dr. Hovey has been a frequent contributor to scientific and popular magazines, and more than a hundred articles from him have appeared in the Scientific American. He wrote a number of articles for the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh editions of the Enclyclopaedia Britannica. He is the author of "Celebrated American Caverns" (1882); "A Guide-Book to Mammoth Cave" (fifteen editions); "Mammoth Cave Illustrated" (with Dr. R. E. Call, in 1897); "Hovey's Hand-Book of the Mammoth Cave" (1909); and a revised an enlarged edition of Hovey and Call's "Mammoth Cave Illustrated" (1912). He compiled in 1897 a work styled "The Origin and Annals of the First Presbyterian Church in Newburyport," that was published by Damrell & Upham, of Boston. More than thirty of his sermons, poems and addresses have been published in pamphlet form; besides numerous minor contributions to the press. Jointly with Dr. Call he has compiled an exhaustive bibliography of Mammoth Cave, including 400 titles of works mainly in his own library, that will appear in 1913 in "Spelunca," (french for a german term for a cave explorer- spelunker- JEFF) a French periodical. Dr. Hovey married, at New Haven, Connecticut, November 18, 1857, Helen Lavinia Blatchley, daughter of Samuel Loper Blatchley, Esquire. She was born at North Madison, Connecticut, April 23, 1830, and is directly descened from Thomas Blatchley, who emigrated from Wales to Boston, in 1635, removed to Hartford in 1640, to Guilford in 1666, whence he returned to Boston, where he dies. Her father went to reside in New Haven in 1846, where he became a well-known business man and had one of its principal streets named for him. On her maternal side, Mrs. Hovey traces her ancestry back to the twelfth century. Her grandfather, Ebenezer Robinson, and her great-grandfather, Capt. James Robinson, were in the Revolutionary army. Previous to marriage she taught in the New Haven schools and also in Woodward and Hughes High Schools in Cincinnati. Dr. and Mrs. Hovey have had four children, namely, Mrs. Helen C. Ellinwood, wife of Rev. Henry F. Ellinwood, of Hamlet, North Carolina; Dr. Edmund Otis Hovey, Jr., of New York City, who is general secretary of the Geological Society of America, and geological curator in the American Museum of Natural History; Samuel Blatchley Hovey, deceased; and Mrs. Clara Hovey Raymond, who, with her son, Horace Hovey Raymond, makes her home with her parents at Newburyport. Dr. and Mrs. Hovey celebrated their golden wedding November 18, 1907; shortly after which the following testimonial was publicly presented: "The Presbytery of Boston take pleasure in presenting you, the Reverend Horace C. Hovey, D. D., this testimonial, containing a brief expression of their esteem for you, on having completed the jubilee of your ministry for Christ and His church. In doing so we wish to acknowledge the unfailing goodness of Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, whose hand has sustained you and your beloved wife in all your varied life and work. We also recognize with profound gratitude the signal honor conferred upon you by His grace in permitting you to serve as an ambassador of Christ for the exceptional period of fifty years. We most heartily congratulate you and Mrs. Hovey on this consummation together of fifty years' service in the vineyard of our Lord. We appreciate fully the work and worth of such a term of service, and realize that for the ripe scholarship which has adorned your preaching, the pastoral care which has nurtured it, the irenic spirit which sweetened it, the consistent godly life which enforced it and the large measure of success which has attended it, the whole Church of God, and the land you love are your debtors. Your work as a Presbyter has been characterized by loyalty to Presbyterian principles; your zeal for and unremitting toil in their advancement have been tempered with sweet reasonableness, and charity to Christians in other flocks. Your knowledge of Church Law has made you a safe councillor, and a leader in her courts; for all of which we tender you our most hearty thanks. It is the earnest prayer of our Presbytery that you and your life partner may be long spared to enjoy in health and peace the evening of life among your family and many friends; and when the dawn of the endless day breaks and the shadows of this life flee away, you may have an abundant entrance into the inheritance of the saints in light, and receive life's crowning benediction from Him whose name is love, in His own immortal words, 'Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of thy Lord.'" Dr. Hovey, now an octogenarian, enjoys his full intellectual vigor, and is spending his declining days among his friends and former parishioners, at Newburyport, Massachusetts. Besides occasional use of his gifts as a preacher and a lecturer on scientific and literary topics, he has devoted his time to the congenial task of editing the "Hovey Book," a volume of some 450 pages, with many illustrations, compiled under the auspices of the Daniel Hovey Association, already mentioned. This labor of love has brought him into delightful fellowship, personally and by correspondence, with a great number of kinsmen who claim descent from Daniel Hovey of Ipswich, as well as with many of the name abroad. Yet amid these diversified employments he cherishes the warmest devotion for his native state of Indiana, and retains a lively interest in all that concerns Montgomery county and its inhabitants, among whom he spent his boyhood and early manhood.

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The Hovey book: Describing the English ancestry and American descendants of Daniel Hovey of Ipswich, Massachusetts Haverhill, Mass.: Press of L.R. Hovey, 1913, p. 366. #1593 -- Rev. Horace Carter HOVEY, DD born in a log cabin near Rob Roy, in Fountain County, Indiana Jan 28, 1833 was the son of Edmund Otis Hovey and Mary Carter Hovey. His father was for 47 years identified with Wabash College as founder, trustee and professor (see NO. 1051). Mr. Hovey was graduated from Wabash in 1853 and was subsequently honored by election to the Phi Beta Kappa society. He joined the Centre Presbyterian Church of Crawfordsville when 12 years of age and was teacher in its Sunday School and for several years a member and then director of its large chorus. For two yeaers he was tutor in college. He served one summer on Sunday School Missionary in Fountain County where he organized 20 schools and devised a method of Sunday School map making that has since been generally adopted throughout the country. While fitting for the ministry at Lane Theological Seminary, from which he was graduated in 1857 he taught music in the public schools of Cincinnati and directed a chorus in what is now known as the 3rd Presbyterian Church of that city. He was ordained by the Presbytery of Madison April 16, 1858 within whose bounds he labored 3 years as a home missionary, followed by a year as field secretary of the American and Foreign Christian Union in Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin. Declining a call to the pastorate of a church at Coldwater, MIchigan and also an offer to serve as chaplain in the US Army Mr. Hovey accept as his first settled pastorate the care of the Florence Church of Christ in Northampton, Mass where he remained from 1863-66. While there he served for two terms of two months each as a delegate to the US Christian Commission. The first term he did what was styled "battlefield duty" amid the perils of the WIlderness, North Anna and Cold Harbor. The second term was more quietly spent amid the hospitals at Washington and after the fall of Richmond in aiding its starving citizens. Dr. Hovey held several other pastorates: Second Presbyterian Church, New Albany, In 1866-69; Fulton Street Presbyterian CHurch, Peoria Ill 1869-73; First Presb. Church, Kansas city, Mo 1873-75; Pilgrim Congregational Church, New Haven, Conn 1876-83; Park Avenue Conregational Minneapolis, MN 1883-87; Park Street Congregational Bridgeport, Conn 1887-91; 1st Presbyterian Church (Old South) Newburyport, mass 1893-1909. On resigining the latter charge at age 75 and after more than 50 years of active service, he retired from public life in order to devote himself to special literary, scientific and theological pursuits, though frequently answering invitations to occupy the pulpit or platform. Dr. Hovey received in course the degree of Master of Arts from Wabash College in 1856; and honorary degree of Dr. of divinity first from Gale University, Wisconsin in 1883 and again from Wabash in 1907. He is a fellow of the AAAS, a member of the Geological Society of America and of the International Geological Congress of the National Geographic Society of La Society de Speleologie (France), a charter member of the Conn SAR has been for 15 years president of the Merrimac Bible society, is an honorary member of the local GAR and was one of the founders of the Daniel Hovey Association of which he has been the president since its inception in 1900. He has also held numerous offices in the ecclesiastical bodies with which he has been connected. In 1897, with his son Dr. Edmund Otis Hovey, he attended a meeting of the International Geological Congress at St. Petersburg; previous to which, with a select party, they made explorations in European Russia and across the Ural Mountains into Asia and later made an excursion into Finland. Subsequently Dr. Hovey returned to Paris and accompanied members of the societe de Speleologie on an exploring tour through the caverns and cayons of the region of the Causses and goreges of the Tarn, Jonte and Durbais, with remarkable results. Although not claiming to be a professional geologist, Dr. Hovey has been interested in geological research from boyhood. When but 9 years old he found the first of all the myriads of Crawfordsville crinoids that have since been sent by Corey, Bassett, Springer and others beside himself to the leading museums of America and Europe; and the original crinoid-bank known as Corey's Bluff is still owned in the family. In the summer of 1854 he made an independent reconnaissance of the geological features of southern Indiana and was among the first to call attention to the marble quarries and coal field of that state. During that year he explored a number of Indiana caverns, including the famous Wyandotte Cave, which he mapped and of which he published an account at the time in the NY Tribune and Indianapolis Journal. He has since explored many other caves and grottoes, and is a recognized authority on the subject. He has lectured in the principal cities of the US and Canada on his travels and on popular science. he has been a frequent contributor to the leading magazines and more than a 100 articles from his pen have appeared in the Scientific American. Articles by him have been published in the 9th, 10th, 11th editions of Encyclopedia Britannica. He is the author of Celebrated American Caversn, 1882; Guide-Book to Mammoth Cave, 15 editions; Mammoth Cave Illustrated jointly with Dr. RE Clal, 1897 and a new edition of the same greatly enlarged by him 1912; On the Banks of the Quinnipiac, an historical poem, 1889; The Origin and Annals of the 1st Presbyterian Church of Newburport, 1897; and a New Handbook of the Mammouth Cave with new maps, 1909 and more than 30 of his sermons and addresses have been published in pamphlet form. A complete Bibliography of works about Mammoth Cave has been prepared by him and will shortly be published in Spelunca, a scientific magazine issued in Paris, France. Dr. Hovey married Nov 18, 1857 Helen Lavinia Blatchley, of New Haven, Conn, a daughter of Samuel Loper Blatchley, descendant of WIlliam Blatchley, an early merchant in Boston and Hartford and on her maternal side she came from Ebenezer and James Robinson, both Revolutionary soldier and through them from the Spelman family, famous in early English annals (See Spelman Genealogy published by Frank Allaben, 1910). She was born at North Madison, Conn and was a teacher at New Haven and in both the Cincinnati HS until the time of her marriage. Dr. and Mrs. Hoven celebrated their Golden Wedding Nov 18, 1907 and a large delegation from the Daniel Hovey association were among the many guests. Testimonials were presented by the Essex North Ministerial Association and by the prebytery of Boston. (which followed). Dr. and Mrs. Hovey reside at 71 Lime Street, Newburyport in which city they have had their home for the last 20 years. Their children: Helen Carter born Jan 4, 1859 in Madison Ind; educated at Mount Holyoke College and Claverack College and approved by the NY State Regents; studied vocal music with Dr. Barnett of New Haven and Hugh Clarke of NY; married Rev. Henry Feld Ellinwood April 6, 1891 at Anniston, Alabama. He is the son of Henry P and Helen Ellinwood of East Pembroke, NY was graduated from William College after teaching a short time he studied theology for two years at Andover and one year at Auburn Seminary whence he was graduated and was ordained as Presbyteiran minister. Edmund Otis born Sept 15, 1862 at New Haven, Conn -- see Family 1997. Samuel Blatchley born Aug 20, 1864 in Florence Mass died after a short illness at Peoria, Ill Aug 8, 1869 in the 5th year of his age; a singularly spiritual child. Clara Louise, born Nov 27, 1872 in Peoria; graduated at Bridgeport Conn HS June 1891; wa a student at Wellesley College 1891-93; studied piano with Junius W. Hill of Boston and with Madame Minna Staties Severn of NY City; married Rev. Royal Wilkins son of Franklin M. and Elizabeth Wilkins Raymond (sic) of Westport, Conn Sept 15, 1896 at Newburyport, Mass. Their child was born in Newburyport -Horace Hovey b June 29, 1897 resides with his mother, Mrs. Raymond (sic) in Newburyport.