Charles Beecher

Charles Beecher (b. Litchfield, Connecticut, October 1, 1815 – d. Georgetown, Massachusetts, April 21, 1900) – Minister, organist, hymn composer and arranger, and author. The son of a Congregationalist preacher and brother of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Beecher received a New England education including music instruction with Lowell Mason and a degree in 1834 from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He spent the next phase of his life in the Midwest, where he attended the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, where he also taught music and worked as an organist and choirmaster at a Presbyterian Church. Following a few years of working as an organist at a Presbyterian church in New Orleans, he earned his minister license from the Presbytery in Indianapolis. From there, he served as pastor for Second Presbyterian Church in Fort Wayne from 1844 to 1951. Next, he stepped in to help a dwindling congregation at a Presbyterian church in Newark, New Jersey, where he became very involved in abolitionism. After a year of teaching rhetoric at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1856, he became the pastor of a Congregational Church in Georgetown, Massachusetts. After the Civil War, he helped his sister Harriett provide a ministry for emancipated slaves and served as state Superintendent of Public Instruction in Florida from 1871 to 1873. His last church was in Wysox, Pennsylvania, where he stayed from 1885 until his retirement in 1893. In addition to composing some hymns, he helped select and arrange the 1300 hymns of his brother Henry’s Plymouth Collection (1855). He also wrote several books on theology and abolitionism.