Frederic Dan Huntington

Early life, education and career

Frederic Dan, the youngest of the eleven children born to Dan and Elizabeth Huntington, was born in Hadley, Massachusetts on May 28, 1819. He grew up on the family farm "Forty Acres," the home of both his mother and his grandmother, Elizabeth Porter Phelps.

He graduated at Amherst College in 1839 and at the Harvard Divinity School in 1842. In 1843 he married Hannah Sargent, the sister of Epes Sargent. From 1842 to 1855 he was pastor of the South Congregational Church of Boston, and in 1855-1860 as preacher to the university and Plummer professor of Christian Morals at Harvard; he then left the Unitarian Church, with which his father had been connected as a clergyman at Hadley, resigned his professorship and became pastor of the newly established Emmanuel Church of Boston.

Syracuse, New York

Rev. Huntington founded the St. John's School, a military school, in 1869 in Manlius, New York, and was its president until his death in 1904. In the 1920s, St. John's became known as the renowned military school, The Manlius School, today integrated into the Manlius Pebble Hill School.

He had refused the bishopric of the Episcopal Diocese of Maine when, in 1868, he was elected to the Diocese of Central New York. He was consecrated on April 9, 1869, and thereafter lived in Syracuse, New York.

He was the first president of the Church Association for the Advancement of the Interests of Labor.

Consecrators

• The Most Reverend Benjamin B. Smith
• The Right Reverend Manton Eastburn
• The Right Reverend Horatio Potter N.B.: 93rd bishop consecrated in the Episcopal Church.

End of life

Huntington remained throughout his life attached to the family's ancestral farm in Hadley, Massachusetts, in the 1860s purchasing his siblings' shares so that he could inherit the house. He continued to manage it as a working farm, and spent summers there throughout his life. Huntington died in Hadley on July 11, 1904, aged 85.

Publications

His more important publications included:

• Lectures on Human Society (1860)
• Memorials of a Quiet Life (1874)
• The Golden Rule applied to Business and Social Conditions (1892)

From 1845 to 1858 he was the editor of The Monthly Religious Magazine, a Unitarian review.

Legacy

Huntington's ancestral family home, the Porter-Phelps-Huntington House in Hadley, became a historic house museum in the 1940s, and is open seasonally. His daughter Ruth Huntington Sessions wrote a memoir, Sixty Odd (1936), which includes details about her childhood with Huntington.

Syracuse University School of Education's home is called Huntington Hall, formerly the Hospital of the Good Shepherd. Among the 20 oldest hospitals in the United States, the Hospital of the Good Shepherd was founded in 1872 under Bishop Huntington. As a teaching hospital, it was the first in the United States to offer nursing education, along with Johns Hopkins, in 1885.

In 1915,  the hospital was purchased by Syracuse University to be a part of its College of Medicine. In 1965, patients of the now University Hospital of the Good Shepherd were transferred to the State University Upstate Medical Center Hospital (now Upstate Medical University). The former Good Shepherd hospital building was then converted to academic use and re-named for the hospital's founder.

References

Notes

References

1. [https://www.episcopalchurch.org/library/glossary/huntington-frederic-dan "Huntington, Frederic Dan"], ''Episcopal Church''. Retrieved on 29 September 2019.
2. (1853). "Boston Pulpit". Gleasons Pictorial.
3. [https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/lz/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_NY/83001755.pdf Walnut Park Historic District NRHP 09/15/1983]
4. (1897). "The Encyclopedia of Social Reform: Including Political Economy, Political Science, Sociology and Statistics". Funk & Wagnalls.
5. Sessions, Ruth Huntington. (1936). "Sixty-odd: A Personal History". Stephen Daye Press.
6. "Huntington Hall".
7. "History of the School of Education".