Ephraim Peabody

He was a graduate at Bowdoin College in 1827, studied theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts and began to preach in 1830 at Meadville, Pennsylvania. He was minister for four years in Cincinnati, pastor of a Unitarian church at New Bedford, Massachusetts 1838–1846, and for the remainder of his life pastor of King's Chapel, Boston.[1] While serving at King's Chapel, Peabody happened to marry famous Boston portrait-painter William Morris Hunt to Louise Perkins in 1855.[2]

Peabody was the originator of the Boston Provident Society, and was otherwise largely interested in devising measures for the relief of the poor. During 1853 he travelled in Europe to benefit his health, and spent the winter of 1855/56 in St. Augustine, Florida, with the same object. He was favorably known as a pulpit orator. His sermons, with a memoir, were published in 1857, and a volume of his writings, entitled Christian Days and Thoughts, also appeared (1858).

• Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Peabody, Ephraim" . New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1900). "Peabody, Ephraim" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.

• An autograph book kept by Ephraim Peabody covering the period 1717-1849 and including letters from many leading Unitarians and the papers of Ephraim Peabody are in the Andover-Harvard Theological Library at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.