This Day in Baptist History

March 21, 1820 – Adiel Sherwood was ordained to the gospel ministry, by the Bethesda Baptist Church, in Greene County, Georgia, Jesse Mercer, pastor. Adiel was born in Ft. Edward, N.Y., on Oct. 3, 1791, to Col. and Mrs. Adiel Sherwood. His father served under Gen. Geo. Washington in the Rev. War and had amassed much wealth, but his fortune was lost, and young Adiel had to work to earn his way through school, which included Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. He spent a year at Andover Theological Seminary where he met Luther Rice, the returned missionary partner of the Judson’s. Under his influence he became a part-time city missionary and field rep. for the Mass. Baptist Missions Society. In 1818, at age 27, suffering with TB, he traveled to Georgia. He became effective as an educator, itinerant preacher, revivalist/evangelist, church planter and pastor of Baptist churches. He had great ability in organization. He served as professor of Columbian College in Wash. D.C., helped found Mercer Institute, and was President of Shurtleff College in Alton, IL. But he was most outstanding in the pulpit. In 1827 in Eatonton, Georgia, revival fell and continued in the Ocmulgee Assoc. in the fall of that year, under his powerful preaching, 4,000 responded to prayer. In a year there were not less than 15,000 additions to the churches by baptism. He traveled through forty counties in GA, preaching 333 sermons while maintaining his pastoral duties. In 1865 Dr. Sherwood moved to Missouri to live out the rest of his days. He died on Aug. 19, 1879, in his eighty-eighth year. He had been preaching for almost three score and ten years. Condensed by Greg J. Dixon from: This Day in Baptist History II: Cummins and Thompson, BJU Press: pp. 156-57. [C.F: Julia L. Sherwood, Memoir of Adiel Sherwood, D.D. (Philadelphia: Grand and Faires, 1884), p. 170.]