Librarian
Centurion, 1908–1948
Born 27 November 1855 in New York (Manhattan), New York
Died 3 September 1948 in Norfolk, Connecticut
Proposed by Charles A. Briggs and Rollo Ogden
Elected 7 November 1908 at age fifty-two
Proposer of:
Century Memorial
Charles Ripley Gillett. [Born] 1855. Engineer, clergyman, archaeologist, librarian.
1855 is known as the Year of Violence in American history—the year that gave Bloody Kansas its name. The antagonisms over the extension of slavery were intense. Men were fearful and militant in the view of titanic things to come.
The North and South of this nation were rapidly becoming separate peoples, just as in the world of today the West and the East are parting. Men saw that their country could not continue half slave and half free, just as today an Inevitable Conflict portends on the broader stage of the world. And John G. Whittier, seeing clearly the inescapable clash before the country, gave thanks—in words that might have been written this morning—that he lived in a time:
“When Good and Evil, as for final strife,
“Close vast and dim on Armageddon’s plain.”
Lacking statesmanship to resolve the conflict, the conflict came and was fought. We may take hope that C. R. Gillett lived a good life for ninety-three years nevertheless; but we ought not forget that while he was a boy the price of that good life was paid by others—at Gettysburg and Chickamauga, Antietam and Appomattox and a hundred other fields for four bloody years.
He was graduated from New York University in the Class of 1874. For three years he practiced Civil Engineering and then studied for the ministry at the Union Theological Seminary. Thereafter, he spent three years in archaeological exploration and study to such effect that he later catalogued the Egyptian and Cypriote Collections of the Metropolitan Museum. But it was as Librarian of the Union. Theological Seminary, as its Registrar and Dean of Students that the finest part of his life was lived.
He was a man of wide culture, acquainted with many and varied realms of learning, loyal his life long to the Church of his fathers, a devoted servant of the Seminary in which he spent more than a half century as student and member of the faculty, the oldest member of this Presbytery—a Centurion for forty years.
He was two months younger than our oldest member, Poultney Bigelow, still going strong.
Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia
Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1948 Memorials