Thirty-second Annual Meeting 243 
Report of the Committee on Necrology. 
The following report of the Committee on Necrology was 
adopted by the Academy and ordered filed. 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF GEORGE FREDERICK WRIGHT 
By GeorGe D. HuBBARD,* 
Oberlin, Ohio. 
In the passing of Professor George Frederick Wright a long life of 
active, productive work has closed and there goes from our midst one 
who has been an example and an inspiration to us all. Dr. Wright 
was born in Whitehall, New York, January 22nd, 1838. His death 
occurred on April 20th, 1921, of heart failure following influenza. 
He came of sturdy New England Puritan stock. On his mother’s 
side, the family had been on American soil since 1640; on the father’s 
side perhaps equally long. Mr. Wright’s father was a farmer, and 
this son, one of a large family, acquired his early education in the local 
schools. At the age of seventeen he had gone as far as the district 
school could take him, and went out to teach a term in the only kind 
of school he knew. 
It was in 1855, while still only seventeen, that he made the long 
journey from the old family home at Whitehall to the little college of 
Oberlin. Four years were spent in the undergraduate course and three 
in the theological seminary. These seven years came at a time in the 
history of Oberlin, as well as of the nation, when the social and even 
the political order trembled, and great questions were before the people. 
Mr. Wright found Oberlin a splendid place in which to feel his way 
in the discussion and solution of theologic, scientific, social and political 
questions, and he always took an intelligent part in such activities. 
These seven years not only gave him his college and seminary course, 
but laid the foundations for his future career. They brought out many 
of the qualities that were subsequently to give him the place he took 
in the world. 
His first public service was a ten-year pastorate of the Congregational 
Church at Bakersfield, near St. Albans, in northwestern Vermont. 
His next residence was nearly an equal period at Andover, Massa- 
chusetts, as pastor of the Free Church, a residence which threw him 
in close contact with the stimulating faculty of Andover Theological 
Seminray. The friendships and intercourse of this period proved of 
very great value in Mr. Wright’s life work. Not only did he meet the 
men of the Andover faculty, but he came in close contact with scholars 
of Boston, New Haven, and New York, to whose influence he readily 
responded. From Andover he was called to Oberlin in 1881 to become 
*The author is quite unfamiliar personally with all of Professor Wright's 
experience save the last fifteen years, but is very happy to have known him so 
well in these later years. Owing to this lack of first hand information, extensive 
and frequent use has been made of life sketches prepared for other purposes, even 
s the borrowing of phrases and sentences. Credit and thanks are hereby given 
or all. : 
