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4to, previous folds, small break at the wax seal; very good. The Reverend Lorenzo D. Johnson writes to Hon. Job Durfee stating that the Roger Williams Church Corporation will attempt to raise funds because of "having had a debt standing against them for some time." To raise funds they "have adopted the following method.to give a course of Scientific lectures to be delivered in the house in the western margin of the city.called Christian Hill." Johnson asks Durfee to speak on behalf of the church and mentions that he has already obtained the services of Mr. Upham of Salem, Hon. Tristam Burges and a few others. Lorenzo Dow Johnson was born in 1805 in Wethersfield, Vermont. A Reformed Methodist preacher, he lived in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, but served at a number of different churches in New England including The Roger Williams Church in Providence. Rev. Johnson married in 1832, in Rochester, Massachusetts, Mary Burges, daughter of Abraham Burges and the niece of Tristam Burges, afterwards member of Congress from Rhode Island, and professor in Brown University. He was the author of a number of books including a biography, The Spirit of Roger Williams: with a Portrait of One of His Descendants. There is evidence that he was installed as pastor in the Roger Williams Baptist Church Society in 1827, [cf. Cheney, Rev. Martin. A sermon delivered at the installation of the Rev. Lorenzo D. Johnson, as Pastor of the Roger Williams Baptist Church Society, in Providence, Oct. 25, 1827] although this is interesting since his biographers call him a Methodist. This church united with the Quakers in 1837. After traveling in Europe, he was in the clerical employ of the Government from about 1851 until the second battle of Bull Run and, there being an urgent need for assistance for the wounded, he went to the front, and from that time to the close of the war, devoted himself to the care of the sick and wounded in and about Washington. Job Durfee (1790 1847) was a politician and jurist from Rhode Island. He graduated from Brown University in 1813 and was admitted to the bar and commenced practice in Tiverton. He was a member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives from 1816 to 1820, and was elected as a Democratic-Republican to the Seventeenth Congress. In 1833 he was elected associate justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court. As chief justice, he presided over the trial of the last person executed in Rhode Island, John Gordon. Durfee was the author of What Cheer, a Poem in Nine Cantos; and of an oration, The Influences of Scientific Discovery and Invention on Social and Political Progress, or Roger Williams in Exile (1843).
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