He did not drink liquor and he was rarely ill. As an abolitionist, a temperance advocate, a defender of the Sabbath, and an educator of young minds, he took it as his personal mission to convince others to accept his beliefs, and was therefore sometimes a controversial figure.

[4] Nevertheless, at age twenty, under the guidance of his pastor, William Wick, Monteith began to study Latin grammar and to educate himself in the hours not devoted to agriculture.

After a short stint as a schoolteacher in Cumberland, Maryland, he continued his education at Princeton Theological Seminary which had opened in 1812 with one professor and only a dozen students.

When Alexander received a plea from the frontier outpost of Detroit for a minister from Lewis Cass and Henry Jackson Hunt, he suggested Monteith should accept the offer.

Several of the town's prominent citizens bought more than one share, and by April 6 when Monteith set off on horseback for New York, he had collected $450 to use to purchase books in the east.

Six days later, the plan for the university was legally established by action of the territory's executive and judicial officers who comprised Michigan's legislature.

The university's officers had authority over all institutions of public education in the Michigan Territory including colleges, schools, libraries, and museums.

On April 30, 1821, a new act was passed, changing the name to the University of Michigan, and abolishing the office of president in favor of a board of twenty trustees.

It would not be until 1837, sixteen years after Monteith had left Detroit, that classes would first be organized at the university's new home in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

On May 12, 1817, while on his trip east to buy books for the library, Monteith was ordained by the Presbytery of New Brunswick, his former professor Archibald Alexander leading the charge.

Now fully authorized to conduct marriages, baptize and perform communion, he organized the First Protestant Society of Detroit on March 27, 1818.

In the year the First Protestant Society was founded, a recession caused the financial support for Detroit's new institutions to falter, and so, in January 1819, Monteith again traveled to the east, this time to raise funds to build a place of worship.

Sadly, she contracted an epidemic fever while on a trip to visit her parents a mere fifteen weeks after the wedding, and died on October 9, 1820.

[10] When Monteith married a second time, on August 30, 1821, at Florence, Ohio, to Abigail Harris, he had already resigned his post at Detroit in order to take up the professorship of Latin and Greek at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

[11] During his tenure as Professor of Latin and Greek at Hamilton College, John Monteith played an important role in a religious feud that nearly destroyed the young institution.

[12] Monteith responded to Davis's objection to the new preaching style by meeting with students and trustee Gerrit Smith and praying publicly from the pulpit, claiming that: "Thou knowest, O Lord that the faculty of Hamilton College have sinned in high places: and we pray Thee, O Lord, if they are obstacles to Thy work, that Thou wouldst remove them out of the way".

The feud had had significant results for Hamilton College, reducing the number of students from 107 in the spring of 1823 to 9 in 1829, the year following Monteith's departure.

George Washington Gale, a fellow alumnus of the Princeton Theological Seminary, was then living nearby, and had begun to read about New England manual labor schools modeled on those established by Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and by the Alsatian pastor J. F. Oberlin.

[13] Under Monteith's guidance, students studied subjects such as mathematics, surveying, geography, and bookkeeping, and also engaged in "useful bodily labor" for three or four hours a day.