Jonathan Fisher

He was the first Congregational minister from 1794 to 1837 in the small village of Blue Hill, Maine in the United States and helped found the Bangor Theological Seminary.

[1] In his manners, morals and writings Fisher represents the best of the vigorous New England churchmen who shaped the standards of their congregations during America's formative years.

[2] As a young man he considered becoming a blacksmith, cabinet maker or clockmaker, but his intellectual gifts were evident and his family was able to send him to Harvard in 1788.

He studied liberal arts and divinity, supporting himself by waiting on other students in the dining hall and selling watercolors of wildlife.

The Reverend Jonathan Fisher, Master of Arts, a degree and title in which he took much pride, was a most unusual and remarkably gifted man.

When at the close of the 18th century he came to Blue Hill, then a frontier village "in a wilderness", he was seemingly leaving behind him all those intellectual and artistic pursuits and resources in which he delighted.

Yet, instead of leaving these in the "Seat of the Muses", which was his name for Harvard College and Cambridge, he transported them to his lonely, far-flung parish, and with no little success, grafted many of them upon the people, and upon the pioneer institutions of his new charge.

In his study on the right entrance to his house, he read his Hebrew Bible at five o'clock each morning, in winter by the light of his "blazing logs"; his Latin and Greek he taught to four or five young men, who usually boarded with him and his own large family.

Industrious almost beyond belief, and possessed of an unflagging physical vitality, he relieved his omnipresent poverty and increased the few hundred dollars of his meager salary by farming his own acres, concocting medical remedies, braiding numberless straw hats, sawing out buttons from the bones of farm animals, and even of dead household pets, painting names on vessels or painting sleighs (at $2.50 each), making pumps, chairs, chests, hair-combs, tables, bureaus, bedsteads, cradles, even drumsticks for the local militia (at 25 cents a pair), and by repairing much of the shaky furniture in Blue Hill.

Congregationalists believed that the Christian Church is universal, with the multitude gathered from diverse nations agreeing on the tenets of one common faith.

He was also very active in the attempt to eliminate slavery by proposing that slaves be purchased from their owners and sent back to Africa as free men and women.

Over time and as new sects such as the Baptists entered the Blue Hill region, the severity of Calvinist doctrine became less acceptable to the congregation.

His notebooks and sketchbooks record his observations and interests in scientific matters, surveying, engineering, mathematics, geometry, agriculture, and natural history.