Samuel Kirkland

Samuel Kirkland (December 1, 1741 – February 28, 1808) was a Presbyterian minister and missionary among the Oneida and Tuscarora peoples of central New York State.

Kirkland named it in honor of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who was a member of the first Board of Trustees of the Hamilton-Oneida Academy.

Kirkland began his missionary work as a protégé of Reverend Eleazar Wheelock in Connecticut at his Moor's Indian Charity School [1] (later relocated to New Hampshire as Dartmouth College).

Kirkland moved to central New York, where he became a missionary to the Iroquois, especially the Oneida and Tuscarora located at the western end of the Mohawk River Valley.

Warfare in the Mohawk Valley caused widespread destruction in both the colonial frontier settlements and many Iroquois villages, as one side and another conducted retaliatory attacks.

[4] Kirkland helped negotiate treaties and keep peace between the Iroquois tribes, who were relocated to smaller reservations, and whites.

Long interested in education, in 1793 Kirkland founded the Hamilton-Oneida Academy as a boys' school in central New York to meet demand from the many new European-American settlements.

The couple were honored by a large memorial stained glass window in Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kansas City, Missouri, where descendants of both the Lathrops and the Kirklands are members of the Parish.