1819-1868
Adoniram Judson Joslyn
Baptist Pastor/Abolitionist NY/IL
In 1819, after six years on the field, Adoniram Judson built the first Christian zayat and preached his first sermon in Burmese. On 5 October 1819, Mary Polly Waite Joslyn gave birth to a son and named him Adoniram Judson Joslyn. Her husband, Rev. Lindsey Joslyn, was a pastor in Nunda Valley, New York, who eventually led his family to Illinois.
Rev. Adoniram Judson Joslyn came to McHenry County, Illinois, in 1838, and six years later became the second pastor of Elgin’s First Baptist Church in Kane County. He was a community activist aiding with the establishment of Elgin Academy in 1855 and serving as one if its first directors. Adoniram Judson Joslyn was “an active factor in religion, politics, journalism and the general advancement of the village.”[1] But pastor Joslyn was mainly known as an anti-slavery advocate who established the first newspaper in Elgin, the Western Christian, which
advocated repeal of the Illinois black laws restricting the rights of free Negroes. Led by Joslyn, the Elgin Baptists, in a letter from the church as a body to its association in 1846, expressed an “increased desire that intemperance, licentiousness, and slavery should be numbered among the things that were and are not.”[2]
He unsuccessfully tried to integrate the Baptist’s Shurtleff College in Alton, IL, and was a delegate to the 1848 Buffalo, NY, convention that organized the Free Soil Party that opposed the extension of slavery into the U.S. territories. Joslyn was elected secretary of the Republican Party when it organized in Geneva, Kane County, in 1854. A year later he eventually became pastor of Union Park Baptist Church in Chicago where he aided in establishing the first University of Chicago.
President Abraham Lincoln appointed Joslyn as Elgin’s postmaster in 1863, a position he held until 1866. Also during the Civil War, A. J. Joslyn served as interim pastor at Elgin’s First Baptist while pastor Benjamin Thomas was away from the pulpit serving with Union forces. During that time Joslyn led the congregation to receive two train freight cars loaded with 110 “contraband” from the Civil War and helped them to organize the Second Baptist Church of Elgin. Upon Thomas’ return to Elgin, Adoniram Judson Joslyn relinquished his interim pastorate at the First Baptist Church and joined the newly-organized Second Baptist Church.[3]
Adoniram Judson Joslyn died October 9, 1868, at age 49 and is buried in the Bluff City cemetery in Elgin, Kane County, Illinois. He was survived by two daughters: Gertrude Emily (1846-1923) who married Mr. John W. Parnum; and Ada Janette who was a local teacher (1854-1874).
[Compiler’s Note: The modern Judson University is located in Elgin, Illinois, where Adoniram Judson Joslyn had his most effective ministry. The compiler is proud to have been a member of the First Baptist Church of Elgin for 14 years while serving as president of Judson University following the pioneering footsteps of Adoniram Judson himself and Adoniram Judson Joslyn, his namesake.]
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[1] History of Kane County, Ill, Vol II (Chicago: Pioneer Press, 1908), p 579.
[2] E. C. Alft, Elgin’s Black History (Elgin, Illinois: Published by the City of Elgin, 1996), p. 1.
[3] E. C. Alft, Elgin’s Adoniram Judson (Unpublished 1976 article in the possession of the compiler, 5 pages.