Thomas Starr King
(NSHC statue)

Thomas Starr King, (1824 – 1864) was a Unitarian minister, influential in California politics during the American Civil War.

Thomas Starr King, "the orator who saved the nation", was born December 17, 1824, in New York City. The sole support of his family at age 15, he was forced to leave school. Inspired by men like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Ward Beecher, King embarked on a program of self-study for the ministry. At the age of 20 he took over his father's former pulpit at the First Unitarian Church of Charlestown, Massachusetts.

In 1848 he was appointed pastor of the Hollis Street Unitarian Church in Boston, where he became one of the most famous preachers in New England. He vacationed in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and in 1859 published a book about the area entitled The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscapes and Poetry. In 1860 he accepted a call from the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco, California. During the Civil War, he spoke zealously in favor of the Union and is credited (by Abraham Lincoln) with saving California from becoming a separate republic. In addition, he organized the Pacific Branch of the Sanitary Commission , which cared for wounded soldiers.

A fiery orator, he raised over $1.5 million for the Sanitary Commission headquarters in New York, one-fifth of the total contributions from all the states in the Union. The relentless lecture circuit exhausted him, and he died in San Francisco on March 4, 1864, of diphtheria.

Mountain peaks in the White Mountains and in Yosemite National Park are named in his honor. In 1913 he was voted one of California's two greatest heroes and funds were appropriated for a statue. In 1931 the state of California donated a bronze statue of King to the National Statuary Hall Collection. In 1941 the Starr King School for the Ministry (Unitarian Universalist), in Berkeley, California, was also renamed in his honor. King's church and tomb in San Francisco are designated historical monuments.

External links

• Details on his life and works
• http://www.aoc.gov/cc/art/nsh/king_t.htm