Background
Deems, Charles Force was born on December 4, 1820 in Baltimore. Son of George W. and Mary (Roberts) Deems.
clergyman General pastor professor
Deems, Charles Force was born on December 4, 1820 in Baltimore. Son of George W. and Mary (Roberts) Deems.
Graduate Dickinson College, 1839.
A precocious child, he delivered lectures on temperance and on Sunday schools before he was fourteen years old. He was professor of logic and rhetoric at the University of North Carolina from 1842 to 1847, and professor of natural sciences at Randolph Macon College (then at Boydton, Virginia) in 1847-1848, and after two years of preaching at New Bern, North Carolina, he held for four years (1850-1854) the presidency of Greensboro Female College. He continued as a Methodist Episcopal clergyman at various pastorates in North Carolina from 1854 to 1865, for the last seven years being a presiding elder and from 1859 to 1863 being the proprietor of Street Austins Institute, Wilson.
He was one of the founders (1881) and president of the American Institute of Christian Philosophy and for ten years was editor of its journal, Christian Thought.
Deems was an earnest temperance advocate. As early as 1852 he worked (unsuccessfully) for a general prohibition law in North Carolina, and in his later years allied himself with the Prohibition Party.
He was influential in securing from Vanderbilt the endowment of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee. The Charles F. Deems Lectureship in Philosophy was founded in his honor in 1895 at New York University by the American Institute of Christian Philosophy.
He signed the Presented to the president of the United States in favor of the restoration of Palestine to the Jews.
Married Annie Disosway, June 20, 1813.
