Background
He was born on December 19, 1793 in Kensington, Rockingham County, New Hampshire, United States, of Scotch descent, the son of Elijah and Deborah (Nudd) Shaw. He was a farmer's boy.
He was born on December 19, 1793 in Kensington, Rockingham County, New Hampshire, United States, of Scotch descent, the son of Elijah and Deborah (Nudd) Shaw. He was a farmer's boy.
The only formal education he received was that afforded by winter terms in the local school.
In the first half of 1811, he visited Newburyport, Massachussets, and Saratoga Springs, New York. During the next three years he made frequent tours as an exhorter, not only in his native state but also in Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts.
On March 31, 1814, he was ordained to the ministry at the "Christian" meeting house in Kensington. From this time on his labors in behalf of the developing religious body he had joined were incessant and varied. For eight years or more Shaw cared for the congregation in Brutus and for those in surrounding towns, also making numerous missionary tours, some of which extended into Ohio and northward into Canada.
Returning with his family to New England in the spring of 1828, he took charge of a church in Salisbury, Massachussets, but in 1830 accepted an invitation to become pastor of a church in Portland, Maine. He was away much of the time, however, on preaching tours that carried him throughout New England.
In 1834 he resigned and, after making his home in Amesbury, Massachussets, for a brief period, removed to Exeter, New Hampshire, to take editorial charge of the Christian Journal. This paper was a continuation of the Herald of Gospel Liberty, the earliest religious newspaper in the United States. From 1818 to 1835 it was published as the Christian Herald by Robert Foster, from whom it was taken over by the Eastern Christian Publishing Association, organized January 1, 1835, with Shaw as one of its executive committee. Shaw was sole editor of the Journal from 1835 to 1840 and associated with it till the end of his life.
In 1840, when relieved of office work in connection with the paper, he removed to Lowell, Massachussets. The remaining eleven years of his life he spent in untiring labors, especially in behalf of education and organized missionary activity. For brief periods he had pastoral care of churches in Lowell, Massachussets, Durham, New Hampshire, Franklin and Fall River, Massachussets; he also continued his itinerant preaching. For a time (1842 - 43) he was agent to secure funds for the establishment of Durham (New Hampshire) Academy.
He traveled in its interests chiefly in New England, but in 1850 made a tour from Massachusetts to Michigan and back. This was his last great effort; for some time his health had been failing, and in May of the following year he died.
The Shaws were Congregationalists, but partly through the influence of the father's second wife - Elijah's mother died when he was fourteen - the family became connected with the movement for a vital, undenominational Christianity inaugurated in New England by Abner Jones. Elijah was converted at the age of seventeen and almost immediately became an active religious worker.
On July 16, 1818, he married Lydia True of Andover, New Hampshire, and soon afterward they removed to Cayuga County, New York, and settled at Brutus.