Background
He was born on December 25, 1823 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, the son of Philip Benjamin and Catharine Sadtler. His father, a German by birth, was a goldsmith and an amateur of optics.
He was born on December 25, 1823 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, the son of Philip Benjamin and Catharine Sadtler. His father, a German by birth, was a goldsmith and an amateur of optics.
Sadtler graduated from Pennsylvania College (later Gettysburg College) in 1842, stayed on at Gettysburg as a student in the theological seminary under Samuel Simon Schmucker, and was licensed by the Maryland Synod in 1844.
He was pastor of churches in and near Pine Grove, Schuylkill County, Pa. , 1845-49; at Shippensburg, 1849-53; of St. Peter's, Middletown, 1853-56; and of St. John's, Easton, where he succeeded Charles Frederick Schaeffer, 1856-62.
In the latter year, seeking a somewhat milder climate for the sake of his wife's health, he accepted the principalship of a girls' school at Lutherville, Md. , a suburb of Baltimore. The school and the village where it was located owed their existence to the enterprise of John Gottlieb Morris.
Sadtler was a good teacher and administrator, and by conducting Lutherville Seminary prosperously through the Civil War years and the hard times that followed he gained the reputation of a financial wizard. He declined the presidency of Pennsylvania College, of which he was a trustee 1862-77, but was induced a few years later to succeed Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg as the second president of Muhlenberg College at Allentown, Pa. He took charge Jan. 1, 1877, and with his formal inauguration later in the year the college became the property of the Lutheran Ministerium of Pennsylvania. Its future was still dim.
In 1885 he was crippled permanently by a fall on the ice, and, fearing that he could no longer fulfill all the duties of his position, he retired at the end of the year. Theodore Lorenzo Seip was his successor. For the rest of his life Sadtler made his home in Baltimore. He was as active as his health would permit in the work of the church. He died while on a visit to Atlantic City.
Sadtler was devoted to the college and was confident of its growth, and he was the kind of man who inspires the devotion and confidence of others.
By his marriage Oct. 9, 1845, to Schmucker's daughter, Caroline Elizabeth, he became a member of one of the most influential of Lutheran ministerial families. He was survived by his wife, two daughters, and seven sons, one of them Samuel Philip Sadtler, the chemist.