Background
Osmon Cleander Baker was born July 30, 1812 at Marlow, the son of Dr. Isaac Baker, and of Abigail Kidder.
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Osmon Cleander Baker was born July 30, 1812 at Marlow, the son of Dr. Isaac Baker, and of Abigail Kidder.
At fifteen he entered Wilbraham Academy, in Massachusetts, was converted there, received his license to exhort at the age of seventeen, and in 1830 enrolled in the first class in Wesleyan University, at Middletown, Connecticut, whose president, Wilbur Fisk, who had also been his principal and teacher at Wilbraham, profoundly influenced him. On account of serious ill health he had to leave college in his senior year.
In 1834 he became teacher in the seminary at Newbury, and in 1838 principal. In the jubilee year of Methodism (1839) the matter of a theological school was agitated by the New England and New Hampshire Conferences, and in 1840-41 Newbury, was selected as the site. This led Baker to organize in 1840 the theological society of Newbury Seminary for the training of ministers, and in 1841 he and his associates began regular theological classes. In 1843 a portion of the Seminary building was formally dedicated as a theological school. This made Baker the first professor in such a school in Methodism in America, though W. M. Willett had been teaching Hebrew in Wesleyan since 1830.
In 1844 Baker resigned to become pastor in the New Hampshire Conference, but had served only two churches, Rochester and Manchester, when in 1847 he was made presiding elder (district superintendent). That same year saw the theological institution (the Methodist General Biblical Institute) reorganized and opened at Concord, N. H. , with Baker as professor of homiletics, Methodist discipline, etc. Both in his character and instruction - for he was a born teacher - he left a deep impress upon his students. In 1852, he was elected bishop by the General Conference which met that year in Boston, but Concord remained his home until the end. As bishop he was conscientious, kind, fair, and competent. His unrivalled knowledge of Methodist law comes out in his Guide Book in the Administration of the Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church (1855, revised ed. 1869). For nearly two generations this was a hand-book for perplexed bishops and pastors, in those years when that mighty little book, The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, was taken seriously.
Baker was six feet tall with a smooth, florid, intelligent face.
He married Mehitabel Perley, of Leinster, in 1833. She survived him, dying at Concord May 8, 1890.
