Robert Kennon Hargrove was an American bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church and educator. He served as a professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Alabama, and as president of the Centenary Institute and and of Tennessee Female College. He was also a member of the traveling ministry of the Alabama Annual Conference.
Background
Robert Kennon Hargrove was born on September 17, 1829 in Pickens County, Alabama, United States. He was the son of Daniel Jones and Laodicea (Brantley) Hargrove. Through both his parents he was descended from families resident in Georgia and the Carolinas for several generations.
His upbringing was intensely pious. One of his grandfathers, a kinsman of Bishop William McKendree, was a local preacher as well as a planter; his father was for fifty years a class leader; he was himself converted at the age of eleven.
Education
Hargrove graduated from the University of Alabama in 1852.
Career
Hargrove entered upon a professorship of mathematics which held him at his alma mater till 1858. He entered the traveling ministry of the Alabama Annual Conference in 1857. Then he became a Methodist minister, and, except for a time when he was a chaplain in the Confederate army, he held pastorates at various towns in the mid-South till 1865. He was President of the Centenary Institute in Summerfield, Alabama, 1865-1867, and of Tennessee Female College in the 1870s.
Reentering the itinerancy, he served different churches till 1882 when he was made a bishop. In 1876 he had acted as a delegate to a conference held between the Northern and Southern branches of his church with the aim of reconciling their differences, and after his elevation to the bishopric he attended another such conference in 1898. Other responsible posts fell to him. He was secretary of the college of bishops 1884-1900, president of the board of management of the Epworth League 1894-1898, and president of the board of trust of Vanderbilt University from 1889 till the June preceding his death.
He worked diligently to increase the activities of the Southern Methodist Church in the northwestern states and on the Pacific Coast, and, through a notable translator whom he brought to Nashville, he furthered Protestantism in Mexico.
He continued to preach till within a few months of his death. He died on August 4, 1905, in Nashville, Tennessee, and was buried there in Mt. Olivet Cemetery.
Achievements
Robert Kennon Hargrove is remembered as a prominent Methodist bishop and educator. He was the first to urge a bond scheme which saved the Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal church, originated the woman's department of church-extension for the securing of parsonages in the same church, and helped establish fraternal relations between the northern and southern branches of the Methodist church.
Hargrove was a member of the Methodist Episcopal church.
Personality
Hargrove is said to have been distinguished by a pervading sweetness of character. His integrity and determination made him a capable executive, and it was only his increasing deafness which in 1902 brought about his superannuation.
Connections
Hargrove's first wife was Harriet Cornelia Scott, the daughter of a cotton manufacturer who lived in Tuscaloosa.
His second wife, whom he married in 1895, was Ruth Eliza (Barker) Scarritt of Kansas City, Missouri.
