Timothy Walker

Background

Timothy Walker was born in Woburn, Massachussets, one of the twelve children of Capt. Samuel Walker and his wife, Judith Howard. Nine of these children died within two months in 1738, victims of diphtheria.

Education

Timothy was graduated from Harvard College in 1725.

Career

In March 1730, before he was twenty-five, he was called to the first parish to be established in Penacook (later Rumford and still later Concord), N. H. Before he was installed, he made an agreement that if through extreme old age he should be unable to carry on the whole work of the ministry his salary should be reduced; but as sole minister of Concord he continued till the day of his death. The township of Penacook had been granted in 1726 by Massachusetts to one hundred selected settlers from Andover and Haverhill. It lay within the district designated as the shire of Bow by New Hampshire, and its boundary lines were not clearly established. In 1727 the entire Bow district was granted by New Hampshire to a group of absentee proprietors. Thirteen years later the Crown made a settlement whereby the township was thrown into New Hampshire, and the Massachusetts pioneers were threatened with dispossession. Walker, as agent for the Rumford proprietors, made three trips to England in 1753, 1755, and 1762, in order to appeal directly to the King in Council, and finally, in behalf of the settlers and original landholders, won a favorable decision from the Crown. This judgment, that a change of provincial boundaries did not affect titles to private property, is important in the history of Colonial land tenure. Walker's house was the town's chief mansion during the first half-century of its development. His diaries, of which only fragments remain, were kept from the time of his ordination in 1730 until his death in 1782 and are valuable in recreating the picture of life in a pioneer village. Edited by J. B. Walker, they were published in 1889 under the title Diaries of Rev. Timothy Walker. Two controversial sermons of his were published. The first, The Way to Try All Pretended Apostles (1743) was preached in January 1742. George Whitefield's "pretended" evangelical powers had stirred Walker, with many others, to protest. In this sermon he gave a vivid characterization of the evangelists: "by their Gesture, their Tone, their Delivery, of avowing so much of transport they endeavour what they can to depress and darken the Understanding, and to warm the Imagination, and to alarm the Affections, and when once these are set up to tyrannize over the Understanding, the Mind is thereby rendered susceptible of any Impressions, and so men become moulded into any Form which their enthusiastic or designing Leaders would have them. " Later, in 1771, when Hezekiah Smith, a Baptist evangelist from Haverhill, came to preach at Concord, Walker attacked him in a sermon entitled Those Who Have the Form of Godliness (1772), so vehement that two men left the meeting house and turned Baptist. Testimony to the strength of his influence is furnished by the fact that the peripatetic Whitefield let Concord severely alone. During his active career Walker was able to keep up an interest in the classics and maintain general admiration from family and friends.

Achievements

• Timothy Walker has been listed as a noteworthy clergyman by Marquis Who's Who.

Personality

In the fifty-two years of his ministry Walker preached every Sabbath but one. Often he took his gun into the pulpit with him. In theology he was a moderate Calvinist, accepting the Half-way Covenant. While the town had no legal government, it was necessary for him to depend on voluntary contributions from his parishioners; in 1750 his salary had become so meager that the people, through Walker's son-in-law, petitioned the governor for a permanent subsidy, stating that the loss of "a gentleman of unspotted character and universally beloved by us" would be irreparable. His will shows that he had accumulated very little property; he preferred to labor along with his flock for the necessities of life. He may best be styled as a farmer-preacher, insisting upon the duties of practical religion, and rarely entering into the religious controversies of his century.

Connections

On November 12, 1730, he had married Sarah Burbeen of Woburn, who bore him five children.

Father:

Samuel Walker

Mother:

Judith Howard

Spouse:

Sarah Burbeen

child:

Sarah