Thomas Goodwillie (abt. 1800)

Ancestors

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Biography

The following biography is a precis of one in the Vermont Historical Magazine:

Thomas and his brother David went in 1813 to Cambridge. Returning home in the spring of 1817, they attended the Caledonia County Academy for a short time; entered Dartmouth College, and graduated August 1820. Having become members of the Associate Church a few years before, they were admitted by the Associate Presbytery of Cambridge, and commenced the study of theology in the beginning of 1821, at the Eastern Theological Seminary of the Associate Church in Philadelphia.

The Associate Presbytery of Cambridge licensed them both at Ryegate, 29 September 1823.

Leaving Philadelphia early in the spring of 1824, in fulfilling the Synod's appointments to preach, they went to South Carolina, then into Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio, and returned to Philadelphia the next spring. On their way South, their first interview with their uncle, Dr. Banks, who was highly pleased with their company and conversation.

The Barnet congregation, on 26 October 1825, gave Rev. Thomas Goodwillie a unanimous call to be assistant pastor and successor to his father. He was ordained and settled as pastor of the Associate Congregation at Barnet by the Associate Presbytery of Cambridge, 27 September 1826.

He preached at Montpelier, 11 October 1827, before the Legislature, and the Legislature elected him their chaplain for the session.

By appointment of the Presbytery to which he belonged, he went on a mission to Upper Canada in 1827. In consequence of a petition from Lower Canada, he went and preached in several towns on the St. Francis River, in 1829. While he was officiating as chaplain to the Legislature, and absent on these missions, his father officiated in the congregation at Barnet. A few weeks after his father died, Thomas left Barnet on account of ill-health; for a year traveled in the Southern and Western States; in 1831 he went to Europe, and traveled there for two years, and returning in 1833, with his health so far recovered as to resume his labors in the congregation at Barnet.

He was clerk of the Associate Synod (of the North) from 1841 to 1854, when the Synods united, except in 1852, when he was chosen moderator.

On 11 April 1833 he married, and has four children living, three sons and a daughter, besides a daughter who died in 1850 at age 13. The two oldest sons have graduated at the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, and settled in their profession in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The eldest son is one of the faculty of that college. The youngest son, Thomas, is a student at Dartmouth College, preparing for the Christian ministry. (One of the older sons may be James Goodwillie, who was enumerated in the 1880 census of New York (Manhattan): James Goodwillie, dentist, age forty-four, born in Vermont, about 1836 by his census age, to a father born in Vermont and a mother born in Scotland. James's wife, Sarah A., age forty-two, born in New York about 1838, whose father was born in Massachusetts and mother in New Hampshire.}

Sources

• Vermont Historical Magazine, No. XI, October 1867, p 281