Author: Campbell, Zenas
Biography:
by
Jackson, Heather (HJ)
CAMPBELL, Zenas (1803-89: ancestry.com)
His early years are obscure but census records flesh out the later ones. He was born in Raynham MA to Sally (Andrews) and Oliver Campbell on 5 Feb. 1803. The family moved to Livermore ME about 1812. There, on 13 Sept. 1824, he married Patty Andrews, who must have been a close relation; her family had made the same move from Raynham about 1807. They had ten children together. Nothing is known of his education but he became a teacher, lecturer, and preacher. In 1828 he published an abridgment of Murray's English Grammar with the title or subtitle "The Grammatical Interrogator." In midlife he may have been an itinerant speaker: there were children born and books published in different states. Campbell seems to have had a spiritualist phase in the 1850s (The Spiritual Opposition Line [1853] and Who Is the Messiah? [1854], both by "Elder Campbell"), but his last recorded preaching was more conventionally on the subjects of the destiny of man and on the authenticty of the scriptures [1876].The 1880 census records him as a farm labourer in Leeds ME, blind from cataracts, and single--which may be an error, or may simply mean he was not at the time living with his wife Patty, who died at Livermore in 1881. He died at Adams MA on 5 Mar. 1889. (ancestry.com 26 July 2025; WorldCat; Hollis) HJ