Author: Phinney, Clement
Biography:
PHINNEY, Clement (1780-1855: ancestry.com)
He was born in Gorham, Maine, on 16 Aug. 1780, the son of Edmund and Sarah (Hamblen) Phinney and descendant of one of the founders of the settlement. As a child he was notably musical and loved to sing. Youthful follies including drinking and gambling did not prevent him from taking on respectable employment as a schoolmaster—which he combined with farming--and marrying Joanna Wallace (1785-1859) in Gorham on 1 Jan. 1803. The couple had ten children between 1804 and 1825. A crisis of conscience after a drunken weekend led to a conversion experience about 1806, reconfirmed at a Freewill Baptist revival meeting led by Samuel Hutchinson (q.v.) in 1809. After being baptised by Hutchinson in 1813, Phinney was ordained in 1816 and became a travelling evangelist, “one of the most popular preachers” of his denomination (Pennsylvania Telegraph). He was also a Master Mason but in 1833 he publicly renounced Freemasonry as a “corrupted institution.” He is not known to have published anything apart from the hymns co-authored with Hutchinson, but a biography of him, with emphasis on his spiritual progress and his remarkable powers over his listeners, appeared in 1851. He died in Portland, Maine, on 2 Mar. 1855. (ancestry.com 17 Jan. 2023; findagrave.com 17 Jan. 2023; Philadelphia Telegraph 14 Aug. 1833 [reprinted from the Maine Free Press]; D. M. Graham, The Life of Clement Phinney [1851]; Zion’s Advocate 16 Mar. 1855) HJ