Author: Wilson, Joseph
Biography:
WILSON, Joseph (1797-1878: New York Herald)
When he published The Devil Turned Doctor, a temperance tract in verse, in 1831, the Rev. Joseph Wilson was the newly installed first pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Greenbush NY. Few details are available about his family origins, though he had graduated from the College of New Jersey (Princeton) and had been licensed to preach by the Dutch Reformed Church in 1821. As part of the evangelical movement in the northeast in those years, he at first moved frequently from one congregation to another--Middleton DE (1822-30), Greenbush NY (1831), Albany NY (1832), Westerlo NY (1833), Athens NY (1834). He spent two long settled periods 1838-44 and 1849-72 at Fairfield NJ. He contributed to church magazines and acted on church councils; he also published an edition of the Daily Commentary of Matthew Henry (1832) widely advertised in church newspapers. He married at some point before 1840 but the name of his wife has not been found. After retiring from Fairfield in 1873, he died in 1878 of "an apoplectic attack" at the home of a daughter in Orange NJ. (Connecticut Observer 25 Jul. 1831; Christian Intelligencer [New York] 26 May 1832, 29 Sept. 1839, 14 Oct. 1843; New York Herald 2 May 1878; Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Old Dutch Church . . . [1898] 147-8) HJ