William Passavant

William Passavant
Lutheran Church
Feast	3 January

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Lutheran Church on November 24 with Justus Falckner and Jehu Jones
.

Early life

William Alfred Passavant was born in 1821 in
Frankfurt
.
Phillipe Passavant built a store and became the new town's first merchant.
Johann Georg Rapp and his brother Frederick, who then founded Harmony, Pennsylvania, but eventually sold their colony to Abraham Zeigler who moved it further west, to New Harmony, Indiana.^[5]^[6]

Young Passavant and Wenzel crossed the
English.^[7] While at college, where Passavant attended the Presbyterian services offered, he learned his sister Emma had married an amiable Presbyterian minister, Sidney Jennings.^[8]

After taking a year off from his studies due to the unexpected death of his eldest brother, Detmar, in Pittsburgh, Passavant entered the
Cincinnati, Ohio, and attended revival meetings that his father considered too Methodistic.^[11]

Career

Passavant received his license and began his ministry as well as his publishing career in
Baltimore, Maryland, in 1842. Ordained in 1843, he published the Lutheran Almanac for its first two years, before passing that project to others. Another project was a Sunday School hymn book.^[12] Passavant also met his future wife, Eliza Walter, although he felt his finances were not secure enough to support a family.^[13] In 1844, Passavant accepted the repeated calls of a struggling Pittsburgh congregation: First English Evangelical Lutheran Church. During his time as their fifth pastor (1844-1855), he helped to increase the overall membership and steered the congregation towards public outreach.^[14] After moving to that city, Passavant organized the Pittsburgh Synod. By its second meeting, he had already established six Sunday schools, some with the help of other Protestant clergy.^[15]

Passavant married Eliza Walter on May 1, 1845, shortly after his friend Krauth married, despite a fire in Pittsburgh's business district three weeks earlier that had devastated many of his parishioners. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon with the meeting of the Evangelical Lutheran General Synod of the United States America in Philadelphia, as well as visited friends and relatives in Baltimore.^[16]
The following year, Passavant traveled to Europe as the region's delegate to the Christian Alliance in London in August 1846. He also toured historic sites in England, France, and Germany, and managed to secure promises of Lutheran missionaries from
Theodore Fliedner who had opened a hospital and training school for deaconesses in Kaiserswerth, near Düsseldorf and the Basse family's traditional estates. At Passavant's request, in 1849, Fliedner brought four German deaconesses to Pittsburgh to work in the Pittsburgh Infirmary (later Passavant Hospital until merging with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center).^[18]^[19]

Especially after his Continental tour, Passavant became known for addressing important social issues, including slavery before the
Mennonite nursing deaconesses in the Netherlands, and Elizabeth Fry's work in England.^[20]

The sabbatical also convinced Passavant of the importance of the
General Council
.
After his father's death in 1858, Passavant accepted a position as pastor of Christ Lutheran Church in
Zelienople, which he had established in 1854, using a small inheritance after his sister Victoria's death and to honor their still-living mother (with whom Passavant remained close until she died in 1870). The deaconesses also taught and worked with female prisoners in Allegheny County
.
Passavant founded many missions, as well as hospitals in Pittsburgh,
Mt. Vernon, New York. Beginning in 1866, Passavant and Louis Thiel worked to establish Thiel College, which the Pittsburgh Synod's 1869 convention in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, approved to serve western Pennsylvania, and which formally incorporated on September 1, 1870.^[25] One of the last institutions Passavant founded was the Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary.^[26] Many of the social welfare institutions Passavant founded would later join as the Lutheran Services in America, the largest church social program in the United States.^[27]

Death and legacy

From 1881, two years before Knauth's death, to his own death in 1894, Passavant edited The Workman. His son and namesake, William Passavant Jr., turned down an invitation to lead a Philadelphia congregation to continue his father's work as a pastor and editor of the Workman during his lifetime. The elder Passavant died in his Pittsburgh home after falling ill attending a fellow pastor's funeral.[28] He is buried in the cemetery of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Zelienople.^[29] His son resigned his position heading the General Council's Home Missions effort to assume further duties with the deaconesses and other charities his father fostered, but he himself died in 1901.^[30]
The house in which Passavant was born, Passavant House, is now Zelienople's local history museum and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.^[31]

Notable institutions organized
- The Orphans' Home and Farm School in Zelienople, Pennsylvania (now Glade Run Lutheran Services)
- The Passavant Epileptic Home in Rochester, Pennsylvania (now Passavant Memorial Homes)
- Passavant Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (now UPMC Passavant Hospital)
- Passavant Hospital in Chicago, Illinois (now Passavant Memorial Hospital)
- Passavant Hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois (now
  Passavant Area Hospital
  )
- Passavant Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (now Aurora Sinai Medical Center). The building that once housed the hospital is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
- The Wartburg Orphans' Farm School in
  The Wartburg Adult Care Community
  )
References
1. ^ Passavant, Dettmar (January 1, 1925). "Romantic Story of Baron Basse, Founder of Zelienople". Western Pennsylvania History. 8 (1): 12–25. Retrieved November 4, 2021.
2. ^ Edwards, Harold. "Bassenheim Furnace". Milestones: The Journal of Beaver County History. 26 (3). Archived from the original on November 29, 2014.
3. ^ Simpson, Elizabeth Jacobs. "Zelienople Historical Society". www.zelienoplehistoricalsociety.com.
4. ^ Passavant, p. 22
5. ^ Passavant, p. 23
6. ^ Shelby Miller Ruch, Harmony (Arcadia Publishing, 2009) at p. 8
7. ^ Gerberding, G. H., Life and Letters of W. A. Passavant, D. D., Illinois Historical Society, 1909, pp. 36, 40-41
8. ^ Gerberding, p. 38
9. ^ Gerberding, p. 42 et seq.
10. ^ Gray, Trudy M., ^[permanent dead link] Historical roots run deep in Zelienople The Tribune-Review Publishing Co., August 1, 2004
11. ^ Gerberding, pp. 53-61
12. ^ Gerberding, p. 103
13. ^ Gerberding, pp. 109-111
14. ^ Gerberding, G. H. (1906). The Life and Letters of W. A. Passavant, D. D. Greenville, PA: Young Lutheran Co.
15. ^ Gerberding, pp. 113-126
16. ^ Gerberding, pp.130-132
17. ^ Gerberding, pp. 139-151
18. ^ Baden's First 100 Years (Christ Lutheran Church of Baden, PA.) Archived 2009-10-07 at the Wayback Machine
19. ^ Gerberding, pp. 183-193
20. ^ Gerberding, pp. 175-183, 250-259
21. ^ Gerberding, pp. 307-319
22. ^ Gerberding, pp. 327-350, 443-457
23. ^ Gerberding, pp. 194 et seq.
24. ^ "Passavant Memorial Homes Foundation". Passavant Memorial Homes Foundation. Archived from the original on 2014-01-04. Retrieved 2014-01-04.
25. ^ The History of Thiel College 1866-1974 (Dr. Roy H. Johnson. Thiel College, Greenville, Pennsylvania)
26. ^ "Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod - Christian Cyclopedia". cyclopedia.lcms.org.
27. ^ Lutherans in North America (Holy Trinity Church, New Rochelle, NY) Archived 2012-04-14 at the Wayback Machine
28. ^ Gerberding, pp. 575-588
29. ^ "Rev William Alfred Passavant, Sr (1821-1894) -..." www.findagrave.com.
30. ^ Gerberding, pp. 589-591
31. ^ The Passavant House (Zelienople Historical Society)
Other sources
- Gerberding, G.H., LIFE AND LETTERS OF W. A. Passavant, D. D., Illinois Historical Society, 1909 at https://archive.org/stream/lifelettersofwap00gerb/lifelettersofwap00gerb_djvu.txt
- Jennings, Zelie Some account of Dettmar Basse, the Passavant family and their arrival in America (Zelienople Historical Society. 1988)
- Solberg, Carl. "Passavant Revisited," Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly (2002) 75#4 pp 194–202. short scholarly biography
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Early life

Career

Death and legacy

Notable institutions organized

References

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External links