Edward Porter Humphrey

Biography

Humphrey was the son of Congregationalist minister and second president of Amherst College Heman Humphrey and his wife Sophia Porter (1785–1868), daughter of Noah Porter. He was born in Amherst, Hampshire, Massachusetts or in Fairfield, Connecticut. The documentary evidence in Ancestry.com for Fairfield, Connecticut appears to be strongest and is based on census records. His first wife was Catherine Cornelia Prather, daughter of Thomas Prather and Matilda Martha Fontaine.

He and Catherine Cornelia were married March 3, 1841. She bore him one son, Edward William Cornelius Humphrey, who became a legal expert and representative to the national Presbyterian General Assembly. Edward and Catherine also had one young daughter who died as an infant shortly after Catherine died during childbirth on September 28, 1844. As a child, Catherine Cornelia Prather's portrait was painted by the American portrait painter Matthew Harris Jouett.

Her portrait was retrieved from Louisville's Speed Museum collection to become part of the private collection of her descendant Eleanor Belknap Humphrey, sister of William Burke Belknap the younger, and daughter of William Richardson Belknap. Her portrait, known as "The Little Grandmother" remains in a Humphrey family collection, is registered with the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and in the 1970s was on temporary loan to Transylvania College for an exhibition of Kentucky portraits. The Jouett portrait of Catherine Cornelia Prather Humphrey as a child was also used as an illustration in the book Kentucky Heyday by British Army officer Brigadier General Arnold Nugent Strode Strode-Jackson.

On April 3, 1847, Humphrey married his second wife, Martha Pope, daughter of Alexander Pope and Martha Fontaine and widow of her cousin, Charles Pope, son of William Pope Jr., and Cynthia Sturgess. Humphrey's second son was Alexander Pope Humphrey, a Louisville lawyer with the firm of Brown, Humphrey, & Davie, who later inherited his mother's home, "Fincastle", in Louisville. Other descendants of Humphrey include newspaper editor Lewis Craig Humphrey, Dr. Edward Cornelius Humphrey, M.D., Politics and Prose co-founder Barbara Meade, and historian of economic thought Thomas M. Humphrey.

Religious training and ministry

Humphrey grew up in Connecticut, and he trained for college at the Amherst academy. In 1828 he graduated with honors from Amherst College. In 1833 he graduated at the Andover Theological Seminary, and in 1834 he answered the call to begin his ministry as pastor of a Presbyterian church in Jeffersonville, Indiana. He soon, in 1835, became pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Old Louisville, Kentucky, and served that rapidly expanding church for eighteen years. In 1846 the Rev. Stuart Robinson, for whom the Stuart Robinson School was later named, filled the pulpit during a nine-month absence of Rev. Dr. Edward P. Humphrey. Photos of the old Second Presbyterian Church, before and after it was destroyed by fire in 1956, show that it was once a magnificent building. In 1852 Rev. Humphrey was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Old School Presbyterian Church, and he preached a sermon called "Our Theology" as retiring moderator to the national assembly gathered in Charleston, South Carolina. The sermon was well received and was distributed by the Presbyterian Board of Publications. He served as pastor in Louisville of the old Presbyterian Church on Third Street between Green and Walnut Streets, a building later converted into a theatre and eventually known as the Metropolitan building.

He received the degree of Doctor of Divinity from Hanover College in Indiana in 1852, and in 1853 he was named by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church as a professor in Princeton Theological Seminary. He declined the professorship at the Princeton Seminary but accepted one offered as Professor of Church History at the Theological College in Danville, Kentucky. In the later years of his residence in Danville, his health began to fail, perhaps because of the ongoing American Civil War. He had a devoted loyalty to the Union forces of the national government and a strong desire for conciliation of the differing factions in the nation and in the church.

Cave Hill Cemetery, which includes a National Memorial Cemetery begun for Civil War soldiers, has been the pre-eminent burial ground in Louisville ever since Humphrey gave the dedicatory address in 1848, and it remains a premier example of cemetery design in the United States. "The site's natural rock outcroppings and hilly topography have been complemented with ponds, statuary, and architecturally elegant tombs. More than 500 kinds of trees and garden plantings are maintained in this naturalistic oasis." As Porter said in the dedicatory address for the cemetery, "Let the place of graves be rural and beautiful. Let trees be planted there. Let the opening year invite to their branches the springing leaf and birds of song . . . . Let the tokens of fond remembrance in the shrub and flower be there."

Member, National Presbyterian General Assembly

In 1866 he answered an appeal to return to Louisville. Members of the old Second Church, where he had been pastor for many years, started a newly organized College Street Presbyterian Church, of which he became the pastor. The church became one of Louisville's largest and most notable places of worship. In 1871, Amherst College, his alma mater conferred upon him the degree of L.L.D.