William Henry Foote
William Henry Foote [1]
a Presbyterian minister, was born at Colchester, Connecticut, December 20, 1794. He entered Yale College in the junior year; spent some time teaching, and then entered and studied for one year in Princeton Theological Seminary. Having been licensed by the Presbytery of Winchester in October 1819, he preached at various missionary stations in Virginia until June 1822, when he organized and afterwards became pastor of a church in Woodstock. In November 1824, he became pastor of the congregations of Mount Bethel, Springfield, and Romney; about 1838 agent of the Central Board of Foreign Missions, laboring within the bounds of the synods of Virginia and North Carolina. While thus engaged, he gathered the materials for his volumes, afterwards published, of Sketches, Historical and Biographical, of the Presbyterian Church in Virginia and North Carolina. In 1845 he returned to his old charge, in Romney, and continued till 1861. During the war he was occupied in lower Virginia as agent for Hampden-Sidney College, also in supplying vacant pulpits, and in Petersburg, during Grant's siege, as chaplain to the hospital. He returned to Romney and Springfield (now in West Virginia), and labored till his death, November 22, 1869. See Obituary Record of Yale College, 1870; Genesis Cat. of Princeton Theol. Sem. 1881, page 27.