Henry Cumings

Henry Cumings (1739-1823), minister of Billerica for sixty years, was born on September 16, 1739, in the west part of Dunstable, the parish that became the town of Hollis, New Hampshire, in 1746. His father, Jerahmeel Cumings, was one of the petitioners who obtained the incorporation of that parish; his mother was Hannah Farwell, daughter of Henry Farwell. His father died in 1747, when Henry was eight, and his mother married Deacon Stephen Jewett. Dr. Cumings believed he owed much to his mother, "a woman of uncommon energy, and very devout," and to his pastor, Rev. Daniel Emerson of Hollis, who befriended him, prepared him for college and helped him through. He graduated from Harvard College in 1760, not yet twenty-one, taught school at Reading in 1761, and studied theology with Mr. Emerson.

After the dismissal of Rev. John Chandler in 1760 the Billerica church had no pastor for two years. On November 18, 1762, church and town, meeting together, chose Mr. Cumings "by all the votes" and offered him a settlement of two hundred pounds and a salary of eighty pounds with the use of the parsonage pasture. He was ordained on January 26, 1763, with seven churches in council; Mr. Emerson preached the sermon. On May 19 of that year he married Ann Lambert, daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Lambert of Reading. She died on January 5, 1784, and he afterward married her sister, Mrs. Margaret Briggs (1786), and then Sarah Bridge, daughter of Rev. Ebenezer Bridge of Chelmsford (1791). His children included Frances, who married Dr. William Wilkins; Elizabeth, who married Lewis Gould of Ashby; Henry, a Harvard graduate of 1795 and a teacher, who died near Louisville, Kentucky; and John. In 1776 he lived at what was later called Dr. Hubbard's place on Bedford Street.

Cumings was the patriot minister of a patriot town. Hazen had "little doubt" that the town's resolutions of February 1, 1773, took shape under his hand, and in October 1776 he sat with Joshua Abbot, Dr. Timothy Danforth, Capt. Josiah Bowers and Col. William Tompson on the committee that drafted the town's answer on forming a new government for the state. Billerica sent him to the convention of 1779-1780 that framed the Constitution of Massachusetts. His printed sermons span the war and its aftermath: a Thanksgiving sermon preached at Billerica on November 23, 1775; a sermon at Lexington on April 19, 1781, the sixth anniversary of the first bloodshed of the Revolution; and the election sermon before the lieutenant governor and General Court on May 28, 1783. The war also showed in his pay: as the Continental currency collapsed his salary rose on paper from eighty pounds to £9,000 for 1781, and in 1782 it returned to eighty pounds in hard money. He later published a eulogy on Washington (1800), ordination sermons and a Half-Century Sermon (1813), and Harvard gave him the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1800.

His granddaughter Nancy Wilkins, who lived with him for twenty years, remembered him as more than six feet tall, with silvery flowing hair, strong in mind and body, hospitable, quick of temper but self-controlled. He was a fine Hebrew and Greek scholar, could recite the first book of Paradise Lost from memory, prepared boys for college and later taught theological students, and once a year visited every school to catechize the children. He loved his garden and wild flowers, and on Christmas Eve trimmed his rooms with evergreen in memory of his first wife. In fifty years he admitted 199 persons to the Half-Way Covenant and 307 to full communion, and he kept the record of deaths in the town from 1784 that John Farmer used in his Historical Memoir of 1816. His sympathies leaned to the Arminian rather than the high-Calvinist side, yet his granddaughter held that he kept to the evangelical doctrines; the church moved to the liberal side under his colleague, and historians have counted him among the early Unitarian ministers.

The fourth meeting-house was built in 1797 during his ministry. In February 1813, citing age and infirmity, he asked for a colleague, and Nathaniel Whitman was ordained on January 26, 1814, the fifty-first anniversary of Dr. Cumings's own ordination; the two men became warm friends, and Cumings gave the charge at the service. He died in office on September 5, 1823, after a pastorate of nearly sixty-one years, longer than any before it, and was buried by the town "with reverent affection," the last of its pastors to receive that honor.

References

1. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), ch. XV, p. 260 (choice and settlement of Henry Cumings)
2. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), p. 261 (ordination; recollections of Miss Nancy Wilkins)
3. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), p. 266 (colleague settled; death of Dr. Cumings)
4. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), Genealogical Register p. 33, CUMINGS 2 (family and list of publications)
5. Farmer, Historical Memoir of Billerica (1816), p. 19 (ordination of Rev. Henry Cumings)
6. Henry Cumings, A Sermon Preached at Lexington, on the 19th of April, 1781 (Evans Early American Imprints)
7. Henry Cumings, Election sermon before the General Court, May 28, 1783 (Evans Early American Imprints)
8. Vital Records of Billerica to 1850, deaths p. 356 (Rev. Henry Cumings, D.D., Sept. 5, 1823)