The Pastors of Siloam · 1892–1895
W. R. Lawton
A Lincoln University graduate, teacher and minister who led Siloam from 1892, and whose own funeral was held there nearly fifty years later.
Pastor
At Siloam
Lawton became pastor of Siloam in 1892. He arrived soon after the old church on Prince Street, the congregation's home since 1850, had been taken down, and the congregation was moving between temporary rooms. Records of his work as pastor have not yet been found.
His ties to Siloam lasted long after his pastorate. In 1905 the Brooklyn Standard Union announced that he would assist his successor, Dr. W. A. Alexander, at the funeral of Dr. George Sidney Phillips, a Siloam member for forty years. The 1918 catalog of Lincoln University still listed him as a Presbyterian minister in Brooklyn.
Lawton died in Brooklyn on December 31, 1943. His obituary in the New York Age reports that his funeral was held at Siloam on January 4, 1944, with the pastor, Rev. George Shippen Stark, officiating, and that he was buried in The Evergreens Cemetery.
Life and ministry
William R. Lawton was born in 1860, according to his Find a Grave memorial. He studied at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, earning a B.A. in 1883 and an M.A. in 1888, and he graduated from its theological seminary in 1886.
The 1898 Ministerial Directory, compiled from the ministers' own returns, records the rest of his early career. He was ordained on May 3, 1886, and served from 1886 to 1887 as stated supply of Central Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. He then turned to teaching. In 1888 he was principal of the Beaufort Normal and Industrial Institute in South Carolina, and from 1889 to 1891 he was professor of history and civil polity at Lincoln Institute in Missouri.
Family
His obituary says he was survived by his wife and by his sons and daughters.
Sources (6)
- Siloam Presbyterian Church, "Our History," the church's earlier website (2026)
- Edgar Sutton Robinson, ed., The Ministerial Directory of the Ministers in the Presbyterian Church in the United States and in the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, vol. 1, p. 365, Ministerial Directory Co., Oxford, Ohio, 1898, Internet Archive
- Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), College and Theological Seminary, Biographical Catalogue, 1918, Internet Archive
- "Siloam Presbyterian Church - Brooklyn, N.Y.," New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, n.d.
- "1905 Deaths" (Brooklyn Standard Union, January 25, 1905, transcribed), Brooklyn Genealogy Information Page, 1905
- "Rev William Rufus Lawton," Find a Grave memorial 174257125, with a transcript of his New York Age obituary of January 8, 1944, p. 8, Find a Grave, 2016