Russell's spiritual son of the "prince of preachers"

The Rev. Amos Hall Stote began his preaching career in this building, built in 1861 and still in use, in Earls Colne, Essex.

Find a Grave/Doris Christensen

Preachers tend to be a vagabond lot, following calls from congregation to congregation and often ending up, when the last call comes, far from where they started. That's certainly the case with the Rev. Amos Hall Stote and his wife, Angelina, who are buried in the Russell Cemetery.

Both were native to the Isle of Wight, located in the English Channel just off the southern coast of the English mainland. Here they are now, high and dry in landlocked Lucas County.

They're here because the Rev. Mr. Stote's penultimate call was to Russell's First Baptist Church and, when he retired, Russell seemed as good a place as any to await the final call.

It's cheating a little to identify Amos as an Isle of Wight native. He was born May 1, 1837, at Milford on Sea, just across the Solent, but moved to Cowes as a child with his parents, Benjamin and Jemima Stote. Benjamin's occupation was given as shipwright's laborer in 1850 and Amos was enumerated in the census of that year, when he was 13, as an errand boy.

When he was 14, during 1851, Amos was apprenticed to a shipwright and spent seven years learning the the ship-building trade. When the 1861 census of Cowes was taken, his occupation was given as "blockbuilder," crafting and perhaps assembling in multiples the wooden blocks that are the basis for the tackle systems of sailing ships. He had married Angelina Theresa Read, some four years his senior, on June 13, 1860, at Newport, Isle of Wight. Her occupation was housemaid.

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The Stotes probably were a nonconformist family --- non-Anglican. And some time between 1861 and 1866, Amos felt the call to preach.

This was complicated for a young man who valued education, but didn't have much of it. Preachers of that day, even in Methodist and some other nonconforming traditions, were expected to have some knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, for example.

Amos was fortunate (and sufficiently enterprising) enough to obtain a place as a student at what then was known as The Pastor's College, founded in London during 1856 by the Rev. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a Baptist known by many as "the Prince of Preachers." By 1861, Spurgeon was minister of the largest non-conformist church in the world,  the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London --- still an active congregation. The Pastor's College was renamed Spurgeon College, after its founder, during 1923. It, too, remains active.

The Pastor's College specialized in training pastoral candidates who had limited academic backgrounds. Programs were developed, based on ability, and Spurgeon himself said in 1871 that someone who needed help with English "should not muddle his head with Hebrew," although courses in Biblical Greek and Hebrew were (and still are) offered.

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Amos completed his program in London about 1865, when he was nearing 30, and during 1866 accepted a call from the Baptist congregation in Earls Colne, which had completed a new building five years earlier and was, at the time, the largest Baptist congregation in Essex. That church building still stands and still houses a Baptist congregation.

Four years later, the success of his ministry there led to a call from a Baptist congregation in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Stote family pulled up stakes in England and, in 1870, set sail.

During the next 40 years, the Rev. Mr. Stote's preaching calls took the family to Logansport, Indiana; Joliet, Illinois; Sterling, Illinois; Lawrence, Kansas; Kansas City, Kansas; Perry, Oklahoma; and finally, during 1901, to Russell, Iowa, where he became widely known and highly respected, preaching until failing health forced him into retirement.

Amos and Angelina had a total of eight children two of whom died young. The others were Kate, who never married and took care of her parents in Russell during their old age, Ellen (Kimble),  William H., Frederick C., Archibald B., and Frank Amos. As in many preachers' families, the children were scattered far and wide.

The Rev. Mr. Stote died at the age of 76 on Nov. 26, 1913, and following funeral services at First  Baptist Church was buried in the Russell Cemetery. Six preachers carried him to his grave --- Shipman (Russell Methodist), Tinkham (Russell Presbyterian), Chase (Lagrange Presbyterian), Skogsberg (Trinity and Mt. Carmel United Evangelical), Cornford (Bethel United Brethren) and Sangston (formerly First Baptist).

Angelina died little more than a year later, on Dec. 17, 1914, age 81, and was buried by his side.