Alonzo Ames Miner


Alonzo Ames Miner was a Universalist minister. He was the second president of Tufts University.

Origins

Born in Lempster, New Hampshire, he was the second of five children and only son of Benajah Ames and Amanda Miner. His father was a descendant of the colonist Thomas Miner.

Career

He taught school in rural Vermont and New Hampshire before being ordained a Universalist minister in 1839. He served as pastor to churches in Methuen, Lowell, and Boston, Massachusetts.
Miner supported many moral and civic causes, at various times being on the Board of Trustees at Tufts, the Board of Overseers at Harvard, the Massachusetts Board of Education, the Board of Visitors to the Massachusetts normal school. For 21 years, he was president of the Massachusetts State Temperance Alliance, and he was the Prohibition candidate for Governor of Massachusetts in 1878. One of the founders of Tufts, he rescued the college from near bankruptcy and instituted many new educational programs as president from 1862 to 1875.

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