June 16, 1810, Scan­tic Parish, East Wind­sor, Con­nec­ti­cut.

June 20, 1880, Mon­son, Mass­a­chu­setts.

Son of hymn­ist Phoebe Brown, Samuel was ed­u­cat­ed at Am­herst Col­lege, Yale Col­lege (grad­u­at­ed 1832); Pres­by­ter­i­an The­o­lo­gi­cal Sem­in­a­ry, Co­lum­bia, South Car­o­li­na; and Union Sem­in­a­ry, New York. He taught in Can­ton, China; Ma­cao; and Hong Kong (1838-47), and up­on his re­turn to Amer­i­ca, ran an acad­e­my in Rome, New York (1848-51). In 1851, he went to a Re­formed Dutch pas­tor­ate in Owas­co Lake, New York. A school he found­ed there, Spring­side, was part of the Un­der­ground Rail­road that helped es­caped slaves move north be­fore the Amer­i­can ci­vil war. In 1859, the Board of For­eign Mis­sions of the Re­formed Dutch Church sent Brown to Yo­ko­ha­ma, Japan, as the first Amer­i­can miss­ion­a­ry in that coun­try. He trans­lat­ed a num­ber of books from Eng­lish to Ja­pa­nese, pre­pared Ja­pa­nese gram­mar vol­umes, and helped found Mei­ji Ga­kuin Un­i­ver­si­ty, in Shi­ro­ka­ne­dai, To­kyo.

• Hughes, p. 328

1. Monson