Evangélisation

1866 · Best.-Nr. BK0132 — Philadelphia: F. Gutekunst 1866. Carte-de-visite photograph 3 ½ x 2 ¼ inches on larger mount with Gutekunst's 704 & 706 Arch Street imprint and two-cent U.S. revenue stamp for playing cards on verso. Contemporary identification beneath image "George Balcom / Evangelist. Fine condition. A portrait of George Farnham Balcom 1823-1879 the New York Baptist evangelist whose itinerant ministry eventually took him west to Kansas and Nevada. Balcom grew up in Oxford New York entered the Baptist ministry at about thirty and became known particularly for evangelistic work in both speaking and singing. He conducted meetings and helped organize churches in New York Pennsylvania Ohio and the western states. Balcom moved west in 1870 settling near Cawker City Kansas. Local accounts credit him with preaching among the earliest sermons in Osborne County and describe his continued work establishing churches on the frontier. His western career also included a brief period in federal service as special Indian agent at Nevada's Pyramid Lake Reservation in late 1871 making him the first Baptist preacher in the state.1 The revenue stamp dates the portrait closely to the Civil War-era federal tax on photographs while Balcom's handwritten identification as an "Evangelist" places the image squarely within the itinerant phase of his career. An well-documented portrait of a nineteenth-century Baptist revivalist whose ministry extended from rural New York to the developing communities of the American West. . F. Gutekunst unknown books