Elmer Hewitt Capen

Elmer Hewitt Capen (1838-1905) was born in Stoughton, Massachusetts, graduated from Tufts College in 1860, and served a term in the Massachusetts House of Representatives while still an undergraduate. After briefly practicing law he entered the Universalist ministry, serving the Independent Christian Church in Gloucester, a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the First Universalist Church of Providence, Rhode Island. In 1875 he became the third president of Tufts College, the first graduate to hold the office, and during his thirty-year tenure the college added medical and dental schools, broadened its curriculum, and admitted women. He died in office in 1905.

The old Gloria Patri responses book (1866, also in this collection) as revised for a new century by Elmer Hewitt Capen, president of Tufts College, with the music edited by Leo Rich Lewis, Tufts's professor of music — evidence that the Universalist liturgical tradition, though always a minority taste, persisted into the twentieth century.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)