William Henry Ryder

William Henry Ryder (1822-1888) was a Universalist minister, born in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and ordained at Concord, New Hampshire, in 1843. After early pastorates in New England he led the Universalist church in Roxbury, Massachusetts (1850-1860), and then St. Paul's Universalist Church in Chicago (1860-1882), becoming one of the denomination's most influential ministers in the Midwest. An early opponent of slavery, he organized an industrial school for African American children through his Chicago congregation after the Civil War, and he received honorary degrees from Harvard and from Lombard University. He died in Chicago in 1888.

A patriotic parlor gift-book edited by William Henry Ryder, the Chicago Universalist leader whose benefactions later endowed denominational institutions. Literature, biography, and national sentiment for the center table — the Universalist clergy participating in the general culture of the 1850s parlor.

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