1. Robert Finley was an American Presbyterian clergyman and educator who is known as one of the founders of the American Colonization Society, which established the colony of Liberia in West Africa as a place for free African Americans.
17 Facts About Robert Finley
1. 2.
Robert Finley was a pastor for 20 years at a Presbyterian church in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, and taught in elementary school and at a boys' academy.
3.
Robert Finley served briefly in 1817 as the president of the University of Georgia before his death.
4.
Robert Finley was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1772 to James Robert Finley and his wife Ann Angrest.
5.
Robert Finley's father, James Finley, was born 1737 in Glasgow, Scotland, where he was trained as a yarn merchant and where he became acquainted with Rev John Witherspoon, then a pastor in the town of Paisley about six miles from Glasgow.
6.
Robert Finley's father immigrated from Scotland to New Jersey in 1769.
7.
Robert Finley entered the College of New Jersey at the age of 11 and graduated in 1787, at the age of 15, at a time when it served more as a boys' academy.
Related searches
John Witherspoon 8.
Robert Finley taught at several places, including Charleston, South Carolina, where many households held enslaved African Americans.
9.
Robert Finley returned to Princeton in 1793 to study theology, and served as a tutor.
10.
Robert Finley was appointed as a trustee of the university in 1806 and served until his resignation in 1817, when he departed for Georgia.
11.
In 1795, Robert Finley was ordained as the pastor of the Presbyterian church at Basking Ridge, where he served for 19 years.
12.
Robert Finley was a popular preacher and noted educator, developing the concept of the modern Sunday School curriculum.
13.
Robert Finley worked there from 1795 until his acceptance of the University of Georgia presidency in July 1817.
14.
In 1795, Dr Robert Finley, re-established the private academy, known as the Basking Ridge Classical School, conducting classes first at the Presbyterian parsonage and then in a new frame school building erected near the church.
15.
In 1809, with enrollment expanding, Robert Finley organized financing and construction of a new two-story brick building, prominently located in the center of the village of Basking Ridge.
16.
Robert Finley did not live to see any of these developments.
17.
Robert Finley is buried in Jackson Street Cemetery on the north campus of the university.