1. William Alfred Passavant was a Lutheran minister who brought the Lutheran Deaconess movement to the United States.
20 Facts About William Passavant
1. 2.
William Alfred Passavant was born in 1821 in Zelienople, Pennsylvania, the third and youngest son of Phillipe Louis Passavant and Fredericka Wilhelmina Basse.
3.
William Passavant's grandfather, Baron Dettmar Basse, born in Iserlohn in the Ruhr Valley in what was then the Grand Duchy of Hesse and later became Germany, spent a decade in Paris as a diplomat and merchant before fleeing the Napoleonic Wars and emigrating to Philadelphia and then Pittsburgh in 1801.
4.
William Passavant traveled and sent glowing letters back to Germany, persuading his daughter and her new husband to emigrate in 1807 from Frankfurt.
5.
Phillipe Passavant built a store and became the new town's first merchant.
6.
William Passavant received his license and began his ministry as well as his publishing career in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1842.
7.
William Passavant met his future wife, Eliza Walter, although he felt his finances were not secure enough to support a family.
8.
In 1844, William Passavant accepted the repeated calls of a struggling Pittsburgh congregation: First English Evangelical Lutheran Church.
9.
William Passavant married Eliza Walter on May 1,1845, shortly after his friend Krauth married, despite a fire in Pittsburgh's business district three weeks earlier that had devastated many of his parishioners.
10.
William Passavant toured historic sites in England, France, and Germany, and managed to secure promises of Lutheran missionaries from Basel, Switzerland.
11.
Especially after his Continental tour, William Passavant became known for addressing important social issues, including slavery before the American Civil War and the needs of German and Scandinavian immigrants and freed blacks.
12.
William Passavant founded and administered a variety of benevolent institutions, particularly in his native country's industrializing cities.
13.
William Passavant noted the comparable apostolic deaconesses, as well as the Sisters of Charity, the Mennonite nursing deaconesses in the Netherlands, and Elizabeth Fry's work in England.
14.
William Passavant founded many missions, as well as hospitals in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Chicago, homes for epileptics at Jacksonville, Illinois, and Rochester, Pennsylvania, and an orphanage as well as an old peoples' home in Mt.
15.
One of the last institutions William Passavant founded was the Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary.
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Many of the social welfare institutions William Passavant founded would later join as the Lutheran Services in America, the largest church social program in the United States.
17.
From 1881, two years before Knauth's death, to his own death in 1894, William Passavant edited The Workman.
18.
The elder William Passavant died in his Pittsburgh home after falling ill attending a fellow pastor's funeral.
19.
William Passavant's son resigned his position heading the General Council's Home Missions effort to assume further duties with the deaconesses and other charities his father fostered, but he himself died in 1901.
20.
The house in which William Passavant was born, William Passavant House, is Zelienople's local history museum and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.