Biographical Details
Date of Birth: June 6, 1813
Birth Location: Chester District, SC, USA
Graduation Year(s): 1836
Degree(s) Earned: Bachelors
Date of Death: February 28, 1907
Death Location: New Alexandria, PA, USA
John Johnston McClurkin
Life Experience
John Johnston McClurkin was born the eldest of nine children. He and his youngest brother, Samuel, were twenty-one years apart in age. He was raised and educated in the towns of Winnsboro and Chester in South Carolina. He attended Columbia College in South Carolina until his junior year, when he moved with his family to Illinois in 1833. In 1834, his parents co-founded a church in Elkhorn, Illinois. Because of their disdain for slavery, they participated in the Underground Railroad along with other members of the congregation. That same year, McClurkin resumed his studies at Indiana College (now IU) and graduated from there in 1836. He was employed as a teacher and a preacher.
From 1836 to 1837 and again from 1847 to 1848, McClurkin taught at Princeton Seminary. He was licensed to preach in 1841. From 1843 to 1851, he was pastor of a Reformed Presbyterian congregation in the towns of Princeton and Walnut Ridge in Gibson County in Indiana. He was then a missionary preacher in Illinois from 1851 to 1853 and a pastor in the towns of Springfield and Greenville in Mercer County in Pennsylvania, from 1854 to 1873. From 1873 to 1880, he was stated supply (a term for traveling ministers of the Gospel). He was then pastor of a congregation in the town of Garrison Creek in Fayette County in Indiana, from 1880 to 1884. He was stated supply for another seven years in Pennsylvania until he retired from active ministry at age seventy-eight. McClurkin lived to age ninety-three. His bequest was divided among Domestic Missions, Syrian Missions, and the Mission in China.
Marriage and Family
Both of McClurkin’s parents died in 1874 only four days apart. He outlived all of his siblings except Samuel. His brother Thomas’s great-granddaughter, Eunice Louise McClurkin Posset, was a missionary in Syria during World War II and the Cold War. She lived to the age of one hundred.
Interesting Anecdote
McClurkin’s eulogist wrote, “He was unmoved through all the defections of his day, and said even when those dear to him changed their views, ‘I stand where I have always stood.’”
References
- Wylie
- Findagrave.com
- files.usgwarchives.net/in/gibson/schools/
- Glasgow (1888)
- Minutes of the Synod of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, Session LXXVIII, May 22 to 28, 1907 (1907)
- Stormont, Gil R. (1914) History of Gibson County Indiana Her People, Industries, and Institutions (Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen & Co.)