Hiram Bingham I
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- This article is about the Hawaiian missionary.
For other uses, see Bingham.
| Hiram Bingham I | |
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 Missionary to Hawaii |
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| Born | 1789 Bennington, Vermont, USA |
| Died | 1869 New Haven, Connecticut, USA |
| Spouse(s) | Sybil Moseley Naomi E. Morse |
Hiram Bingham (1789–1869), born in Bennington, Vermont, was in the first group of Protestant missionaries to introduce Christianity to the Hawaiian islands.
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[edit] Life
Bingham is descended from Deacon Thomas Bingham who had come to the American colonies in 1650 and settled in Connecticut. He attended Middlebury College and the Andover Theological Seminary. [1] He broke off an engagement and found a new bride, Sybil Mosley, in order to become a missionary. On October 23, 1819 he was sent from Boston along with Asa and Lucy Goodale Thurston to lead a mission by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
[edit] Hawaii
Bingham and his wife arrived first on the Island of Hawaii in 1820 aboard the brig Thaddeus, and then sailed on to Honolulu. In 1823, Queen Kaʻahumanu and six high chiefs requested baptism. Soon after, the government banned prostitution and drunkenness, which resulted in the shipping industry and the foreign community resenting Bingham's spiritual impact.[2] Bingham was involved in the creation of the spelling system for the Hawaiian Language and also translated some books of the Bible into Hawaiian.[3]
Bingham designed the Kawaiahaʻo Church, on the Hawaiian Island of Oʻahu. The church was constructed between 1836 and 1842 in the New England style of the Hawaiian missionaries and is one of the oldest standing Christian places of worship in Hawaiʻi.
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[edit] Return
The board grew concerned that he was interfering too often in Hawaiian politics. The Binghams returned to New England in the 1840s for what was intended to be a sabbatical due to Sybil's poor health, but the board refused to reappoint him as a missionary even after Sybil's death in 1848. He published a memoir, A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands in 1847. He remained in New England as the pastor of an African American church. He remarried to Naomi Morse in 1851, running a seminary. He is buried at Grove Street Cemetery, in New Haven, Connecticut.
Bingham's son, Hiram Bingham II, was also a missionary to the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi; his grandson Hiram Bingham III was an explorer who discovered Machu Picchu and became a US Senator and Governor of Connecticut, and his great-grandson Hiram Bingham IV was the US Vice Consul in Marseille, France during World War II who rescued Jews from the Holocaust. His daughter Lydia married the later Hawaiian missionary Titus Coan.
In World War II the United States liberty ship SS Hiram Bingham was named in his honor. It was hull number 1726.
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Sarah Johnson and Eileen Moffett (Spring 2006). "Lord, Send Us". Christian History & Biography 90: 37–38.
- ^ Fortune, Kate. 2000. Hiram Bingham. The Pacific Islands: An Encyclopedia, ed. by Brij V. Lala and Kate Fortune, p. 188. University of Hawai'i Press
- ^ Stowe, David. 1998. Bingham, Hiram. Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. by Gerald H. Anderson, p. 63, 64. New York: Simon & Schuster MacMillan
[edit] References
- Sarah Johnson and Eileen Moffett (Spring 2006). "Lord, Send Us". Christian History & Biography 90: 37–38.
- Miller, Char, ed. 1988. Selected writings of Hiram Bingham, Missionary to the Hawaiian Islands - To Raise the Lord's Banner. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press.
- Lucy Goodale Thurston (1872). Life and Times of Mrs. Lucy G. Thurston: Wife of Rev. Asa Thurston, Pioneer Missionary to the Sandwich Islands. reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2007. ISBN 978-1432545475.
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