Weed, Bartholomew

Weed, Bartholomew a Methodist Episcopal minister, was born at Ridgefield (now Danbury), Connecticut, March 6, 1793. He was trained in the Calvinistic faith and became a Baptist in 1809, but joined the Methodist Episcopal Church in the eighteenth year of his age, under the ministry of Rev. Seth Crowell; was licensed to exhort in 1812: obtained local preacher's license in 1815; and joined the Philadelphia Conference in 1817. During his ministry of sixty-four years he filled appointments in Philadelphia, Bridgeton, Trenton, etc., and was four years a presiding elder in the Rock River Conference, from which he was elected delegate to the General Conference of 1844. His last years were spent in the Newark Conference, which, in 1864, gave him a superannuated relation. During the last eleven years of his life he acted as chaplain of Essex County Jail. He died in Newark, N.J., January 5, 1879. Mr. Weed was ardent in his attachment to the doctrines, discipline, and usages of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and bore with cheerfulness a part in the sacrifices and sufferings of her pioneer work. His ministry was characterized by clearness, warmth, and strength. He was a man of simple tastes and manners, of strong convictions and attachments, and of a heroic and magnanimous spirit. Preaching was his loved employment, and it seemed as hard for him to quit it, though in his eighty-sixth year, as it was for him, a few weeks later, to die. See Minutes of Annual Conferences, 1879, page 73. (R.V.)