Buena Vista County, IA
USGenWeb Project

The subject of this sketch was born of Welsh parentage, December 11, 1851, in Green Lake county, Wisconsin, where he spent the first fifteen years of his life.  In 1866 his father and family moved to northeast Iowa, where he spent the following four years.  In November, 1870, after teaching a term of school, he left home to attend Ripon College, Wisconsin, where he remained two terms.  In September, 1871, he went to the State Normal School at Mankato, Minnesota, and the following winter taught school four miles north of Lake Crystal. In May, 1872, he entered the State University of Minnesota, where he remained for six years, taking the classical course and graduating in June, 1878.  In September of the same year he entered Princeton Theological Seminary and took the full three-year course, graduating in May, 1881.

In October. 1881, he was ordained to the gospel ministry and spent the following five years in home mission work in North Dakota.  In 1886 he came to northwest Iowa, where he has resided since, spending a year at Sanborn, two at Estherville, nine at Bancroft, and is now about completing his tenth year as a resident of Storm Lake.  For the past six years he has not had charge of a special church but is supplying vacancies.  He was a delegate to the Presbyterian assembly at Minneapolis in 1886, and to the one at Pittsburg in 1895.

In 1894 Mr. Williams published a historical pamphlet of sixty-eight pages entitled: "The Early History of the Presbyterian Church and Neighborhood of Proscairon, Wisconsin."  During the last twenty years he has written a large number of articles, mostly historical, to church papers and other periodicals, and has several scrap-books tilled up with these fugitive articles of different dates and on different subjects.  Since coming to Storm Lake, Mr. Williams has taken great interest in the affairs of Buena Vista College.  During the winter of 1898-99 he taught four classes during the absence of one of the professors, and since June, 1906, has been a member of and secretary of the board of trustees.  He is a strong believer in and a stanch supporter of the old-time doctrines of the Presbyterian church.

Mr. Williams was married in 1883 to Eliza Flora, daughter of Rev. T. I. Hodgkin, M.D., of Toronto Canada.  One child was born to them, a little boy who died at three years.  In 1892 Mr. and Mrs. Williams crossed the ocean and spent six months visiting in the British Isles, and two months in 1905 on the Pacific coast.  Mrs. Williams has been greatly interested in missions and has published several missionary stories, one of which was published in Chicago and republished by a ladies' missionary society in Dunedin, New Zealand.