Photograph as originally submitted to this page in the Historical Marker Database www.HMdb.org. Click on photo to resize in browser. Scroll down to see metadata.

Photographer: Allen C. Browne
Taken: August 9, 2015
Caption: John Eliot
Additional Description: This portrait by of John Eliot an unknown artist hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

“No Puritan leader in seventeenth-century New England was more interested in the welfare of the region's Native American population than John Eliot. A graduate of Cambridge University, Eliot immigrated to Boston in 1631. While serving as the pastor of a church in Roxbury, Eliot began to search for ways to perform missionary work among the region's tribal communities. He studied the local Algonquian language, and by 1646 he was preaching to the native inhabitants in their own language.

In order to protect his potential Christian converts, he established the first of fourteen towns for so called ‘praying Indians’ in 1651. Perhaps his most extraordinary accomplishment, though, was the translation of the Bible into an Algonquian dialect a task that required Eliot to invent new words and new grammatical structures. Its publication in 1661 marked the first printing of a Bible in America.” — National Portrait Gallery
Submitted: October 24, 2015, by Allen C. Browne of Silver Spring, Maryland.
Database Locator Identification Number: p335060
File Size: 1.111 Megabytes

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