The Pioneer Missionary Who Built a Frontier Education
Rev. Cushing Eells, a man who devoted his life to raising the moral standard of the Pacific Northwest, is laid to rest after a lifetime of labor in the wilderness.
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The funeral services over the remains of Rev. Cushing Eells, who died at Tacoma last Thursday, aged 83 years, will be held at the Plymouth Congregational church this afternoon. The body was brought to Seattle on the steamer Multnomah. In the death of Rev. Cushing Eells, the Congregational church of Washington loses one of its grandest and most noble characters. His life was devoted to the work of raising the moral standard of humanity. Since his arrival at Walla Walla in 1838, his labors as a home missionary never ceased until death robbed him of power to act. In all parts of the state he labored, and the majority of the bells ringing in the towers of Congregational churches in Eastern Washington were his gifts. He was an educator, and his name will go down in the annals of the state as the founder of Whitman college. Rev. Wallace Nutting, who spoke of the old man, remarked, 'I never saw a man with such tenacity. An object before him—he would reach it if it took ten years.'
“The winds might blow and toss him about, but his purposes were so clearly defined in his mind that nothing could turn him.”
Cushing Eells's legacy lives on through Whitman College, which remains a pillar of higher education in Washington. His life reflects the era of missionary expansion that fundamentally reshaped the state's social and educational institutions.
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