Robert Boyte Crawford Howell was born in Wayne County, North Carolina, March 10, 1801. He attended Columbian College in Washington, D.C., and, in 1827, he was ordained as a Baptist minister. He accepted appointments from the American Baptist Home Mission Society as missionary to the west, in 1834, and on January 1, 1835, as pastor of First Baptist Church, Nashville, Tennessee.
He started The Baptist, a monthly paper, in 1835, and edited it until he gave it to the Tennessee Baptists in 1846. The Nashville church grew to a membership of about 500, whites and blacks, and constructed a new church building. In 1850, Howell became pastor of the Second Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia. The average addition to the church during his tenure was about fifty-seven members per year.
Howell preached 2,000 sermons and assisted in the organization of five churches and the ordination of seven ministers of the gospel. He also served as a trustee of Richmond College and the Foreign Mission Board of the SBC. He also served four terms as President of the Southern Baptist Convention. The material is this collection is primarily from his pastorship at Second Baptist Church. His service as pastor to the Richmond church ended when he returned to Nashville in July, 1857. Howell served the Nashville church the rest of life. He died in Nashville April 5, 1868.
=================== [From sbhla.org. Scanned and formatted by Jim Duvall.]
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