Ashbel Green Simonton

Ashbel Green Simonton
Reverend Ashbel Green Simonton
Born	January 20, 1833 West Hanover, southern Pennsylvania
Died	December 9, 1867 (1867-12-10) (aged 34) São Paulo, Brazil
Burial place	Protestant Cemetery, São Paulo

Ashbel Green Simonton (January 20, 1833 – December 9, 1867) was a North-American Presbyterian minister and missionary, the first missionary to settle a Protestant church in Brazil, Igreja Presbiteriana do Brasil (Presbyterian Church of Brazil)

Simonton was born in West Hanover, southern Pennsylvania, and spent his childhood on the family's estate, named Antigua. His parents were the doctor and politician William Simonton (elected twice to Congress) and Mrs. Martha Davis Snodgrass (1791–1862), daughter of James Snodgrass, a Presbyterian minister, who was the pastor of the local church. Ashbel was named after Ashbel Green, president of New Jersey College. He was one among nine brothers and sisters. The boys (William, John, James, Thomas and Ashbel) used to call themselves the "quinque fratres" (five brothers). One of his brothers, James Snodgrass Simonton, four years older than Ashbel, was also a missionary to Brazil, spending three years as a teacher in the city of Vassouras, in the state of Rio de Janeiro. One of his four sisters, Elizabeth Wiggins Simonton (1822–1879), also called Lille, married the Presbyterian minister and missionary Alexander Latimer Blackford, a colleague of Simonton in Brazil and the co-founder of the Igreja Presbiteriana do Brasil.

In 1846, the family moved to Harrisburg, where Simonton finished high school. After graduating in New Jersey College (the future Princeton University), in 1852, he spent about a year and a half in Mississippi, working as a teacher for young boys. Disappointed with the lack of attention by the local authorities for teaching, Simonton went back to Pennsylvania and tried to become a lawyer, although by that time many people would advise him to become a minister, something to which his mother had consecrated him at his birth. In 1855 he had a deep religious experience during a revival and went to the Princeton Seminary. In his first term, he heard in the seminary's chapel a sermon by Dr. Charles Hodge, one of his teachers, which moved him to the missionary work in foreign lands. He was ordained in 1859 and arrived in Brazil on August 12, the same year.