George Washington Gale

George Washington Gale (1789 – September 13, 1861) was born in Stanford, New York and became a Presbyterian minister in western New York state. A graduate of Union College in 1814, and Princeton Theological Seminary in 1819. in 1827 Gale founded the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York, an institution where students would pay for their education by doing manual labor.

Under the ministry of Gale, Charles Finney professed faith in Christ and undertook to become a Christian minister.

Gale later settled in what would become Galesburg, Illinois, to found Knox College (then called the Knox Manual Labor College) in 1837, site of one of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.