Robert Hallowell Gardiner III

Robert Hallowell Gardiner III (September 9, 1855 – June 15, 1924) was an Episcopal layman and ecumenist, head of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew and one of the founders of the World Council of Churches. A prominent lawyer in Maine and Boston until his retirement for health reasons, he was the great-grandson of Dr. Silvester Gardiner, the founder of Gardiner, Maine, and a trustee for the Gardiner Lyceum school and the Roxbury Latin School.

Robert Hallowell Gardiner III was born in a primitive adobe house in Fort Tejon, California, the son of a military officer, Captain John William Tudor Gardiner and his wife Anne Elizabeth Hays Gardiner. His mother was the daughter of a prominent Cumberland County, Pennsylvania businessman, and this was her second marriage, since her first husband (also a military officer) had fallen ill and died at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1843, and she had also previously lost a baby. Although Elizabeth Hays' family was nominally Presbyterian, she married Tudor Gardiner in 1854 at a historic Episcopal church in near Washington, D.C (St. Thomas Parish).

Capt. Gardiner was then assigned to guard the Grapevine Pass through the Tehachapi Mountains, which gold prospectors crossed on their way to Placerita Canyon near Los Angeles, California. Numerous Native Americans lived in the area: the Chumash at Santa Barbara, as well as Shoshone Gitanemuks and Yokuts. Commanding officer Col. Edward F. Beale wanted to protect these indigenous peoples as well as displaced Amerindians from a developing slave trade in Native American children. The elder Gardiners also worried that John C. Fremont had recently reversed over a century of colonial paternalism, with negative consequences toward longtime inhabitants of Spanish or Mexican descent.

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