Samuel Newell

Samuel Newell (1784–1821) was one of the pioneers of American foreign missions. He was the missionary under American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to India and Ceylon, where he founded the first American Ceylon Mission station.

As the youngest of nine children, he was born to Ebenezer and Catherine Newell on 24 July 1784 at Durham, Maine. He lost his mother when he was three, and his father when he was fourteen years old. At an age of fourteen, he went to Portland, and on a tour of sight-seeing, he accepted an offer of a captain of a vessel that lay in the harbor; consequently, he moved to Boston. In Boston, he did his schooling from Roxbury Grammar School and entered Harvard College in 1803. During his college days, he looks been influenced on religious subjects and influenced by preaching of Dr. Stillman, pastor of the first Baptist church in Boston. In October 1804, he became a member of the First Congregational Church in Roxbury, under the ministry of Porter.

He graduated from Harvard College in 1807, and started working as an assistant teacher of the Grammar School in Roxbury; later, he took charge of the Academy at Lynn. Having decided to devote himself to the ministry, he became the member of the Andover Theological Seminary in 1809 and graduated in 1810 from Andower Theological Seminary; there, he joined the group of Christian students, who were eager to undertake an overseas mission to the heathen. In 1810, he and others like Samuel John Mills, Adoniram Judson, Gordon Hall, Samuel Nott, and Luther Rice proposed themselves to the orthodox Congregational clergy of Massachusetts that they be sent as missionaries; consequently, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was formed in 1812.

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