Hugh Owen Pentecost (1848–1907) was a radical American minister, editor, lawyer, Georgist, and lecturer. Early life, preaching, and radicalization Pentecost was born in 1848 at New Harmony, Indiana, to Emma Flower and Hugh Lockett Pentecost. Hugh was the fourth of five children, along with his eldest sister, Cora; his older brother, George Frederick (who also went on to become a nationally renowned preacher); another sister, Emma; and a younger sister, Rosa, who died in childhood. Hugh was given the middle name "Owen" after Robert Owen, the patron of the utopian socialist community that Pentecost's parents had joined at New Harmony. At the age of two, his family moved to Albion, Illinois. After a short stint as a printer in Kentucky, Pentecost attended Colgate University in upstate New York, and after graduating in 1872, he entered the Baptist ministry. He preached at Baptist churches in Brooklyn; Long Island; Westerly, Rhode Island; Hartford, Connecticut; and Brooklyn. In 1871, while pastoring the Rockville Center, Long Island Baptist Church, he married Laura Anderson, the daughter of a successful Brooklyn confectioner. In 1873, Hugh and Laura left the Baptists in a dispute over the practice of "Free Communion," and then organized their own "Church of the People." They left that church, in turn, during the summer of 1875, after they challenged a church member over his handling of funds. Hugh Pentecost took on another assignment in Westerly, Rhode Island; in 1877, his wife, Laura, died of rheumatic fever. In 1880, while in Hartford, he married Ida Gatling, the daughter of Richard Jordan Gatling. Shortly after his wedding, he once again became a pastor for a Baptist church in Brooklyn, but Pentecost left the Baptist denomination, and became a pastor for non-denominational church in Manhattan and then the Belleville-Avenue Congregation Church in Newark, New Jersey. Pentecost became widely known for his eloquent sermons and his support for anti-poverty causes, Georgist land reform, socialism, and nonresistance. In 1887, he began to make speeches for Henry George's Anti-Poverty Society, ran and lost a race for mayor of Newark on the United Labor ticket, and delivered a sermon in protest of the hanging of the Haymarket martyrs. His increasingly political and theologically unorthodox sermons led to controversy within his congregation in Newark; in December 1887, he resigned from his post and announced that "My studies furthermore have given me such changed opinions regarding many fundamental doctrinal ideas that I