College and Cambridge, he transported them to his lonely, far-flung parish, and with no little success, grafted many of them upon the people, and upon the pioneer institutions of his new charge. A student of languages all his life, he did not neglect his Hebrew, his Latin, or his Greek. In his study on the right entrance to his house, he read his Hebrew Bible at five o'clock each morning, in winter by the light of his "blazing logs"; his Latin and Greek he taught to four or five young men, who usually boarded with him and his own large family. Devoted to drawing and painting, he somehow managed to pursue these arts even in Blue Hill. Industrious almost beyond belief, and possessed of an unflagging physical vitality, he relieved his omnipresent poverty and increased the few hundred dollars of his meager salary by farming his own acres, concocting medical remedies, braiding numberless straw hats, sawing out buttons from the bones of farm animals, and even of dead household pets, painting names on vessels or painting sleighs (at $2.50) each, making pumps, chairs, chests, hair-combs, tables, bureaus, bedsteads, cradles, even drumsticks for the local militia (at 25 cents a pair), and by repairing much of the shaky furniture in Blue Hill. And, with all these labors, he found time to write many poems, and several books. Nor were his activities confined to his parish. Although he nurtured its library, was the power behind its Academy, founded in 1803 (in which he encouraged "the fine arts" as well as the study of classics and mathematics), and watched over the minds as well as the souls of its people, he went on long missionary journeys, was an active Trustee of the Bangor Theological Seminary (and an untiring beggar for its needs as well!). He was an ardent speaker and writer in the cause of bettering the lot of the Negroes and sponsored from its beginning the American Society for the Colonization of Liberia. Through these and other labors both in his church and at home he added immeasurably to the cultural dignity of his village for more than half a century. Blue Hill still respects and honors him. Mary Ellen Chase, JONATHAN FISHER: MAINE PARSON 1768 - 1847 Blue Hill Congregational Church No one can hope to understand Jonathan Fisher unless they realize that first and foremost he was a Congregationalist minister.