Humpday History Highlight
By Wyatt Earp | July 8, 2009
Endicott Peabody
While reading another entry in The Greatest Presidential Stories Never Told, I found this week’s installment of the HHH. This one may be my favorite, if only because of its topic.
Wyatt Earp was a fixture of the Old West. Franklin Roosevelt gave us the New Deal. What possible connection could there be between them?
The answer lies with a man named Endicott Peabody.
Reverend Peabody was the founder and longtime headmaster of Groton Academy, a fabulously exclusive New England boarding school attended by the sons of wealthy Easterners. He was headmaster when Roosevelt attended the school, and became FDR’s mentor. But few realized that this scion of Eastern establishment had some Wild West in his past.
In 1882, while studying for the ministry, Peabody spent six months doing missionary work in a wild and remote part of the world: Tombstone, Arizona. Just a few months after the Earps and Clantons shot it out at the OK Corral, Peabody was helping to found Tombstone’s first Episcopal church – with some help from Earp’s gambling winnings.
Awesome! Knowledge is power, kids.
Sadly, I do not have nearly the luck or the skill in gambling as the real Wyatt Earp.
Topics: HHH | 4 Comments »
July 8th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
A church was built on gambling money? Wow.
July 8th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Kim, it was far from the first or the last, merely one of the few that will admit it. cough Southern Baptist cough.
July 8th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Those Episcopalians are some wild and crazy guys!
July 9th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Kim – Ironic, no?
Old Dog – I think we can throw Reverend Wright’s church on that list, too.
Proof – Thank you, Steve Martin.