Ashley Day Leavitt
Congregational minister
Ashley Day Leavitt (1877–1959) was a Yale-educated Congregational minister who led the State Street Church in Portland, Maine, and later the Harvard Congregational Church in Brookline, Massachusetts. Leavitt was a frequent public speaker during the early twentieth century, and was awarded an honorary degree from Bowdoin College for his pastorship of several congregations during wartime.
Early years
Ashley Leavitt's father was Burke Fay Leavitt. In 1868, Leavitt's father Burke was living in Melrose Highlands, Massachusetts and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, an academic honor society. Burke subsequently became a minister for the United Church of Christ, and served as pastor of the denominations' first church in Maine at Williston in suburban Portland, Maine from 1872 to 1876.
Ashley Day Leavitt was born October 10, 1877, in Chicago, Illinois to Burke Fay and Lena (Day) Leavitt. Leavitt's name "Ashley" was taken from that of the maiden name of the wife of his ancestor Dr. Roswell Leavitt, a Massachusetts native and longtime physician in Cornish, New Hampshire who married Dorothy Ashley, a native of Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1798 in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Leavitt's father went on to be pastor at the Town Church of Manchester, New Hampshire in 1893. From at least 1900 to 1909, his father was a minister of Melrose Highlands Congregational Church in Melrose, Massachusetts, and later took up a pastor's post in Lincoln Park in suburban Chicago.
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