William Plumer Jacobs
American minister (1842–1917)
William Plumer Jacobs ( PLOO-mur; March 15, 1842 – September 10, 1917) was an American Presbyterian minister who founded Thornwell Orphanage and what is now Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. He was the pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Clinton for 47 years, from 1864 to 1911.
Jacobs was licensed to preach by the Charleston Presbytery in April 1863 and was made pastor of three churches in Clinton shortly following his graduation from Columbia Theological Seminary in May 1864. Within four years, he had taken on preaching at First Presbyterian Church full-time. He was a part of the Clinton Library Society and the Clinton High School Association, the latter of which founded Clinton High School in January 1873. Thornwell Orphanage opened under Jacobs's direction to ten children on October 1, 1875. Clinton High School became Clinton College in 1880 and conferred degrees starting in 1882, the first of which went to Jacobs's daughter; this school eventually became Presbyterian College. In 1909, Jacobs founded Thornwell Memorial Church on the orphanage's campus, and he ministered at both churches until retiring from First Presbyterian in September 1911. He died in September 1917. Numerous obituaries referred to him as the "Father of Clinton".
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This entry incorporates text from “William Plumer Jacobs” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.