1837 - 1932 Person Name: Rev. S. C. Beach Author of "The Golden Rule" in Songs for Little People Seth Curtis Beach was born on August 8, 1837 in western New York State. He was a Unitarian minister, author, poet and hymnist. The family lived in a log cabin they had built on a fifty acre farm near the village of Marion, New York. His mother and older sister tutored him until he was eight.
In 1858 he enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, but transferred to Union College in Schenectady, New York and gradated from there with an A.B. degree in 1863. As a Unitarian, Beach enrolled at Harvard Divinity School to prepare for the ministry. After college he preached as a supply minister for a number of churches eventually settling at All Souls Unitarian Church in Augusta, Maine in 1867. He also served as minister at First Church in Dedham and later in Bangor. He published several books of sermons, served as secretary of the national Unitarian Ministerial Union, and was appointed Superintendent for Missionary Work in Northern New England for the American Unitarian Association (AUA). He visited struggling parishes in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont helping them to solve congregational problems.
Seth Curtis Beach died in 1932. The Unitarian Year Book called him “the dean of our Unitarian ministers.”
NN, Hymnary editor. Source: Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, www25.uua.org/uuhs/
Seth Curtis Beach