Ezra Ripley

Ezra Ripley (1 May 1751 – 21 September 1841) was an American minister of Concord's First Parish Unitarian Church. Biography Ripley graduated from Harvard in 1776 where he taught and subsequently studied theology. In 1778 he was ordained to the ministry in Concord, Massachusetts, where he continued for 63 years, preaching his last sermon the day after his 90th birthday. Harvard gave him the degree of D.D. in 1818. Ripley was a leader in the temperance movement. At the time Ripley settled in Concord the town was divided into two religious factions, but he quickly succeeded in binding them in a union that existed for nearly 50 years. During this period, Ripley was the only minister in town. He married the widow of his predecessor, the reverend William Emerson, Sr. William’s grandson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, later said of Ripley: With a limited acquaintance with books, his knowledge was an external experience, an Indian wisdom. In him perished more personal and local anecdote of Concord and its vicinity than is possessed by any survivor, and in his constitutional leaning to their religion he was one of the rear-guard of the great camp and army of the Puritans.