Reverend William Mack

1807–1879
Minister, Educator, Author, Husband and Father

For more than four decades, Reverend William Mack devoted his life to Christian ministry, education, and the service of families and communities. Born on July 29, 1807, in Flushing, Queens, New York, he was the son of William Mack and Mary Frances Murry or Murray. Although research into the earlier origins of the Mack family continues, the younger William’s life can be followed from New York through his education and early ministry and ultimately to Tennessee, where he spent much of his adult life.

Education played an important role in preparing William for the work he would undertake. He attended Union College in Schenectady, New York, graduating in 1831, and continued his studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he received three years of theological training. He was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry on February 5, 1835.

That same year brought another important beginning. On October 20, 1835, William married Elizabeth Scoville Bingham in New York City. Their marriage produced five children: Sarah Frances, Joseph Bingham, Mary Elizabeth, William Luther, and Cornelia Mayes Mack. Their first child, Sarah Frances, died in infancy.

William’s early ministry included service as pastor of the Third Presbyterian Church in Rochester, New York. By January 1840, however, the young minister and his growing family had moved south, where he became pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. His life and ministry would thereafter become closely associated with Tennessee.

William eventually settled in Columbia, Maury County, where he served as pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church and became involved in education as president of Jackson College. He resigned the college presidency in 1849, but his work as a minister continued. The 1850 federal census records William and his family in Maury County and provides a valuable contemporary glimpse of the household during these years.

The following year brought a profound change to the family when Elizabeth died in 1851, leaving William with their surviving children. On October 25, 1854, he married Sarah Ann Boardman in Pulaski, Giles County, Tennessee. William and Sarah had two sons, Edward Gookin Mack and Walter Clarence Mack. Walter died during infancy in 1863.

William’s formal pastorate in Columbia ended in 1857, but his ministry did not. For approximately another twenty-two years, he continued evangelical work throughout Middle Tennessee. His career therefore extended well beyond the churches and educational institutions with which his name was formally associated. His was a ministry carried into communities over many years and through a period of enormous change in both Tennessee and the nation.

William also used the written word as an extension of his ministry. Surviving sermons, addresses, correspondence, and publications allow later generations to encounter something of his thought and religious convictions in his own words. Among his later works was Readings for Families and Vacant Churches, published in 1874. A surviving 1858 letter to his son Joseph offers a more personal window into William not simply as a clergyman, but as a father communicating with an adult son.

Perhaps one of the clearest indications of William's influence within his own family is found in the lives of two of his sons. Joseph Bingham Mack, a son of William and Elizabeth, entered the ministry, as did Edward Gookin Mack, a son of William and Sarah. Thus, children from both of William’s marriages carried a tradition of religious service into another generation.

William’s family knew both accomplishment and sorrow. He experienced the deaths of his first wife and children during his lifetime, while raising a family and maintaining a ministry that stretched across decades. His seven children—five with Elizabeth and two with Sarah—became the beginning of the descendant story that this website seeks to preserve.

Reverend William Mack died on January 10, 1879, in Columbia, Richland County, South Carolina, while visiting his son. Following his death, his remains were returned to Tennessee for burial in Greenwood Cemetery in Maury County, bringing him back to the community that had been home to so much of his family life and ministry.

Today, William Mack can be remembered not only through the record of churches he served, schools with which he was associated, and words he left behind, but also through the generations that followed him. His story provides the starting point for a much larger family history—a story of two marriages, seven children, expanding generations of descendants, and a legacy extending far beyond the lifetime of one nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister.

This website is dedicated to preserving that story: the life and legacy of Reverend William Mack and the generations who came after him.