Before he became a nationally prominent religious figure as the fundamentalist pastor of Brooklyn’s Emmanuel Baptist Church, the Rev. John Humpstone was assigned to his first pastorate in Galway, NY in 1873. It was there that he met and married Galway native Mary Paul before getting reassigned to a larger church in Albany and then Brooklyn. The family maintained a camp on Galway Lake at which they often summered and so did Amsterdam industrialist Harvey Chalmers. It was during these summer stays that the Reverend’s son and today’s Amsterdam Birthday celebrant, Oliver Paul Humpstone first met Chalmers’ daughter Jessie. A romance between the two bloomed and they were eventually married by Reverend Humpstone in Amsterdam in 1902…

You can read more about Dr. Humpstone in the new book “A Year’s Worth of Amsterdam Birthdays.”