George Claude Lorimer

George Claude Lorimer [Dr. George C. Lorimer] (1838 - 1904) was a noted reverend, and was pastor of several churches around the United States, most notably the Tremont Temple in Boston, Massachusetts. In Louisville, Kentucky, he came under the influence of Reverend W.W. Everts, who turned Lorimer to Christianity. He was ordained in the Baptist Ministry, first holding brief pastorates in Harrodsburg, Kentucky and Paducah, Kentucky, and then for eight years at the Walnut Street Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. After another brief term in Albany, New York, he next took up an office at the Tremont Temple in Boston, where he would serve as pastor for twenty-one years, with some interruptions. Early in February, 1879, the financially distressed First Baptist Church of Chicago extended a call to Lorimer to come there from the Tremont Temple, and on May 4, 1879, he preached his first sermon as pastor of the Chicago congregation. Lorimer's pastorate was "successful in the highest degree", and by January, 1881, the church raised sufficient means to pay a substantial portion of its debt. On September 25, 1881. Lorimer delivered his farewell sermon in Chicago, returning to the Tremont Temple and leaving a gift of $1,600 to the reorganized Chicago congregation. In 1901 he took up a new pastorate for the last time, at the Madison Avenue Baptist Church in New York City.