Munger, Hiram (1806–1902)

Hiram Munger was a camp meeting manager and lay revivalist in the Second Advent movement.

Early Years

Hiram was born at Monson, southern Massachusetts, September 27, 1806, the first child of Stillman and Susanna Munger. Stillman was a miller. Hiram’s ten siblings were Alfred Squier (b. 1809), Caroline (b. 1811), Susan (b. 1813), Sophronia (b. 1816), William (b. 1819), Charles (b. 1820), Austin (b. 1822), twins Marian Almira and Huldah Alvira (b. 1825), and Lucy Maria (b. 1830). All survived beyond their 40^th year, a remarkable circumstance for that era.

As a boy Hiram had moved with his family from Monson to Ludlow and Wilbraham, his father working at different mills. Hiram himself earned a little cash as a toll-gate operator or by helping his father in the mill. One summer, when 10 years old, he worked on a farm for three dollars a month and earned enough for his father to buy a cow. Poverty was always at their door. None of them had suitable clothing for cold weather. Hiram’s education suffered with the change of schools and the necessity to assist the family income. By age 16 he could read and write, but he could not “cipher,” that is, do arithmetic.¹

When Hiram was 22 years of age he married 18-year-old Lucinda Hancock on May 7, 1829, at Wilbraham, a nearby village to the west of Monson.² Unlike the family in which Hiram was reared, he and Lucinda suffered the loss of more than half of their children to diseases such as measles, smallpox, and “brain fever.” The three children who survived to adulthood were Alfred (b. 1830), Mary (b. 1832), and Lucy Augusta (b. 1840).³

Spiritual Awakening

Soon after his marriage, Munger learned of a Methodist camp meeting taking place south of his home, just across the border in Connecticut. He and a work colleague attended, intent on disrupting it. When a mob used a club to bloody an old man, Munger and his friend were appalled. They turned on the rioters, bound some and attacked others, then guarded the camp during the night.⁴ In his history of the Second Advent movement, Isaac Wellcome described Munger as a man with a “giant frame,” “rough, blunt . . . kind, tender in spirit, careless in appearance and coarse in expression.”⁵ It was understandable that the mob fled from him. He was a formidable opponent in any skirmish and a valuable keeper of the peace at camp meetings.

When a temperance lecturer in Chicopee urged everyone to sign the temperance pledge, Munger resisted. Eventually, though, after much bargaining and cajoling, he finally signed and poured his home-made cherry rum down the sink.⁶ Similarly, though he attended Methodist meetings regularly, he resisted the calls of the preachers to come forward for prayer. Finally, while providing security for revival meetings conducted around 1833, Munger went forward at the call of Josiah Litch, then a young Methodist preacher, later a leading figure in the Second Advent movement. Walking home from the meeting, Munger detoured into the bushes on the bank of the river and cried and laughed and shouted until midnight.⁷

Camp Meeting Manager

In the summer of 1842 the Methodists hired Munger as camp organizer, manager, and security officer for a large camp meeting near Chicopee. Any “rowdies” he captured were tied to the preacher’s stand where they were forced to listen in the hope of their conversion. (In answer to those who espoused nonresistance, Munger later defended his policy of making citizens’ arrests).⁸ When the Methodist meeting closed, Joshua Himes came with a proposal to erect a huge tent for a Millerite camp meeting on the same grounds. He paid Munger $25 to take the same role as he had done for the Methodists. Munger was overwhelmed by the size of the tent, twice as large as any he had ever seen, and perhaps equally impressed that it eventually filled to its capacity of at least 3,000 people.⁹

He accepted another $25 to take charge of an Advent camp meeting at Plainville, Connecticut. At this second gathering Munger found more time to listen to the messages preached by George Storrs and others and examine what they were teaching based on his own study of the Bible. “I was convinced that they had got the truth on the nature of the events,” he wrote, but he did not have the same conviction about “the time.” Perhaps he still had difficulty with arithmetic, making it hard to comprehend the calculations in the preachers’ expositions of time prophecies. In any case, in his reflections on this camp meeting, published 14 years later when date-setting was blunted, he added, “I do not care if we never get a correct clue to the time, the doctrines will stand the test.”¹⁰

Advent Preacher

Wellcome observed that the 1842 Plainville camp meeting marked a “new era” for Munger in which he devoted “all the energies of his giant frame and eccentric mind” to spreading the Second Advent message.¹¹ Throughout 1843 and 1844 Munger toured away from home, providing camp meeting oversight and security services and conducting his own revival meetings.

Beginning a few years prior to his connection with Second Adventism, Munger, when at home in Chicopee, had opened his house for Wednesday evening meetings. These meetings promoted “primitive” Methodism, characterized by revival of rigorous personal holiness and enthusiastic expressions of worship in opposition to formalism and intellectualism. Participants frequently were “struck down” or “slain by the Spirit.” On one occasion when a woman was “struck down,” she fell backwards and hit her head on the floor, lying comatose for five days before reviving.¹²

These gatherings attracted criticism from the main Methodist body in town. Munger was undaunted. He had drifted from his church, caring not for those he called “dandy preachers” who perfumed their hair with pomade. He had no regard for services where musical instruments were employed to accompany the singing. “The choirs are a nest of unclean birds,” he declared. The devil has come into the Methodist church “with a fiddle under his arm,” he fumed.¹³ He regarded the local seminary with disdain, calling it the “Minister Factory.”¹⁴ Women, he thought, should be clothed plainly, not as they were on Sundays in starched dresses, silks, bows and ribbons.¹⁵ With Millerite views added to his independent spirit and criticisms, the Methodist officers voted Munger and 84 like-minded members out of the Chicopee church on grounds of heresy, but without a trial, according to Wellcome.¹⁶

Amidst the turmoil surrounding the Millerite movement in the 1840s, Munger experienced a financial crisis. He lost his savings, having loaned approximately $1,500 to friends who defaulted on their obligations. Fortunately, he had invented and patented a new type of water wheel that rescued him from financial ruin. In 1846 he and his family moved to New Hampshire where he sold and installed enough of the water wheels to establish himself back in Chicopee.¹⁷

Through the subsequent decades, Munger identified himself as an “Advent preacher.”¹⁸ His preaching and lecturing was done as a layman, and he mixed his testimony with his engineering skills as he installed machinery for saw mills and grist mills throughout New England.¹⁹

Wellcome wrote, “Eld[er] M[unger] has traveled East and West and preached with good results in many places.” He estimated Munger had attended 175 camp meetings up to the time of writing (early 1870s), usually serving on the organizing committees.²⁰ Amidst the disputatious branches of Adventism that developed after 1844, Munger was connected, loosely at least, with the group that organized as the Advent Christian Association in 1860. He called the tenets of his preaching “Plain Truths.” They may be summarized as:

a) Truth is gained from Scripture and the Church Fathers or tradition. Scripture is the spring of water, tradition is the aqueduct. The aqueduct may become defiled and must only be used when it agrees with Scripture.

b) The world and everything in it was originally created good.

c) As a result of Adam and Eve’s transgression all was cursed and all need redemption.

d) The earth will be restored to its glorious condition after purification by fire.

e) The earth and humanity will not get better prior to the Second Advent. Not all will be converted and the persecution of the saints will continue to the end.

f) The righteous will receive their reward after their resurrection at the Second Advent.

g) God’s kingdom is to be established on the renewed earth where the saved will dwell.²¹

Warrior With Words

Munger also engaged in strident criticism of various other movements on the American religious landscape of that era. In 1854, for example, he published an article in the Advent Watchman telling of his public debate with a Spiritualist or “Rapper” (so called for the mysterious “raps” that, in 1848, the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, claimed were communications from the dead). Munger demonstrated from Scripture that God’s voice was heard through prophets who never used “rapping or table tippings.” In his own colorful style he accused his opponent of being “as blind as a beetle” and riding an “old dirt car” or rail carriage of manure. His sermon was instrumental in running the imposter out of town.²²

In the October 1870 issue of the Advent Christian periodical, World’s Crisis, Munger used characteristically vivid language in denouncing Seventh-day Adventists: “If ever there was a time to take off this hypocritical wart or fungus flesh from the Advent body, it is now. I know God does not bless it. It proves a corroding curse wherever it goes.”²³ These words set a cat among the pigeons. Joseph H. Waggoner, a leading Seventh-day Adventist evangelist, responded in a lengthy Review and Herald article. Munger, he counter-charged, was a “reckless maligner” whose accusations were “unchristian and slanderous.” If the Advent body, of which Munger was a member, suffered so badly from warts and fungus flesh, calling for excision, then the whole body was terribly sick, Waggoner mused. How do you know God does not bless the Seventh-day Adventists? Waggoner asked. If the Seventh-day Adventists are a curse then what are you going to do about it? he teased.²⁴

Years later, in 1895, papers in Massachusetts reported Munger was a leading Seventh-day Adventist and was predicting that the end of the world would come in 1897. If it was true, he obviously would have had to abandon his avowed dislike for date-setting. Be that as it may, the Review and Herald with haste made the disclaimer, “Elder Munger is not a Seventh-day Adventist, nor anywhere near it. He never professed to be one.”²⁵

At the age of 81, Lucinda Hancock Munger suffered a fall at home in Chicopee that broke her hip, hastening her death in July 1892. Ten years after his wife’s death, Hiram Munger passed away at Chicopee on June 8, 1902, aged 94. He was laid to rest with Lucinda in East Street Cemetery at Chicopee.²⁶

Sources

“Hiram Munger.” FamilySearch. Accessed November 9, 2022, https://www.familysearch.org/tree/pedigree/landscape/KNSQ-3ZT.

“Hiram Munger.” Find A Grave. Memorial ID 178277352, April 10, 2017. Accessed December 27, 2022, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/178277352/hiram-munger.

Letter, Hiram Munger to Joshua Himes. Advent Herald, October 19, 1850.

Munger, Hiram. The Life and Religious Experience of Hiram Munger, Including Many Singular Circumstances Connected With Camp-meetings and Revivals. Boston, MA: Crisis Publishing Office, 1856.

Munger, Hiram, “There will be a Second Advent Camp-meeting . . . .” Advent Herald, August 7, 1844.

“The following paragraph, dated at Springfield . . . .” ARH, August 13, 1895.

Waggoner, Joseph W. “S.D. Adventists and Their Critics.” ARH, January 10, 1871.

Wellcome, Isaac C. History of the Second Advent Message and Mission, Doctrine and People. Boston, MA: Advent Christian Publication Society, 1874.

Notes

1. Hiram Munger, The Life and Religious Experience of Hiram Munger, Including Many Singular Circumstances Connected With Camp-meetings and Revivals (Boston, MA: Crisis Publishing Office, 1856), 11-14.↩

2. “Hiram Munger,” FamilySearch, accessed November 9, 2022, https://www.familysearch.org/tree/pedigree/landscape/KNSQ-3ZT.↩

3. “Hiram Munger,” FamilySearch.↩

4. Munger, Life and Religious Experience, 14-19.↩

5. Isaac C. Wellcome, History of the Second Advent Message and Mission, Doctrine and People (Boston, MA: Advent Christian Publication Society, 1874), 244, 246.↩

6. Munger, Life and Religious Experience, 20-23.↩

7. Ibid., 26-27; on Litch see Jonathan Gomide, “Litch, Josiah (1809–1886),” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists, September 22, 2020, accessed December 23, 2022, https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/article?id=59OZ.↩

8. Letter, Hiram Munger to Joshua Himes, Advent Herald, October 19, 1850, 302.↩

9. Munger, Life and religious Experience, 41-49.↩

10. Ibid., 52-54.↩

11. Wellcome, History of the Second Advent Message, 246.↩

12. Munger, Life and Religious Experience, 92-95.↩

13. Ibid., 32, 35, 41.↩

14. Ibid., 97.↩

15. Ibid., 124-126.↩

16. Wellcome, History of the Second Advent Message, 247.↩

17. Munger, Life and Religious Experience, 118-119.↩

18. “Massachusetts State Census, 1865,” FamilySearch, accessed December 27, 2022, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MQCH-7SS; “United States Census, 1880,” FamilySearch, accessed December 27, 2022, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MH6V-P92.↩

19. Munger, Life and Religious Experience, 132-165.↩

20. Wellcome, History of the Second Advent Message, 247.↩

21. Munger, Life and Religious Experience, [181-205].↩

22. Ibid., 132-165.↩

23. Quoted in J. H. Waggoner, “S.D. Adventists and Their Critics,” ARH, January 10, 1871, 26-27.↩

24. Waggoner, “S.D. Adventists and Their Critics,” 26.↩

25. “The following paragraph, dated at Springfield…” ARH, August 13, 1895, 528.↩

26. “Hiram Munger,” Find A Grave, Memorial ID 178277352, April 10, 2017, accessed December 27, 2022, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/178277352/hiram-munger.↩