Benajah Harvey Carroll

Benajah Harvey Carroll

Benajah Harvey Carroll 1843-1914

Baptist minister and educator. B.H. Carroll was born in Carrollton, Mississippi, the son of a preacher-farmer and one of twelve children. At the age of 18 he was graduated from Waco University in Waco, Texas, and then spent the next four years in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. In 1865, at the age of 22, he was converted to Christ in a wood shed through the efforts of a Methodist evangelist, and was ordained to the ministry one year later.

During the first years of his ministry, immigrants were moving into Texas by the thousands, and he labored for their evangelization. After pastoring several Baptist churches, he became secretary of the Education Commission of the Baptist General Convention of Texas in 1899. He served in this capacity until 1901, at which time he became head of the Bible department at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. In 1905 he was made dean of the Baylor Theological Seminary, which later became Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Carroll served as president of Southwestern from 1908 until his death in 1914.

In addition to his intellectual and argumentative abilities, in an age of denominational debates, he possessed a lovable nature. He once said, “When I come to know a man and love him as a friend and a brother, nothing can destroy the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.” He believed in the Baptist interpretation of the teachings of the New Testament, and was devoted to spreading those teachings to the uttermost parts of the earth.

Ruckman ’67