Note 278 — Chapter XXV · PHYSICAL TRAINING IN THE YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS.

Some knowledge of Dr. Gulick’s ancestry is required if one seeks to explain the work he accomplished with such limited preparation of a formal sort. Peter Johnson Gulick (1797-1877), the third of seven sons of a New Jersey farmer, and a descendant of Hendrick Gulick, who came to this country from the Netherlands in 1653, was graduated from Princeton College in 1825, studied afterwards in Princeton Theological Seminary, married Fanny Hinckley Thomas, of English ancestry, and in November of 1827 sailed with her from Boston under appointment as a missionary of the American Board. The following March, only eight years after the opening of the mission to the Hawaiian Islands, they reached Honolulu by way of Cape Horn, and in this field he remained in active service for forty-six years. Of his eight children one died during student days in America, and all the rest became missionaries. Luther Halsey, the oldest son (1828-1891), came to the United States and entered an academy in Auburn, New York, in the fall of 1841, and after further study with a physician in Amboy, New Jersey, went to New York City for three years in medicine, first in the College of Physicians and Surgeons and then in the medical department of the University of New York, from which he was graduated in the spring of 1850. The next year he was ordained as a missionary, married Louisa Lewis, daughter of a New York merchant, and started back on the long journey around Cape Horn. For eight years (1852-1860) he was stationed at Ponape and Ebon Islands, in Micronesia. At the end of that time, broken in health, he returned to Honolulu. Several years of public speaking on missionary topics in the United States followed, and then from January of 1864 till February of 1870 he was secretary of the Board of the Hawaiian Evangelical Association, the agent of the American Board on the Hawaiian Islands and in Micronesia. See “Luther Halsey Gulick, Missionary in Hawaii, Micronesia, Japan, and China,” by Frances Gulick Jewett (Boston and Chicago, Congregational Sunday School and Publishing Society, 1895).