Roland Douglas Sawyer

Roland Douglas Sawyer was a Congregationalist minister and Massachusetts state legislator. He is best remembered as one of the leading Christian socialists of the first decade of the 20th century and as the author of an array of self-published books and pamphlets on genealogy and the local history of New England.

Biography

Early years

Roland Douglas Sawyer was born January 8, 1874, in Kensington, New Hampshire, the son of a father who was a shoemaker and a mother who taught school. Roland dropped out of school at age 16 to learn he craft of shoemaking from his father, but at the age of 20 he made the decision to change his career path and entered the now defunct Revere Lay College in Revere, Massachusetts, a Protestant evangelical seminary.

Upon graduation from Revere in 1898, Sawyer took a position as a pastor at Hope Chapel in Brockton, Massachusetts, the first of four Congregational churches he would head. Coakley would be impeached by the House and found guilty and removed from office by the Senate the following year.

Sawyer ran four more campaigns for higher political office as a Democrat, all without success: for U.S. Congress in 1925 and in 1942, a second try for Governor of Massachusetts in 1928, and a race for U.S. Senate in 1930.

Clerical career

Sawyer was a Congregationalist minister throughout his life, heading churches at Brockton (1898-1900), Hanson (1900-1905), Ward Hill (1905-1909), and Ware (1909-1950s) in the state of Massachusetts.

Sawyer was also, particularly early in his clerical career, active in conservative social organizations, including the Anti-Profanity League, the Christian Endeavor Society, the Anti-Saloon League, and other temperance organizations. Ironically, as a Massachusetts legislator Sawyer came to believe that liquor prohibition was a failed system with unintended negative consequences and was involved in campaigns for its abolition.

Following his retirement in the 1950s, Sawyer spent his remaining years at his home in Kensington working on research projects in local history and genealogy.

Death and legacy Sawyer died in October 1969 at the age of 95.

Sawyer's papers reside in the Milne Special Collections department in the library at the University of New Hampshire in Manchester. The collection runs to 165 archival boxes, some of material.

An additional 13 boxes of materials, chiefly his dime novel collection, reside at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.