Russell H. Conwell

Russell H. Conwell (1843–1925) was born in South Worthington, Massachusetts, and left law studies at Yale in 1862 to raise and command a company in the Civil War. Admitted to the bar in 1865, he practiced law before his ordination as a Baptist minister in 1881; called the next year to Philadelphia's struggling Grace Baptist Church, he built it into the Baptist Temple and, in 1884, founded night classes for working students that grew into Temple University, of which he served as first president from 1887. His lecture "Acres of Diamonds," urging listeners to find opportunity where they already stood, was delivered by his own count some six thousand times over five decades and funded much of the university's growth. He died in Philadelphia.