This man first saw the light May 20, 1813, in a house on Congress Street in Portland, Maine, where dwelt the pastor of the Second Congregational Church of the city. The baby was called Elijah because that was the father’s name; and the father at his birth had been called Elijah because of the famous prophet in Israel who bore the name. At the father’s birth it was said by his parents, “We must have a prophet in the family.” So the name Elijah was given to the boy and he proved a prophet not in name only, but in reality as well. The Rev. Elijah Kellogg, pastor of the Second Congregational parish in Portland during the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, was no mean representative of the old Hebrew prophet. The famous name sat well and appropriately upon the younger man. Had the Rev. Mr. Kellogg lived in the days of Ahab, of infamous memory, we may be very sure he would have stood beside the old prophet in his stout resistance to that wicked king; and had the Hebrew prophet been born in New England in the eighteenth century he would have sympathized warmly with his young namesake as he buckled on his belt and beat the drum for the patriots at the battle of Bunker Hill, and put forth all his skill and strength to free the colonies from the selfish and tyrannical rule of George III. There never yet was a true prophet of God in any land whose heart did not beat warmly for larger popular liberty and for a higher type of righteousness. Every prophet looks toward a sunrising that shall bring to earth a better day.
Elijah Kellogg, Sr., was but a boy at the opening of our Revolutionary struggle, but he was a boy of high spirit, of dauntless courage, and of most generous impulses. He derived these qualities of character from two distinct sources. These sources were, first, his ancestry, and second, the neighborhood where he was born, viz., South Hadley, Massachusetts. A boy could hardly be born and reared in the atmosphere of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, especially around Northampton and the Hadleys at that period of time, and be anything other than a freedom-loving patriot. It was a region of country favorable to the growth of heroes. Settled by stanch and sturdy Puritans, its people had for many years been sternly disciplined by the Indian troubles. No pusillanimous and faint-hearted men could by any means live long in that section. Only men of courage and strength could abide there. The Kelloggs proved what stuff they were made of, for the family had been living there for more than a century when Elijah came upon the scene. They were there when the regicide judges, Whalley and Goffe, pursued by the rancorous hatred of Charles II., sought an asylum in New England. Those men came first to New Haven for shelter, but even there they were not safe from the emissaries of the king. The protection, however, that New Haven could not afford them, Hadley could. Among the steel-hearted men of that up-river country they found safety. In that region was an association of liberty-loving souls, which, better than woods and better than caves, made life safe for those men who had helped behead a faithless king and had thereby given the cause of political and religious freedom a great uplift. Some towns are vastly better for boys to be born in than other towns are. South Hadley was one of the “better towns,” where Elijah Kellogg, Sr., saw the light for the first time in the year 1761.