His last visit to Portland was during “the Old Home week” in August, 1900. He opened the festivities of that notable week by preaching Sunday morning in this Second Parish church, upon invitation of its pastor, and preaching again in the evening of that day at Yarmouth; returning Monday morning to the residence of his niece in the old homestead of his honored father, the first pastor of this Second Parish church, who died in that historic house on Cumberland Street in 1842, aged eighty years.
Elijah Kellogg married, after the age of forty, Hannah Pomeroy, the daughter of the Rev. Thaddeus Pomeroy, pastor at Gorham, Maine, from 1832 to 1839. Two children survive this union, both residing in Melrose Highlands, Massachusetts, Frank Gilman Kellogg and Mary Catherine, the wife of Mr. Harry Batchelder. I was called to officiate at the funeral service of their mother in the Cumberland home referred to, and rode to the grave with her sorrowing husband. Returning from the cemetery, the aged, grief-stricken man, said, “Now I will return to my home to be alone with my God.” His words have been living in my memory ever since. They implied that he was sure of finding the God of all comfort in that secluded and desolated home on Harpswell’s shore. Who doubts but the God we love dwelt there with his aged servant, strengthening and supporting him in his loneliness and sorrow?
His children desired greatly to have their father with them in their pleasant homes, but he chose to dwell among the people whom God gave him to serve unto the end. “I will die in the harness,” he would say, in answer to their appeals. I have from the lips of his son the words of the last prayer he was heard to offer some days before his death. “I thank God for a Christian mother, who consecrated me to Christ and the Christian ministry,”--the prayer was followed by his repeating of the twenty-third Psalm.... Just before Elijah Kellogg passed away from earth, he delivered this touching message for his Harpswell flock, “I want to send my love to all these people.” Having loved his own, like his dear Lord, he loved them unto the end. Yesterday the message was delivered to them by Professor Chapman in his funeral discourse. The very last words of this venerable man of God, this faithful shepherd of God’s people, were, “I am so thankful.”