Jacob Osgood

Who was Jacob Osgood?

Jacob Osgood was the founder of a 19th-century Christian sect in New Hampshire known as the Osgoodites.

Osgood was born in South Hampton, New Hampshire. At age 12, his family moved to Warner, New Hampshire, where, as a young adult, he married Miriam Stevens, with whom he had eight children.

Osgood became a farmer in Warner and was a member of the local Congregational Church. In the early 19th century, both Calvinism and Universalism were vying to become the dominant theological perspective among New England Congregationalists. Osgood was averse to both approaches and left the Congregational Church in 1805. He initially joined the Free Will Baptists, but by 1812 he had begun his own separate congregation.

Osgood taught his version of Christianity to others in the Congregationalist Church in Warner. He claimed to be a prophet who could heal physical deformities and illness through the laying on of hands. Thomas Hackett was Osgood's first disciple, and Osgood's following grew throughout New Hampshire in the 1820s. The first congregation of Osgoodites was established in Warner, with a second one of approximately thirty families being organized in Canterbury in the early 1820s.