1865-1955
Director of the Young Men's Christian Association and Lay Missionary

Pledge.

John Mott was born just weeks after the end of the Civil War and would live beyond America's conflict in Korea. Along the way John R. Mott would lead an extraordinary life dedicated primarily to the one goal he established in his youth, that of spreading the gospel to those who had never heard it. He had an ordinary, comfortable childhood in Postville, Iowa, the son of a lumberyard operator and a mother committed to the Methodist Church. At the age of thirteen, under the influence of evangelist J. W. Dean, Mott professed Methodism and with the help and guidance of his local pastor, Rev. Horace E. Warner, entered Upper Iowa University at the age of sixteen. Two years later he transferred to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He was considering a...