Homer Clyde Stuntz, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church

Appointed Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal church for the state of Iowa in 1920

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/137812047/homer-clyde-stuntz

Children Photo Clyde Bronson Stuntz 1886–1965

Lucy Clark Stuntz 1893–1903

• Homer's birth, biographical, and death information are available at https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LWJP-6HMm and https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/137812047/homer-clyde-stuntz
• Homer's photograph is used courtesy of Dorian the Historian, Find A Grave ID 46627283.
  • "HOMER CLYDE STUNTZ, was the youngest of the children of Edward Wells Stuntz and Isabel (Hilborn) Stuntz. He graduated from Albion Academy, which his father helped to found, and from which all the children graduated. All of them also taught school at various times during the winters, and Homer, after a stint of school-teaching went out to Iowa to work with his oldest brother, where, as he once said, ”I could follow a plow straight as a die for a hundred and sixty rods in soil as black as a preacher’s hat.” He taught school in the winters and became interested in the study of law under the tutorship of a local barrister. Less than a year later he felt a call to preach and after some experience as a lay preacher he enrolled at Garrett Biblical Institute in Evanston, Illinois, to study for the ministry. Eye trouble interrupted his studies, and he took a preaching appointment again in Iowa.
  • "There, during a summer conference at Clear Lake he met a young woman who was acting as postmistress for the Conference. She asked him to spell his name when he inquired for letters, and smiled at the sound of the “ntz”, but later on she found the name to be quite acceptable, and Estelle May Clark became the wife of Homer C. Stuntz. She came of farming people then living in Missouri. Her father, Timothy and her mother Elvira were real pioneers, having traveled out from Connecticut, where his earliest known ancestor, Lieutenant William Clark, had arrived from Dorsetshire, England in 1630. They too were God-fearing, Bible-reading parents, members of the Congregational Church. Estelle was studying in a teacher’s college while living with an older, married sister in Indiana, wife of Henry Ward and Bennett, a Methodist minister. An older brother, Eli, went to Arizona and then to California where, with his brother-in-law, General Moses H. Sherman, built the Los Angeles Railway Company, the Hotel Clark, the Subway Terminal Building and other enterprises. Other brothers and sisters moved to the Southwest. Homer and Estelle were married in 1885, and after the birth of their first child, Clyde Bronson, they went to India as missionaries of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Homer served as pastor, Presiding Elder, School Superintendent and as editor of “The IndIan Witness”, a Methodist publication.
  • "In 1895, their furlough coinciding with a serious break in his health, the family, then consisting of Clyde, Clara, Hugh, and Lucy returned to the United States. Again Homer took a pastorate in the Upper Iowa Conference, at Waterloo and later at Mt. Vernon, site of Cornell College. When the United States occupied the Philippine Islands following the war with Spain, the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church asked Homer to go out to pioneer Protestant work in that former Spanish colony that had never known liberty of religion. After two years he returned to take the family to Manila where they lived until a second, serious break in his health forced return to the United States.
  • "When his health was restored, the Board of Missions named him a Field Secretary to help inform the Church on missions and raise funds for the work. The family moved to Madison, New Jersey, and the following year, 1908, Homer was elected Executive Secretary of the Board of Missions. After four years, he was elected a Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church at the General Conference in Minneapolis. At his request he was assigned to administer the work in South America for a four-year period and was then transferred to the Omaha area, where he died of a heart attack in 1924.
  • "Following his death, Estelle purchased a home in St. Petersburg, Florida, and lived there with two nieces of the Bennett family until her death in 1944. Her ashes are buried beside the grave of her husband in Omaha. The first break in the family circle came in Manila when Lucy, the youngest child, died of spinal meningitis, for which at that time there was no cure. She was just eleven years old."