Benajah Harvey Carroll
1843 – 1914

Baptist minister and educator, B. H. Carroll was born in Carrolton, Mississippi, the son of a preacher-farmer and one of twelve children. At the age of eighteen he was graduated from Waco University in Waco, Texas, and then spent the next four years in the confederate army during the Civil War. In 1865 at the age of twenty-two, he was converted to Christ in a wood shed through the efforts of a Methodist evangelist and was ordained to the ministry one year later. During the first years of his ministry immigrants were moving into Texas by the thousands and he labored for their evangelization.

After pastoring several Baptist churches, he became Secretary of the Education Confession of the Baptist General Convention of Texas in 1899. He served this capacity until 1901 at which time he became head of the Bible department at Baylor Theological Seminary which later became Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Carroll served as president of Southwestern from 1908 until his death in 1914.

In addition to his intellectual and argumentative abilities in an age of denominational debates, he possessed a lovable nature. He once said, “When I come to know a man and love him as a friend and a brother, nothing can destroy the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.” He believed in the Baptist interpretation of the teachings of the New Testament and was devoted to spreading these teachings to “the uttermost part of the earth.”