Battersby, Charles

Battersby, Charles, a Methodist Episcopal minister, was born at Manchester, England, in 1836. He emigrated to the United States with his parents in his ninth year; received from his exemplar an early, careful mental and moral traininug; experienced conversion in his nineteenth year, while teaching near Saugerties. N. Y.; and at once began laboring from house to house for the salvation of souls. He graduated at the State Normal School at Albany in 1858; resumed his profession as teacher at Gravesend, L. I.; received license to preach, and accepted a call to supply a vacant pulpit until 1864, when he entered his remaining life-work as city missionary and tract- distributor in New York city. He joined the New York Conference in 1865, and labored under its direction to the close of his life, receiving as his first appointment the Five Points Mission, and his three subsequent ones as chaplain of the city prison. He died of typhoid fever, May 29, 1868. Mr. Battersby was extremely modest and retiring in deportment, charitable in judgment almost to a fault, unflinching in duty, ardent and sportful in his home relations. His literary attainments and preaching abilities were extraordinary, and his life exemplary. See Minutes of Annual Conferences, 1869, p. 89; Simpson, Cyclop. of Methodism, s.v.