He was born in Elmira, New York. In 1880, at age 6, he was living with his parents at 423 Franklin Street, Elmira, New York. ®76 He attended Grammar School #3 in Elmira for 8 years and the next 4 years he spent at his uncle Dwight L. Moody's school, Mt. Hermon in Northfield, Massachusetts, from which he graduated 13 June 1892. He was a member of Centenary Methodist Episcopal Church in Elmira. In 1888, when he went to Mt. Hermon, his parents and family moved from Elmira to Gardner, Kansas. He attended Princeton College (Harvard?), but he was living in Gardner, Kansas by 11 April 1893. He left Gardner, Kansas on 4 May 1893 to go to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. He spent the summer of 1893 at the Moody Bible Institute; then attended the University of Kansas. He played varsity football at the University of Kansas in 1894. ®81 He left the University of Kansas in the middle of his junior year to become Assistant State Secretary of the YMCA of Kansas, in Topeka, on 3 May 1895. In 1898 the International Committee of the YMCA made him General Secretary in charge of YMCA work for the Spanish American War occupation forces of the U.S. Army in Cuba. (In 1898 Spain ruled Cuba and its' rebels. 15 February 1898, the battleship USS Maine, stationed in Havana’s harbor to help protect United State's interests, was blown up. War was declared, and led by Teddy Roosevelt, was won by the United States, with a truce with Spain being signed by August 1898). He married Mary Beckwith on 28 Jul 1900 in Havana, Cuba and they lived at 67 Prado, Havana after 1 Sep 1900. Their first son, Alexander Dwight was born in Havana on 30 May 1901. In May 1901 he left Cuba when the American forces were withdrawn. By Sep 1902 he was working in Chicago, Illinois for the Moody Bible Institute in charge of the new Evening Bible School. On 11 April 1903 their daughter Elizabeth Beckwith was born in Chicago. In November 1903 he applied for appointment as a missionary to one of the Spanish-American fields of the Methodist Episcopal Church. From 1 Jan 1904 until 1 May 1905 he was in Waterloo, Iowa, as Assistant Pastor to Dr. Samuel Callen, First Presbyterian Church at 505 Franklin Street (their combined salaries were $2800). The family lived at 414 Allen Street, Waterloo where their son Leonard was born on 28 April 1905. He left Waterloo after 16 months because the Church could not support the salaries of two ministers. ®82, ®83 In April 1905 he became Minister of his own church, ®84 the First United Presbyterian Church, 100 East Charles Street ®85, Oelwein, Iowa. He commuted from Waterloo to Oelwein for two months, finally moving his family on 1 Jul 1905 to Oelwein when Leonard was two months old. Their son Arnold Beecher was born 29 May 1907 in Oelwein. In Dec 1908 he performed at Union Meetings in Crawfordsville, Iowa with singer Miss McSparran. ®86 He left Oelwein in late March 1909 to become the Minister of the First Presbyterian Church, 501 South College Avenue, Aledo, Illinois, where he remained until 1 Sep 1919. (The Church he served burned and was rebuilt after they moved to Galesburg in 1919). His mother visited them in Aledo at 528 North Sixth Street about 1909. They lived free in the manse at 602 South College Avenue, Aledo, Illinois from at least 18 April 1910 ®5to 1919, and received a salary of $1800 per year and one months vacation. Their daughter Mary Isabel was born 2 February 1911 in Aledo. A 67 year old female widowed childless friend born in Vermont named "Aunt” Mary Davis lived with them in Aledo. She was a spinster who thought Mary Izabell needed help before Leonard was born in Waterloo in 1905 and moved with them to Aledo and stayed until after Mary was born in 1911. Then "Rosie”, a 14-15 year old country girl, came to be live in household help. Rosie left the family when they moved to Galesburg. She opened a cafe in Aledo and ran it until she retired. After A. E. received an inheritance of $500-$800 he started looking for a safe place for his wife and 5 children to spend the summers. After looking at a lot of lakeshore, on 4 November 1912 he purchased 9.5 acres with a house (built about 1863) at Big Sand Lake, Lot 5 Section 27 Township141 Range 34, Lake Emma Township, Dorset, Minnesota, from Charles Kubesch for $500. ®87 A. E. had the screened sleeping porches added to three sides of the one room house (which was always called Camp). Beginning in 1921 they drove from Muskogee to Dorset in 4 days over the unpaved Jefferson Highway (JH marked on barns, etc.) A. E. did not like to drive so Leonard or someone else drove the 7 passenger Mitchell automobile. There were no motels so they stayed in tourist parks where they would put up their tent and cook dinner. Breakfast was usually in a restaurant. Aunt Laura or Rosie often came along to help. Later they traveled by train to Dorset. The train would leave Minneapolis at 8 AM and arrive at Dorset at 5 PM. Mr. Thomas, the owner of Pine Cone Camp on Big Sand Lake, would meet them with a wagon and take them to Pine Cone, where they would spend the night. The next day they would go the mile to Camp. A. E. would come to Camp for the month of August, then take the family home on the train. In September 1919 they moved to Galesburg, Illinois, and A. E. took charge of New Era work of the United Churches of Wisconsin and Illinois, with offices in Chicago. He spent several years traveling to give lectures. On 1 January 1920 they lived at 506 Greenleaf Street, Galesburg, Illinois. On 30 November 1920 they lived at 1092 North Broad Street, Galesburg, Illinois. Reverend Moody moved to 217 North First Street, Muskogee, Oklahoma on 1 January 1921. The family stayed behind in Galesburg until June, 1921 to finish the school year (Leonard finished the 8th grade). Alexander graduated from Galesburg High School in June 1921, and went to Maryville College, Maryville, Tennessee the next fall. The family then followed to Oklahoma where their address from 3 Sep 1921 to 16 March 1923 was 528 North 6th Street in Muskogee. ®10 On 6 Sep 1923 they lived at 2805 West Okmulgee Avenue in Muskogee. ®10In 1926 his mother , Sarah Laura Beckwith, moved from Washington to live with them. She died in the music room of the parsonage at 515 North Thirteenth Street on Friday, 5 August 1927. ®88 By June 1928 they lived at 437 North Fourteenth Street, Muskogee, Oklahoma. He was Minister of the First Presbyterian Church, Fifth and West Broadway, Muskogee, Oklahoma from 1 January 1921 until 1928. He resigned because of poor health just before his death in 1928. Muskogee friends were Bob, Betty and Bobby Eyster with whom they liked to picnic on Fern Mountain with the Arkansas River below them. He died at age 54 of Bright’s disease (kidney failure), mitral valvular stenosis and arteriosclerosis on 3 Aug 1928 after several months of illness while visiting his sister Laura and her husband, Erwin G. Lundy, DDS, in Emporia, Kansas. He and the family were on their way to Camp when he became ill. He sent them on to Camp while he stayed in Emporia. He died at 6:30 PM at the Newman Memorial County Hospital in Emporia (Lyon County). The funeral was held in Emporia and he was buried in nearby Gardner, Kansas, with his parents. The Gardner Cemetery is at latitude 384817N longitude 0945612W. He was President of the Muskogee Rotary Club and the Ministerial Alliance of Muskogee, Chairman of the Muskogee Presbytery and a Trustee of Tulsa University at his death. He was a tall and heavy man (called Dr. Moody by his children) who liked classical and ragtime music. He knew Latin, Greek and Hebrew, was very organized, liked picnics, and though he never spanked his children, maintained discipline. After A. E. died in 1928, the family furnishings were put in storage (and never redeemed unless their son Alexander did it) at Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri where widowed Mary Izabell and daughter Elizabeth and son Arnold went to live while daughter Mary went to school for the 1929-30 and 1930-31 school years. Camp at Dorset, Minnesota burned to the ground in 1984.

“Rev. Arnold Edwin Moody, Presbyterian Minister
by Peter Wilson, Park Rapids, Minnesota
After buying nearly a mile of shoreline on the south shore of Big Sand Lake, Rev. Arnold Edwin Moody summered in Park Rapids, Minnesota from 1911-1928. I suspect he was invited to preach at least one or more local
congregations, since he had a broad view of Christianity. Rev. Moody was active in the early Boy Scout movement and many humanitarian religious activities. When he died his wife, Mary Isobel, and mother-inlaw, Sarah Laura Wright Beckwith, wintered at Camp on Big Sand during the depression, and knitted baby booties, sweaters and bonnets for Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago. There were no church pensions for widows of many ministers then, nor Social Security, and their savings were lost during the Depression. Yet their son Alexander Moody finished a law degree, Leonard Moody finished a medical degree, and Mary Moody Anderson finished college at a woman's college in Nevada Missouri and in Bemidji, Minnesota. Their son Arnold Moody learned the Tool and die trade, but loved working as a fishing and hunting guide in the area when he was young and later retired
with his wife Frances to Loon Lake across the road from Big Sand Lake. All the family visited the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago at one time or another because Dwight Lyman Moody was a great uncle, I believe, of Rev. Arnold Edwin Moody. Frank Moody is the only member to live in Hubbard County today, but his cousin Dwight Moody keeps an uninsulated summer cottage almost across the road in the easternmost part of the original 1911 purchase. Both are pretty well secluded from the road. Frank and Rosemary Moody are active in the Hubbard County Historical Society and court house art museum, I believe. Dwight and Mary just come up for 2 weeks in the summer from Aledo IL, usually in the August. Frank and his cousin Dr. David Moody in Florida have pretty extensive documentation of the Moody family in Hubbard County and in colonial America. They can correct and elaborate on what I am only writing from memory. I spent many happy days at old cottage on Big Sand before it burned to the ground about 1984. There was a good photo in the Enterprise. By that time Sophus Marcus Anderson and Mary Moody Anderson, a retired elementary teacher in PR, were living on the lake. Their 2 children, Stephen Anderson and Mary Anderson Wilson were living in the Seattle area and Minneapolis, respectively.”

Princeton or Harvard? ..letterman on football team? Elmira-christening? Need address in Oelwein. Ask Frank and Dwight for father's birth certificates. Was he a Trustee of Princeton University? Check 1910 Aledo Census for 528 North Sixth.