Abel J. Brown  Abel J. Brown (1817–1894), was a Lutheran pastor of Immanuel's and Buehler's (or Beeler's) congregations in Sullivan County, Tennessee. He was a leader in the Evangelical Lutheran Tennessee Synod from 1836 to 1861. He was instrumental in the leading the East Tennessee congregations to form the Evangelical Lutheran Holston Synod, and was a leading member of that synod from 1861 until his death. He published several of his sermons and essays, and was the president of the Diet of Salisbury in 1884, which oversaw the creation of the United Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the South. Brown was born near Lincolnton, North Carolina on March 27, 1817. He was the son of Absalom and Elizabeth (Killian) Brown, and the first son and second child of a family of ten children. His paternal grandfather was an Englishman, who came to America when a boy, and was a soldier in the Revolutionary war. His maternal grandfather was of German extraction, a native of Pennsylvania but in early life came to North Carolina, where he lived in the balance of his days and died. Brown's parents and ancestors generally, so far as is known, belonged to the laboring classes, and were distinguished for their industry, their frugality and thrift, and their moral integrity and religious worth. His mother was a woman of strong mind and of deep religious convictions, and eminently pious. His father was a man of superior native intellect, and of great firmness and decision and character. He was a farmer and mechanic and carefully trained up his children to manual labor, as well as "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." He was a man of considerable prominence in the community in which he lived. For many years he held the office of magistrate, and was often solicited to run for higher offices, but always positively declined. Brown's primary education was received in a good country school. His academic studies, preparatory to entering college, were prosecuted principally in the Male Academy, at Lincolnton, N.C., and his collegiate course was taken in Emory and Henry College, Virginia, from which he was graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and which afterward conferred up on him the Master of Arts degree, not merely "in course," but because of his higher attainments in literature. After graduation Brown engaged for a time in teaching. He first took charge of Jefferson Male Academy, in Blountville, Tenn., which he held for five or six years, when he accepted a professorship in Greenville College in Tennessee.