JOSEPH HEWITT, an itinerant Methodist minister, was born in Birmingham, England, on December 21, 1811. Raised in Liverpool, he moved to America at the age of nineteen and settled in Philadelphia. It was there that his life changed as he experienced a religious conversion. As his great-great-granddaughter, Genevieve Post, wrote in a short introduction to his journal, Hewitt “was a rulermaker, ne'erdowell, boozer, and came to Christ.” After his conversion, Hewitt returned to England and married Eliza Johnson in 1835. In the fall of 1847 he was authorized to preach as a minister of the Primitive Methodist Connexion Church, an English Methodist sect which stressed camp meetings and maintained itinerant and local preachers. In 1848 Hewitt moved his wife and two daughters, Lydia and Priscilla, to Platteville, Wisconsin. For the next thirty years he preached on most of the parish circuits of the Western Conference of the Primitive Methodist Connexion, which encompassed nine counties in southwestern Wisconsin. On occasion he took circuits in Racine County, Wisconsin, and Henry County, Illinois, and also served congregations in Janesville, Platteville, and Mineral Point, but he continued to preach as needed until his death on January 30, 1888.
LYDIA HEWITT BENNISON, the eldest daughter of Joseph and Eliza Hewitt, was born in 1844. Little is known of her early life except that she was married; had two sons, Lincoln and Sherman; and was widowed around 1867. Following the death of her husband, she lived with her parents and helped them with their church work until her death from consumption on August 5, 1885.
