George Bennard

BENNARD, George. b. Youngstown, Ohio, 4 February 1873; d. Reed City, Michigan, 10 October 1958. Bennard was the son of a coal miner, who died when George was a young man. He did not finish high school, because his widowed mother and family had to be supported, and so he worked as a miner himself. He was converted at a Salvation Army meeting at Lucas, Iowa. He and his wife became Salvation Army officers, and later he became a Methodist. He travelled as a Methodist evangelist through the northern Midwest of the United States and Canada. Bennard wrote some 300 hymns, of which ‘On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross’* is best known: it is one of America’s most popular gospel songs, one...