Members of William G. Eliot’s church in St. Louis, Missouri organized an educational institute which, in 1857, became Washington University. Its charter permitted no sectarianism in religion or politics. Three-quarters of the early financial support came from members of his Unitarian congregation. Eliot reluctantly became the university’s first chancellor in 1871, and he therefore became minister emeritus of the church which he had founded in 1834. At the time of his death in 1887, there were sixteen hundred students and one hundred faculty members teaching in Washinton University’s college and schools of law, medicine, dentistry, fine arts, and engineering.

This man of small stature and fragile health managed to pioneer jointly in a parish and community ministry in the West which he deliberately choose, determined upon graduating from Harvard Divinity School, “to remain and lay down my ashes in the valley of the Mississippi.” Among Eliot’s other achievements were functioning as a Unitarian Christian missionary in the world around St. Louis, facilitating the formation of economically viable public schools, acting to keep the state of Mississippi in the Union, and providing leadership in the creation of the Western Sanitary Commission hospital agencies in the West to attend to medical emergencies of Civil War soldiers.

In 1854 Harvard University honored him with the degree of Doctor of Divinity.