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PEO-6 (LEG 5) DUG · THE NOBEL RECORD AND THE STANDARD BIOGRAPHIES
The faith-fame item of the religion checklist settles on the town's most consequential pulpit: the Rev. Samuel Clayton Urey of Walkerton, schoolteacher, farmer, and minister of the German Baptist Brethren — the father of Harold Urey. Harold Urey's own Nobel laureate profile names his father exactly so — "Rev. Samuel Clayton Urey" — and the standard biography (Kevles, The Physicists) gives the Walkerton form: "a farmer and minister of the Brethren Church in Walkerton, Indiana." The precision matters and prints: the Brethren ministry of that era was a lay, unsalaried calling, and the men of Samuel Urey's family "traditionally adopted the pious lives of lay ministers" — he preached as a farmer-preacher, taught school, and worked his land, the three callings of a Brethren elder in a German Baptist township. Tuberculosis took the family to Glendora, California, for his health and home again to Indiana; he died in October 1899, when Harold was six. His wife was Cora Rebecca, née Reinoehl — the spelling the biographical record carries (the marker-form question is banked separately as DF-W-21 and is assembly's, not this section's). The son's 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry makes the father's Walkerton ministry, by reach, the most widely printed fact about any pulpit in the town's history; it is printed here at the size of its evidence — a lay Brethren ministry, in Walkerton, in the 1890s — and the Brethren thread is carried whole in the communities addendum of this wave.
Principal sources: Harold C. Urey, Nobel laureate profile (Nobel Prize record); Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists; Matthew Shindell, dissertation on Harold Urey (UCSD, 2011, eScholarship).