The Author of “Beulah Land”
Edgar Page Stites, the author of “Beulah Land” and many other popular hymns, was a local deacon of the Methodist Episcopal Church and served as a supply preacher in Dakota. At the outbreak of the Civil War he lived in Richmond, Virginia. After enlisting he was stationed in Philadelphia and had charge of feeding the troops which passed through that city. At the time of his death in Cape May he was the oldest insurance agent in New Jersey.
During his retirement he once wrote to a friend: “I am whittling away on my eighty-second year. Have written a great many songs the last fifty years signed ‘Edgar Page,’ which is the front of my name. I was enabled by great spiritual help to write ‘Beulah Land’ in 1876, at Philadelphia. I was wonderfully converted sixty-five years ago this month [November, 1852] and am still on board the old ship Zion.”
“Uncle Joe” Cannon, ex-Speaker of the House of Representatives, once met Mr. Stites in Cape May and told him he would rather have written “Beulah Land” than to have been President of the United States. Chaplain McCabe was the first to introduce this now famous hymn to the public, singing it at a ministers’ meeting in Philadelphia. Since then it has been sung around the world and during the World War it was a general favorite of the soldiers overseas.
And another sidelight upon the writer of