Judson Van Deventer
5 December 1855–17 July 1939

Judson Van DeVenter was born on a farm in Michigan in 1855. Following graduation from Hillsdale College, he became an art teacher and supervisor of art in the public schools of Sharon, Pennsylvania He was, in addition, an accomplished musician, singer, and composer. Van DeVenter was also an active layman in his Methodist Episcopal Church, involved in the church's evangelistic meetings.
Van DeVenter traveled throughout the United States, England, and Scotland, doing evangelistic work. Toward the end of his life, Van DeVenter moved to Florida, and was professor of hymnology at the Florida Bible Institute for four years in the 1920s. Van DeVenter published more than 60 hymns in his lifetime, but "I Surrender All" is his most famous.  

Deventer, Netherlands

Willis Van Devanter

Willis Van Devanter, 1911-1937

WILLIS VAN DEVANTER was born on April 17, 1859, in Marion, Indiana. He received a law degree from the University of Cincinnati Law School in 1881 and joined his father’s law firm in Marion. Three years later, Van Devanter moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, and established his own practice. Van Devanter served as a member of the commission that revised the statutes of the Wyoming Territory in 1886. In 1887,
he served as City Attorney of Cheyenne, and in the following year he was elected to the Territorial Legislature. Van Devanter was only thirty years old when, in 1889, President Benjamin Harrison appointed him Chief Justice of the Wyoming Territorial Supreme Court. After Wyoming was admitted to the Union as the forty-fourth State in 1890, Van Devanter resigned as Chief Justice and returned to private practice. In 1897, President William McKinley appointed him an Assistant Attorney General, assigned to the Interior Department.
President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in 1903. President William H. Taft nominated Van Devanter to the Supreme Court of the United States on December 16, 1910. The Senate confirmed the appointment on January 3, 1911. Van Devanter served on the Supreme Court for twenty-six years. He retired on June 2, 1937, and died on
February 8, 1941, at the age of
eighty-one.