John Holt Rice (1777–1831), Presbyterian clergyman, author, and educator, was born in a part of Bedford County that became Campbell County in 1781. He attended Liberty Hall Academy (later Washington and Lee University) in Lexington and George A. Baxter’s academy in New London. From 1796 to 1799 Rice worked as a tutor at Hampden-Sydney College. After privately studying theology, he was licensed as a minister in 1803, and he served successively as pastor of a Charlotte County church, 1804–12, and First Presbyterian Church of Richmond, 1812–23. Rice founded the Virginia Bible Society in 1813. He regularly published sermons and religious essays and edited the Christian Monitor, 1815–17, and its successor, the Virginia Evangelical and Literary Magazine, 1818–28. In 1823 Rice declined the presidency of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), instead accepting the professorship of theology at Hampden-Sydney, where he helped transform the theology department into the separate but affiliated Union Theological Seminary. He died at Hampden-Sydney (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; Sprague, American Pulpit description begins William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, 1857–69, 9 vols. description ends , 4:325–41; William Maxwell, A Memoir of the Rev. John H. Rice, D.D. [1835]; Richmond Enquirer, 16 Sept. 1831).