Washington W. Wendell (1828-1888) was born in Richfield Springs, New York, and died in Orange, Massachusetts. As a young man he traveled with his brother to Fillmore County, Minnesota, where he bought farmland and worked as a shoemaker. He was also a Methodist lay minister. In 1850, in McHenry, Illinois, he married Mary A. Wendell (b. Smith). They moved to Wisconsin, first to Trenton and by 1868 to Milwaukee, where Wendell worked as a shoemaker and sewing machine agent and also continued working as a minister. Around 1872 the couple moved to Orange, Massachusetts, where Wendell was employed at the New Home sewing machine factory. He studied at Choate Metaphysical College in Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 1887 by Clara E. Choate, a student of Mary Baker Eddy who had been expelled from the Church of Christ (Scientist) in 1884. He then became the principal of the Orange College of Christian Science and advertised in Mental Science Magazine and Mind Cure Journal, edited by A. J. Swarts, which regularly published articles repudiating the teachings of Eddy. In October 1887 Wendell was a featured speaker at a convention of mental healers in Boston that was organized by Luther M. Marston and also attended by William I. Gill, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Mary H. Plunkett, Choate, and other former students and associates of Eddy who had broken away from her movement and become hostile to her teachings. Wendell had reportedly just finished writing a book on Christian Science at the time of his death. He was a member of the Greenback Party and of the Knights of Honor.

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