While serving as pastor to a church in Conway, Massachusetts, from 1821-1825, Edward Hitchcock started his tradition of weaving a scientific theme into his Thanksgiving sermons. As a committed Christian, Hitchcock was continually faced with the evidence of paleontology and geology and what he read in biblical Scripture. He and many other early paleontologists remained Creationist without denying the evidence of tropical fossils in cool northern climates and thought that changes in fossils in different layers indicated successive separate creations.