Charles Sherlock Fillmore was born on August 22, 1854, and died on July 5, 1948. He and his wife, Myrtle Page Fillmore, started the New Thought church Unity in 1889. He became known as an American mystic because of what he did to help spiritualists understand the Bible. Fillmore worked to get people to become vegetarians for 30 years of his life. Fillmore broke his hip while ice skating when he was ten years old. This caused him to have problems for the rest of his life. Even though he didn't have much schooling, he read works by William Shakespeare, Lord Tennyson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles Lowell in his early years. He also read books about spiritualism, Eastern religions, and philosophy. In the middle of the 1870s, he met Mary Caroline "Myrtle" Page, who would become his wife. They met in Denison, Texas. He went to Gunnison, Colorado, when he lost his job there. There, he worked in mining and real estate. On March 29, 1881, they got married in Clinton, Missouri. The newlyweds went to Pueblo, Colorado, where Charles started a real estate business with the brother-in-law of Nona L. Brooks, who later started the Church of Divine Science.
