Robert Hudson Howren (August 9, 1811 - September 22, 1889) was a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. He helped organize the Florida Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Tallahassee in 1845 [1] . He was the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Florida Annual Conference in 1848 which helped establish the first educational institution in Florida, the East Florida Seminary, which was a forerunner to the University of Florida [2] . He became a Methodist minister in 1839 in Lowndes County, Georgia, and served for more than 50 years through south Georgia and north Florida [3] . He was the father of Florida congressman Henry Durant Howren and the maternal grandfather of Florida Secretary of State Robert Andrew Gray [4] .