Ohio History Journal

THE HISTORIC RURAL CHURCH1

 

BY Roy E. BOWERS

 

The historic rural church of the Northwest Territory, of

which Tallmadge is a distinguished example, has passed through

three phases and is now entering a fourth. This is especially true

of Ohio. These phases are: First, that of rapid, energetic and

often heroic pioneering. This, in Ohio, ended about 1830. Sec-

ond, that of tension and conflict, ending with the Civil War. Third,

that of prosperity and slow decline, through the Civil War to

the first World War. Fourth, that of new pioneering on new

frontiers, the present-day stage or perhaps that of the immediate

future.

It all begins with the Ordinance of 1787, and its versatile

creator, the Rev. Manasseh Cutler, Congregational minister,

teacher, "dispenser of physic," real estate expert, "Prince of diplo-

mats and first of lobbyists."

The opening up of the Northwest Territory, thus created,

at once followed and immediately it seemed as if all America was

on the march. Within ten years a million settlers poured into

the Ohio Valley. From southern New England alone eight hun-

dred thousand people went west or south before 1820. John C.

Calhoun once stated that so great was their political activity that

there was a time in the lower house of Congress when it was

within five votes of being controlled by a bloc of representatives

who were either natives of Connecticut or Yale graduates or both.

These pioneers had a strong religious bent. Not less than

six definitely religious and denominational invasions can be listed.

Count them: First, the famous caravan assembled by Manasseh

Cutler that left Massachusetts in December, 1787, crossed the

Alleghenies, built the new Mayflower, and in it descended the

Ohio to found Marietta April 7, 1788, and almost immediately

1 Address at the Tallmadge Service of the Mid-West Regional Meeting of the

Missions Council of Congregational Christian Churches, October 23, 1940.

(89)

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90     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

instituted religious services, which led ultimately to the organiza-

tion of the oldest Congregational Church in the Northwest Ter-

ritory in 1796. In 1790 an expedition of New Jersey Baptists

led by Judge John Cleves Symmes went down the river and

landed at Columbia, near the future Cincinnati, and there founded

the first church in the Territory. That same year an eager ideal-

istic colony of French Catholic artisans and tradesmen from Paris

founded Gallipolis, "City of Gaul," a community that has made

a larger contribution to the Roman Catholic hierarchy than any

other American town; eight bishops of that church are sons of

Gallipolis.

Simultaneously, swarming across Kentucky and over the river

came Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians from

all the southern states, pushing up the Miami, Scioto and Licking

valleys into central Ohio. A little later from Pennsylvania

sedately plodded Lutherans, Mennonites, Dunkards and Quakers,

and, less sedately, ardent Welsh Congregationalists; some of these

did not stop till they came in sight of the Indiana line and

founded the fine old Paddy's Run Church, now Shandon, in 1803,

the year Ohio became a state.

Finally, into the New Connecticut, as it was called back East,

but locally known as the "Western Reserve," together with its

western portion, "The Firelands," came New England Congre-

gationalists and a smaller number of Presbyterians from New

York and Pennsylvania. Thus Ohio was the first territory to be

settled by people from all the older states, and this made it what

it has continued to be, the great middle and average and repre-

sentative American state.

Those Connecticut Congregationalists were anxious to have

their emigrating children spiritually cared for, but they were doubt-

ful about the effectiveness of their kind of organization. So they

founded the Connecticut Missionary Society and persuaded the

Presbytery of New York to be agent, taking their ministers, mem-

bers and money to establish churches in the wilderness. Under

the Plan of Union two thousand churches were established in the

Northwest Territory by 1830. The first missionary sent was an

illustrious soldier of the Revolution, physically tough, mentally

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HISTORIC RURAL CHURCH                 91

 

gifted, spiritually adventurous, the Rev. Joseph Badger, not to be

confused with that other Joseph Badger, who, a quarter of a

century later, also came into Ohio as a pioneer of the Christian

group of churches with whom the Congregational Church is now

united.

This Joseph Badger came to Cleveland in December, 1800.

Calling upon the two families composing the settlement, he set

out next day and, in the following six months, looked up all the

families on the Reserve, about two hundred in all. That October

he organized the Austinburg Church, the first Congregational

Society on the Reserve, and one which remains a typical rural

church to this day.

Making Austinburg his home, he ministered far and wide,

organizing many churches. Hampered by his meager support he

asked the Missionary Society for an increase of a dollar a week.

But the Connecticut churches did not warm to his work of church

extension and turned him down. Discouraged, he accepted a call

from the presbytery to go as missionary to the Indians on the

Maumee. He was sent back East to collect funds for his new

work. The Presbyterians gave him $26.39, but in New England

he collected $1,117 and the Connecticut Missionary Society threw

in $100 extra for good measure.

Thus the Austinburg Church was left without a minister,

until Judge Eliphalet Austin's resolute wife, Sybil, mounted her

horse and made her famous but lonely ride back to New England

to persuade the Rev. Giles H. Cowles to come to Ohio. He and

his family returned with her in 1810 and he had a long and fruit-

ful ministry, not only in Austinburg, but far and wide. Roots-

town Church was organized by him that first year.

Mrs. Austin's exploit was typical of the amazing physical

energy of those pioneers.  Nestor Hurlbut of Twinsburg five

times made the journey on foot between Twinsburg and Goshen,

Connecticut. Once, as he left Goshen, he fell in with a man on

horseback, also bound for Twinsburg. He laid a wager with the

man that he would get there first; he won his wager, without

hitchhiking!

Restlessly this dynamic temper kept the pioneers on the move

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92     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

from settlement to settlement. In 1810 a group from Warren,

Connecticut, arrived in Tallmadge: Carters, Beaches, Sacketts,

Sturtevants. After thirteen years' sojourn, representatives of all

four families decided to push farther into the wilderness. Finally

they settled in the fertile meadows of the Vermilion River in

Ruggles Township and soon organized their church in Harvey

Sackett's cabin. The writer's father became minister of that church

about sixty years later, and the writer himself retains vivid boy-

hood impressions of the solid character, intelligence and vigor of

the children of those pioneers. The first man-child born there

became a drover to Iowa in 1846 and later a "Forty-Niner." The

first girl-child became a missionary to India. Both returned to

spend their last years in Ruggles.

Those early missionaries promoted education as strongly as

evangelism. Soon Grand River Institute rose beside Austinburg

Church. In 1802, the year that Cleveland's first school gathered

in a room of Lorenzo Carter's cabin, Joseph Badger and David

Hudson incorporated the Erie Literary Institute and chose Burton,

one of the largest settlements, for its site. Later it was moved

to Hudson and became the nucleus of Western Reserve College,

now a university in Cleveland.

The Rev. John Seward, for a third of a century minister of

Aurora, was always alert to discover promising youth. By his

tutoring and encouragement Samuel Bissell of Twinsburg was

prepared for Yale; he, after graduation there, founded the once

famous Twinsburg Institute. Mr. Seward helped Julian M.

Sturtevant of Tallmadge to go to Yale, whence he returned to the

West and became founder and second president of Illinois College

at Jacksonville. A later discovery of Seward was James A. Gar-

field, whom he inspired to leave the tow-path for Hiram College

and, later, for Mark Hopkins at Williams.

Women teachers emulated pastors in their quickening in-

fluence. Six days in the week they taught in the log school-

houses. Sundays with equal diligence they taught the Bible. Betsy

Sackett of Ruggles shaped the character and outlook of children

for a generation and there is no measure of her gracious influence.

Lucy Foster of Tallmadge counted among her pupils Julian M.

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HISTORIC RURAL CHURCH                  93

 

Sturtevant, Elizur Wright, the well-known actuary, Leonard

Bacon, author of the hymn, "O God, beneath thy guiding hand,"

also John Brown of Ossawattomie and Harpers Ferry.

Academies sprang up beside the churches in every county.

Literally, there was a denominational institute or college within

a day's walk of every backwoods cabin. It was inevitable that

the million sons and daughters of Ohio who went farther west

during the first century should be exceptionally equipped for

leadership in every vocation and in the nation's life. All of which

is to say that the rural church then was the chief cultural agent.

Indeed, in those days there was no distinct class of rural churches,

for all churches were such. That seventh grade boy in examina-

tion had it right not long ago, when he was told to discuss city

life in colonial times and wrote, "There were not many cities in

those days, and what there were were in the country." Until

after the War of 1812 the chief difference between town and

country was in the number of houses to the square mile. Even

in New England in 1806 the ecumenical vision was seen from a

stack.

On the frontier speculators saw a manufacturing city at every

waterfall and a metropolis at every township center. In 1814,

Millville, now without a trace, with Twinsburg's pride and lots

were offered for $250, the highest price in Ohio, outside of Cin-

cinnati. In that year Lydia and Lyman Sperry with their twelve

children disembarked at Cleveland. There they were offered land

in the present center of the city at $1.25 per acre, but scorned it

in favor of a farm in Tallmadge at double that price.

The noble Tallmadge Church was under construction before

the future site of Akron was even surveyed, and when Akron

First Church was a year old Tallmadge completed its first quarter-

century. Thus, in those days the rural church was The Church,

the strong mother of churches in cities yet to be born. The Rural

Church was not a Community Church in the modern self-conscious

institutional sense, but was the inspirer of a deeply religious and

evangelistic awareness of community responsibility. The pioneers

were wonderful neighbors. New settlers were guests till their

cabins were built. Sickness was an emergency to be met with

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94     OHIO ARCHEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

all the resources of all the neighbors. Poverty was the common

lot, but destitution did not exist because all shared and no one

was cold or hungry. Life in the pioneer church was like primitive

Christianity, social-minded not by profession but by instinct and

by the Spirit, flowering and bearing fruit in numberless community

activities inspired but not owned by the church.

By 1830 the scene had changed. Pioneering was over but its

momentum and excitement remained. When they did not sweep

men on to new adventures in the West, as in the case of John

Brown, they reacted locally and violently, and one looks upon a

tumultuous spectacle. Emotions let loose in the Kentucky Revival

rocked the souls of men. Adventists went up and down the land

terrifying the people with lurid prophecies. Spiritualists conjured

up specters that made the morale of the credulous as water. The

Mormons came and left, violently. Antimasonic prejudice like

a tornado swept the land. In Ohio, out of fifty thousand Free

and Accepted Masons, forty-five thousand renounced their obliga-

tion for good and all.

Sectarian controversy centered on doctrine to the extent of

blurring moral judgments. The first Sunday Julian Sturtevant

was in Jacksonville, the Methodists having maneuvered to hold

the only hall against the Presbyterians, he attended the Methodist

service. The preacher seized the occasion to excoriate John Cal-

vin and all his works.

Champ Clark, in his autobiography, says that men who were

so illiterate they did not know the alphabet would argue lengthily

and profoundly the various interpretations of the Greek verb "bap-

tizein" (baptize). How completely in some localities human

values were disregarded is suggested by the epitaph on the tomb-

stone of a notorious Indian hunter:--"To Lem S. Frame, who,

during his lifetime shot 89 Indians whom the Lord delivered

into his hand, and who was looking forward to making up his

hundred before the end of the year; when he fell asleep in Jesus,

March 27, 1843."

Few were the churches that were not split by quarrels. Cases

of discipline were routine religious diversion.  In the Wayne

Church two men fought so bitterly that both were excommuni-

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HISTORIC RURAL CHURCH                 95

 

cated. In the recoil they were thrown into each other's arms and

became bosom friends. Thereupon, joining forces they organized

and built a church of their own where they could quarrel in peace

and amity.

Oberlin was a disturbing element. Plan of Union Churches

called a convention in Cleveland in 1843 to devise means of hedg-

ing in what they called "this fountain of evil and protect saints

from its pestiferous malaria."  Oberlin students came largely

from rural churches and returned to tell the things they had seen

and heard, many of which were distracting enough. In Medina

an Oberlin applicant for a school was chased out of town by a

deacon with a club when the good man caught the student in his

house. Every Sunday for a long period a sermon was preached

against Oberlin at one of the two services.

The slavery issue was the worst disturber of the peace. Presi-

dent, then Professor, Asa Mahan's little children were stoned in

the streets of Cincinnati as "black abolitionists." In Aurora, when

a student from Hudson came to make an antislavery speech in

the church, a mob gathered and loaded and fired a cannon with

such heavy loads of powder that most of the church windows

were broken. It is not strange that in such an overheated atmos-

phere the Plan of Union blew up, and when the smoke had cleared

away scores of churches were found in conferences instead of

presbyteries.

But by degrees one question became dominant--Shall the

union be preserved? In Joshua R. Giddings' tiny law office, a

stone's throw from Jefferson Church, the Ohio Republican party

was conceived. Soon, to be a Congregationalist meant to be a

Republican.

When the war came, the souls of men flowed together in

unity. The country churches rose as one man. Ohio sent more

soldiers into the war than any other state. In Twinsburg, for

example, more than one-tenth of the population volunteered, not

including the "squirrel hunters" of Morgan's Raid. Bodies and

souls were laid on the nation's altar.

In the Civil War the turbulent energies of the pioneer spent

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96     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

themselves, and one now looks upon an era of peace and quietness.

Prosperity came to the rural churches. Many staid old colonial

buildings were supplanted by stylish mid-Victorian structures.

Benevolences increased. Life membership certificates from the

American Missionary Association, long the pet project of Western

Reserve churches, hung on the sitting room walls of hundreds of

farm houses. Oberlin students, coming home for vacation, brought

with them as their guests the sons and daughters of foreign mis-

sionaries. These were effective propagandists. The writer yet

thrills at the memory of guttural and clicking recitations and hair-

raising Zulu war whoops in the Ruggles Church by Amy and

Fred Bridgman and Jamie McCord!

But the prosperity was fleeting. As early as 1844 Emerson,

in his lecture on "The American Scholar," deplored the drift of

farm youth to New England cities. Here it developed a generation

later and now the classification of rural and city churches becomes

valid.

Bad roads irked the young people on the farms. Heavy debts

and all-devouring interest incurred during the post-war boom dis-

couraged any ambition to follow in the furrow turned by the

fathers. The writer recalls that a farmer for whom he once

worked paid over $3,000.00 interest on a note for $1,000.00 and

died with it still unpaid, but thankful that he had not defaulted

the interest.

Many debtors were less heroic; thousands of farms were sur-

rendered to absentee creditors. Machinery displaced hands. The

boys went to the city or went West. By 1885 the glory of many

an ancient church had departed. The city churches now had their

brief turn of prosperity at the expense of the country. The Rev.

P. D. Dodge, far-sighted minister of the Tallmadge Church forty

years ago, told the writer that on the session of every Presbyterian

Church in Cleveland were former Tallmadge men. How many

were in similar places of trust in Congregational Churches he did

not try to estimate. All Cleveland cherishes the memory of one

son of Tallmadge: Sereno Peck Fenn, for whom the great Y.M.C.A.

technical school is named. The writer has referred to another

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HISTORIC RURAL CHURCH                 97

 

Tallmadge boy, Julian M. Sturtevant; yet another was the late

Dr. Homer W. Carter, long an honored secretary of the Wis-

consin State Conference. Like Tallmadge, all the country churches

were pouring their young life into the cities and the new West.

The unhappy result was that a defeatist spirit settled upon the

churches and dozens gave up. But there were contributing causes

even more fatal, because they went deeper into the spiritual

texture.

The New England churches resented having frontier name-

sakes and tried to disown them. In the council called to recog-

nize First Church, Columbus, Lyman Beecher fought with all

his might to stall off any favorable action, saying that there was

no place for Congregationalism in these parts. William Adams

Brown says that the "outstanding character of the American

Church is its provincialism and individualism" as seen in "The

Episcopalians of Virginia, the Congregationalists of New England,

the Presbyterians of Pennsylvania, the Baptists of the South and

the Lutherans of Missouri."  William W. Sweet, in his history

of Congregationalists on the frontier, points out that this denomi-

nation is outstanding in those respects. He notes "the smug pro-

vincialism and the superiority complex of the New England

Churches." For this reason Joseph Badger was given the cold

shoulder; for this reason, in part, the national societies two gen-

erations later left many a country church to die.

Yet even this was not the decisive reason for all of the fatal-

ities, but a curious local culture of that same "smug provincialism

and superiority complex," that made churches of pioneer stock

unfriendly and high-hat toward newcomers among them from

southern Ohio and West Virginia. Its earliest appearance was

in the custom of selling pews to pay for buildings. An equity

was thus constituted in the church property, which could be bought,

sold or inherited like any other tangible property. The pews had

doors and the owners were choosey as to admissions. In the

Weymouth Church near Medina one Sunday a stranger entered

and took his seat. Soon a bristling pewholder made clear that

it was not his seat. He moved to another pew, only to be again

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98     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

ejected. He then left the building but soon returned with a chunk

from the woodpile. This he stood on end in the aisle and sat on

it the remainder of the service. In Twinsburg, after the Congre-

gationalists had paid for their building by the sale of pews, the

Methodists, although less monied, raised an almost equal amount

for their house by shrewdly appealing for gifts to provide a church

for the community with free pews.

Ohio comes naturally by its sectarianism because of the

nation-wide sources from which its people came, and every sect

was largely represented. Churches multiplied on every hand. In

1890 the State had more church buildings than any other in the

union. However, the coldness and exclusiveness of many, and the

timid reserve of the best intentioned among our people alienated

or rebuffed hosts of good folks who otherwise would have taken

to some extent the places of those who left for the cities, and rival

organizations would not so often have sprung up.

Thus it came about, through this combination of national

and local attitudes, that many of the pioneer churches disappeared;

their fine old meeting-houses went to ruin or were taken over for

other purposes or by stronger sects. Yet some beloved sanctuaries

remain, like those of Tallmadge, Atwater, Litchfield, Freedom,

Twinsburg and elsewhere, abiding witnesses to Pilgrim ideals.

Those that survive are now entering upon a new and hopeful

phase that calls them and all their adherents to face new frontiers

for more durable pioneering.

The town is coming to the country. New Americans with

large families are filtering into every township, and on the mail-

boxes there is a picturesque and prophetic alternation of old and

new American names. Let the rural churches revive the sincere

neighborliness of the early days and new strength will surely

revive them.

The danger is that they will not react thus but that they

may revert to the old exclusive pattern. A student of agricul-

tural economics recently made out a report on a typical Western

Reserve community which his own ancestors helped to settle. Of

the present population he remarked: "There is an increase of first

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HISTORIC RURAL CHURCH                  99

 

and second generation foreign stock settling on the smaller farms,

and this fact is resented by the natives." Of course this resentment

is not peculiar to rural districts. The city churches have been as

provincial and have edged away from the newcomers, with the

result that the churches are fast becoming a suburban cult.

Yet now is the new day of opportunity, and a new crisis in

the life of the rural church. To assimilate and grow, or to reject

and perish, are the alternatives. By precept and by friendly forth-

going example on the part of adults, let the children be brought

to show kindness to the young strangers in school, on the play-

ground and in the school bus. Let hospitality welcome them to

the old homesteads, and let the young Old Americans bring the

young New Americans into their church activities. Let the adults

be neighborly toward the parents who may not yet "speak Amer-

ican," but who know the language of the heart and are glad when

their children are happy.

Let ministers and teachers study the Old World background

and culture, and with intelligent appreciation blend it into the

thinner American tradition. Let them be advised by the Rev.

George Blodgett Gilbert, who says in his, Forty Years a Country

Minister: "Somehow the maturer churches must adjust their pro-

grams to all sorts and conditions of men. They may have what

they call 'the best people' . . . but they are headed for disaster. . . .

The lower cultural level supplies the cities with its youth, and

the churches must look in this direction for [replacement]. . . .

It is because this great group of underprivileged do not feel at

home in our churches that more than a score of eccentric sects

exercise such a pull over them." And that goes for rural churches

too.

The new families do not come in colonies, as the early settlers

often came to the Reserve, bringing their church organization with

them, like Windham, Dover and others. Therefore, they can be

drawn one by one into friendly association with existing institu-

tions. As others come they will find a pattern already accepted

cheerfully by those who preceded them. They will not feel ex-

cluded and bleak, and as time passes they will not revert to old

country religious patterns and associations, because they have

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100    OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

found the new ones so satisfying. Thus the community life will

be unified.

Subversive and sinister anti-American agencies are trying to

split American society into hostile blocs, white against black, labor

against capital, Protestant against Catholic, Christian against Jew,

Old American against New American. The spirit that motivates

the "New Testament Church" and later the "American Pioneer

Church" is the only force that can foil these plotters against the

"American Way of Life." It is the spirit of the Christian neigh-

bor and fellow traveler.

In the vital task of reviving these pioneer Christian virtues

it is most fortunate that in the Ohio fellowship the Congrega-

tional-Christian fusion is making such splendid progress. The

Christian brethren represent an actual product of the frontier,

which has preserved more of the spirit of the pioneers than the

older Congregational groups have done. The writer does not

know of a more inspiring chapter of Ohio church history than that

which records the coming of mighty men like Nathan Hill, Samuel

Kyle and David Purviance. Their pure democracy, their love of

life and youth and plain people, and their heroic loyalty to their

convictions, summon all their successors to emulation.

The old life of isolated individualism is fast disappearing.

Aristotle used to teach that the size of any city, if it is to be

efficient, should be fixed by the number of people able to hear one

man's voice at one and the same time. The radio today has packed

the whole world into the area of ancient Athens or Rome. We

are neighbors all.

Let the Pilgrim churches, heirs of the pioneers, whole-heart-

edly accept this fact with its implications. Let the national so-

cieties cooperate, no longer viewing the rural and the downtown

church as a cistern to be pumped dry, but as a living well to be

reopened; not as a field to be overcropped or turned back to wil-

derness, but as soil to be replenished and made fruitful again.

As for the rural church, its line is simply to strive to fulfill

the second great commandment and thus make its blessing avail-

able to all its neighbors.

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