Ohio History Journal

St. John's Parish, Worthington, and

the Beginnings of the Episcopal

Church in Ohio

By RICHARD G. SALOMON*

 

There are, I trust, a few among the oldest members of this parish

who still remember the day fifty years ago when the then dean of

Bexley Hall, the Very Reverend Hosea Jones, delivered the sermon

at the centenary of St. John's. Dr. Jones was closely connected with

Worthington; he had been rector of your parish in the 1870's. But

there are many other ties between Worthington and Bexley: if we

go over the list of your former rectors, we find familiar Bexley and

Kenyon names: Norman Badger, Rodolphus Nash, William French.

Dr. Jones's successor in the deanship, Charles Byrer, was ordained

deacon here in this venerable old church in 1900, together with a

Bexley man, Thomas Jenkins, who now is one of the oldest members

of the house of bishops. Bexley Hall considers it a special honor to

have been called upon again after fifty years, and I am grateful for

the privilege of conveying to you the greetings of our divinity school

and of expressing to you our sincerest wishes for the years and ages

to come.

The aim of the series of sermons and lectures which you have

arranged in celebration of your sesquicentennial is, I think, to define

the place where you now stand after one hundred and fifty years of

parish life: to look back into the past, to take stock of achievements

and perhaps also, since we are human, of failures, and to map out

the tasks of the future. It was a wise idea to distribute this assign-

ment among various speakers; and gladly I follow the instruction

implicit in this arrangement--to stick to subjects which I have

studied in detail, and to keep out of other men's fields. Today I

 

* Richard G. Salomon is professor of history at Kenyon College and professor of

church history in Bexley Hall, its divinity school. His article comes almost unaltered

from an address delivered at the sesquicentennial of St. John's Parish, January 3, 1954.

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shall try to lead you back into the past, to tell you how it all began,

and how the men and women whose names you read on the tomb-

stones out here in the churchyard, laid the foundations for what you

are enjoying now. For a moment let us forget the walls which

separate us from those stones; and let us feel that in some sense

they still are with us, the Founding Fathers, all of them: the

Thompsons and the Burrs, the Topplings and the Kilbournes, the

Barkers and the Buttleses, and the ancestors of those who today

are among your friends and fellow-citizens, the Griswolds and the

Pinneys.

The celebrations and the pageants of the last months have made

you very conscious of Worthington's history. You know there was

the big log cabin near the public square, in which the first Worthing-

tonians assembled for prayer, for school, and for social entertain-

ment; there was the academy building right over the street where

now the library stands. By now these old buildings, long gone, have

become almost as familiar to you as the monuments which we still

see: the Kilbourne house, the Griswold house, the Masonic lodge.

Thus, if I were to restrict myself to Worthington and St. John's

alone, I would run the risk of repeating only what you already have

heard or read a dozen times. It might be more rewarding to show

the broader frame in which things began here in this one place; to

integrate your history into a broader picture of early church life in

the frontier region which became the state and diocese of Ohio, the

old diocese which is now divided into Ohio and Southern Ohio.

Though you are justly proud of being the oldest organization of

Episcopalians in Ohio, there are some other parishes nearly as old as

you. Steubenville in the east and Boardman in the northeast are

still not easy to convince that, as I believe with you, Worthington

comes some years before them.

In many ways the development here was similar to what happened

in other places. There as here we see how the newcomers from the

East, groups of laymen, concerned with their religion, organized

their congregations for the regular ministrations of the church,

which were rather slow to come. The history of St. John's is in

some ways a typical chapter in the history of the old diocese.

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ST. JOHN'S PARISH, WORTHINGTON          57

 

Ohio's church history begins with her political history. The

Ordinance of 1787, which opened the Northwest for settlement,

provided in its first article for freedom in "mode of worship or

religious sentiments" in this new territory; and church life in one or

the other form, according to the traditions and habits which the

immigrants brought with them, began among the first settlers. They

came from various sections of the East, from New England, from the

Middle States, from Virginia; and for a long time the various parts

of Ohio, especially the Western Reserve and the region on the Ohio

River, showed the traces of this difference in origin. The melting

process that created the midwesterner as we know him today was

slow.

What the settlers found was a land of great promise. They were

optimistic about its future. In a letter written here in Worthington

in 1817 an optimist expressed the conviction that persevering in-

dustry would "yet render this State capable of supporting three

millions of people." We know how far this prophecy underesti-

mated the future; but we must consider the conditions under which

it was formulated. In the early descriptions of the state no formula

appears more stereotyped than the "howling wilderness." It took

the unbending energy of the frontiersman to tackle the heroic task

of transforming this vast territory into a working unit. A whole

generation lived in hardship to lay the foundations. An old Worth-

ingtonian, Joel Buttles, has left a most realistic description of what

life in this place was in the first years, in 1804 and 1805. The

"Yankee Settlement"--under this name Worthington appears on

the oldest map--was hidden in deep forests in which only some

first clearings had been made, when his father, Levi Buttles, ar-

rived with his family from Connecticut in December 1804. The

nearest white neighbors were in Franklinton, nine miles to the

south; Columbus did not exist yet. Fifteen miles north on the

Olentangy River there was "Carpenter's Settlement." There were

no other buildings than log cabins except one frame house. The

public square was pretty much all the opening there was, and even

that was covered with cut trees that had fallen pell-mell. It was

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difficult, Buttles says, to get from house to house through all the

timber.

The Buttleses came in the midst of a very hard winter with ten

to twelve inches of snow. A log cabin with one room for the

whole family served as a first abode; then they built a house with

logs from Kilbourne's sawmill. The roof was covered with boards;

the floor consisted of rough boards without smoothening or straight-

ening. The house was not much warmer than the log cabin; a

fireplace of sorts provided some heat. Every member of the family

was worn out by the fatigues of the long journey; everybody was sick.

Flour for bread had to be hauled on sleds from the mill at Chilli-

cothe, forty miles away. Joel himself, a boy of seventeen years, had

to teach school, receiving his pay in the form of boarding with the

families of his few pupils.

A few months after arriving, Levi Buttles had to go to the settle-

ment which is now Granville, on business. There were no roads; he

found himself caught in a fearful storm in the middle of the woods

and passed an indescribable night, sitting on his saddle against a

tree in snow and rain. He returned home with a fever and never

recovered. In the summer of 1805 he died, one of the first victims

of pioneer life here. His grave, out here in the churchyard, is one

of the oldest remains of church life in Worthington.

It took a hardy kind of people to make a living somehow under

such conditions. But those Connecticut Yankees, a manly race,

strong as their wonderful sonorous Old-Testament names, the Ozias,

Abners, Ezras, Eliphalets, Lemuels, and Obadiahs, were not afraid of

any kind of work; and their wives, with the more romantic names

then in fashion for girls, the Cynthias and Clarissas, the Almiras and

Fannys, were no less resolute and stout-hearted, willing and able to

put up with primitive circumstances of life. And there was no room

for sourpusses; the young people had dances in the public cabin

almost as often as prayer meetings.

The rewards for hard work were not brilliant for the first genera-

tion. Up to about 1825 the settlers generally remained poor. The

farm revenue was low; the produce was not marketable for lack of

communications and had to be consumed on the spot, to a large ex-

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ST. JOHN'S PARISH, WORTHINGTON          59

 

tent in the form of whiskey, which became the curse of the settler.

The open whiskey barrel was at everybody's service in every house;

even in a clergyman's house a concoction of whiskey and sweet cider

called "sling" was available.

Prosperity began only after the Ohio Canal and the Miami-Erie

Canal had connected the interior of Ohio with the Ohio River and

Lake Erie.

The first immigrants settled down in small clusters, which were

separated from each other by great areas of uninhabited land; and

these small villages became the nuclei of our large cities.

Roads, of sorts, were built here and there; but they were so poor

in places that up to 1820 the saddle horse remained the only reliable

means of transportation. In countless reports the miseries of travel-

ing are described; a ride from Worthington to Cleveland took a full

week in 1817. Where roads existed there was much complaint about

their poor state. In 1814 the twenty-seven mile stretch from Gran-

ville to Worthington was described as almost impassable. It took

an immigrant family two days to make it.

The standard abode of the earliest settlers was of course the log

cabin. Life among them has been described in unflattering terms;

our sources leave us the choice between crude, rude, unpolished,

primitive, uncouth, and so forth. But a change for the better was

quick to come. In 1817 a lady from the East who had just arrived

with her family at Worthington, wrote home: "Tell dear Mrs.

Adams that I am not likely to become joint inhabitant with the pigs

and fowls of a log cabin; and though we may not have everything

we wish for, we have enough to be thankful for."

Worthington in 1817 was already a thriving place; it contained a

post office, a printing office, four taverns, which means inns, some

of them famous over all of Ohio. The taverns served "plain fare,"

which is described in an old report as consisting of "ham, eggs,

chickens, turkeys, game, and now and then beef, with potatoes,

corn and wheat bread, maple sugar and molasses, honey, etc."; so we

might say, not so very plain. There were four "mercantile stores,"

a college, a Masonic hall--not yet the one we still see on Main

Street--and the manufactories making woolen cloth, hats, saddles,

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60    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

and combs, the short-lived enterprises of the Worthington Manu-

facturing Company.

Thus, fourteen years after the foundation, Worthington seems

to have been out of the woods in a double sense.

Now, what was the position of religion and church in this early

frontier life?

Religion was at a low ebb everywhere in America at the end of

the eighteenth century. Of course there were many thousands of

sincere Christians who lived with prayer and devotion even where

the guidance of a minister was not to be had; but by and large,

and no regard to denominational affiliation, the first Ohio settlers

showed no great religious intensity. "People are exceedingly stupid

in regard to their eternal interests." Thus ran the unfriendly com-

ment of a Congregational clergyman on what he had seen in Ohio

in 1803.

Contemporary reports are full of complaints about religious

destitution and low moral standards in a "land of sinful liberty,"

meaning the Western Reserve--people seeking relaxation from

hard work in drinking, gambling, fighting, and more drinking.

Worthington, as we shall see, was--let it be said without boast-

ing--better than this.

The first missionaries who tried to reestablish the contact between

these crude settlers and the churches faced an educational task as

well as a religious one. They started early, though with insufficient

manpower. Before the eighteenth century ended, Baptist, Presby-

terian, and Methodist missionaries had shown up in the Ohio

Country; in 1800 the tireless Methodist circuit riders were on their

rounds in three large districts of southern Ohio. The flexibility of

their system, the itineracy, which offered the gospel at every door,

was eminently adapted to the conditions of frontier life.

The Episcopal Church was slow in reaching her small flocks

scattered over the new country. In our age of energetic missionary

endeavors, when the whole of the United States is divided up into

dioceses and missionary districts, it seems not easy to understand the

neglect which the church authorities in the East showed to the

frontier. But it would not be fair to put all the blame on individuals.

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ST. JOHN'S PARISH, WORTHINGTON              61

 

The turn of the century was not a period of strength and glory

for the Episcopal Church as a whole. She was just beginning to

recover after the War of Independence, during which she had come

near to extinction. Congregations were small, clergymen were not

numerous even in the East. The church's eminently urban character,

her preference for orderly, sedate parishes with a minister in

residence, and the regulated form of her services did not make for

popularity in the farmer society of the new West. The new settlers

were fascinated by what was called Kentucky religion: the excite-

ment of revivalist camp meetings, hot preaching, and sudden con-

versions shown by jerks and convulsions-just those things which

the Anglicans abhorred. And when at last Episcopalian missionaries

came, they tried to plant their own old ideals in the new society. It

is characteristic that one of them reported in 1820 about his work

in Cleveland: "The numbers are small, but the members are

respectable. I am happy to say that the numerical increase today has

not lessened the respectability of the members." Respectability first!

Methodist circuit riders and Baptist farmer-preachers were not over-

much interested in respectability and had easier access to the heart

of the frontiersman. Occasionally we see even outspoken mistrust

against the church because of her British origin. When Kenyon

College was built in the 1820's, a farmer in the neighborhood re-

fused to believe that this huge pile was not a British fortress built

to subdue Ohio to the king, that Bishop Chase was not a secret agent

of the English crown, and that Kenyon students were not British

soldiers in disguise.

With all legitimate excuses allowed for the inner weakness of the

church in that period, it still remains true that the central agencies

in the East did even less for the West than they could have done.

A considerable number of Episcopalians in the settlements were

lost; they joined other communions because their own church gave

them no help and no hope. Early applications to the house of

bishops for a permit to organize a diocese in Ohio remained un-

answered. The attempt was premature, certainly; but the lack of

interest shown by silence aroused disappointment and bitter feelings.

For more than twenty-five years after the first settlement in Ohio

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(1788) there was only one priest of the church, or minister as they

preferred to say at that time, laboring in Ohio, and even he on

part time only, an earnest idealist and missionary, who worked en-

tirely alone, without any encouragement or help from outside. He

was Joseph Doddridge, a former Methodist preacher, who made his

home at Wellsburg in the Virginia panhandle and began to minister

to Episcopalian families on our side of the river, at Steubenville,

once a month. He extended his work later on as far west as Zanes-

ville.

In all the rest of the state the Episcopalians had to shift for them-

selves. Here and there small congregations gathered with a lay

reader leading prayer-book services. So it is true that the first seeds

of the church in Ohio were planted by laymen, before the clergy

came, and the names of these pioneers of the church deserve to be

remembered at this occasion: Israel Putnam of Belpre and Joseph

Gunn of Portsmouth, on the Ohio River; and on the Western Re-

serve, Joseph Platt of Boardman and Solomon Griswold of Windsor.

It goes without saying that these lay-reader services could not offer

Holy Communion and that no confirmation could be performed in

any of these congregations. It was only in 1814, some years after the

arrival of the first settlers in the Western Reserve, that a communion

service was held there. Only then did a priest visit those destitute

congregations for a few days. He was Jackson Kemper, then a

young missionary, later on famous as the greatest of pioneer bishops

in the West.

In Worthington things were different. The Yankee Settlement

had the advantage of being under the leadership of a man in holy

orders, though only on their lowest grade, a deacon. He is the mos

conspicuous figure in Worthington's history and you have heard

much about him recently: James Kilbourne. The large stone on his

grave out there is not large enough to enumerate all the activitie

of this astounding man: the founder of the company that acquired

the site of Worthington, the leader, or commander, of the emigrants

train, explorer, merchant and surveyor, mill builder and newspape

publisher, worthy master of the lodge, innkeeper and commandin

officer of the militia, member of congress and of the Ohio legisla

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ST. JOHN'S PARISH, WORTHINGTON          63

 

ture, and, be it said without any unfriendly intentions, boss of

Worthington for many years--the "great sachem of the tribe," as

Joel Buttles calls him in his diary. "Esquire Kilbourne," "Colonel

Kilbourne," "The Reverend James Kilbourne"--so they called him

according to the occasion, respectful in each case. The short sketch

of his life which he wrote himself in his old age should be pre-

scribed reading in your schools. Of course it does not tell the whole

story; almost no autobiography does. Every man makes mistakes.

It is no surprise to find that Kilbourne had outspoken critics; but

this is not the time to discuss their accusations. We cannot, however,

pass in silence over the fact that Kilbourne's ministry in the church,

after twenty years in the diaconate--he never took priest's orders--

ended in discord: in resignation and displacement. For the last thirty

years of his life he was a layman. But no regard to old criticisms,

he survives in your memory as the leader to whose intelligence and

energy Worthington and St. John's owe their existence.

It was under his guidance that the steps towards the organization

of a parish were taken. The original layout of the town provided

for one town lot and one farm lot to be set aside for the use and

benefit of an Episcopal church, and a few months after the arrival

the Episcopalians of Worthington organized themselves as "a Re-

ligious Society by the name of St. John's Church in Worthington and

Parts Adjacent." The so-called articles of agreement under which

they banded together, or as they were called very soon (1805) and

more proudly, the "Constitution of the Episcopal Church in Worth-

ington," have been conserved. They are dated February 6, 1804.

The document is interesting enough to be analyzed in some detail.

It differs considerably from the type of foundation documents used

in other Ohio parishes. Those documents provide for ecclesiastical

officers only: wardens, vestrymen, and clerk. The Worthington so-

ciety appears in the articles as a kind of mixed or double organiza-

tion: a society to be incorporated under the laws of Ohio, managed

by a moderator, a recording clerk, three trustees and a treasurer,

and an ecclesiastical establishment with two church wardens, read-

ing clerk, one or more so-called tithing-men, and a "sufficient num-

ber of Choiresters [sic]". The institution of tithing-men, which we

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64    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

do not know any longer, had been familiar to the settlers in their

home in New England; the word means men in charge of good order

in the services. At the end of the document "the Clergyman or

other officiating person" is mentioned, taken as a matter of course,

as it were, without any description of his position or his duties. The

meaning is clear: Kilbourne would serve when his numerous other

duties allowed it, and would be replaced by a lay reader when absent.

The word "parish" does not appear in these articles; but the

essentials of a parish are provided for: minister, church wardens,

reading clerk. Another document shows that the trustees of the

society acted as vestrymen. And so St. John's is entitled to date its

corporate life from that 6th of February 1804--the pioneer parish,

"the first parish of the Episcopal Church organized West of the

Alleghenies," as the Kilbourne tablet here on the wall proudly

proclaims.

Living far away from the organized dioceses of the church in the

eastern states, the settlers could not declare affiliation with any one

of them; they were, as their parents had been before the War of

Independence, Episcopalians without an episcopus, a bishop. So the

document restricts itself to the affirmation of "agreeing in Sentiment

with the Faith, Worship and principal Doctrines of the Protestant

Episcopal Church." The first aim of their ambition, incorporation

under state law as a body politic, was reached very soon. An ap-

plication was made by Kilbourne, and the act of incorporation was

passed by the Ohio legislature in January 1807. It authorized the

society to acquire property corporately, with a peculiar restriction

which I hope does no longer bind the parish: the clear annual in-

come from all its property should not exceed three thousand dollars

a year. What the parish planned on that income is enumerated in

this act: erecting a house of public worship and convenient build-

ings for the accommodation of the minister; enclosing and keeping in

repair the graveyard; relief to the poor; and supporting a school.

It was a program which it took many years to carry out. The build-

ing of the church was not begun until twenty years later; services

were held for some years in the public log cabin, and then until

1831 in the upper floor of the academy, taking turns with the

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ST. JOHN'S PARISH, WORTHINGTON         65

 

Presbyterian congregation, as was done in many places at that

period.

For the first twelve years the life of the parish was like life on

board ship. There was no contact with the church or with churches

outside of Worthington and the "parts adjacent," meaning Berk-

shire, Radnor, Norton, and Delaware, which according to the

articles were entitled to have services of their own once in a while.

We have no means of telling how much of his time Kilbourne gave

to the parish; being a member of congress from 1813 to 1817, and

many things besides, he must have been absent for long periods.

For these periods a much respected citizen, Ezra Griswold, and his

namesake and perhaps distant relative Captain Chester Griswold,

served as lay readers. This makeshift style of church life could not

create great enthusiasm. When in 1816 for the first time a clergy-

man in priest's orders visited the town and held a communion

service--an exceptional opportunity in these times and in this

place--a mere seven persons partook. The congregation did not

know the office, and many of them were evidently not prepared to

come up.

But it was just in 1816 that things began to take an upward turn.

We hear from an old report that in that year the numbers attending

Chester Griswold's services began to increase and "a spirit of in-

quiry and seriousness was spreading." Griswold owned, according

to the same report, "a large number of books explanatory of doc-

trine and worship which were kept in continual circulation"; and

simultaneously Dr. Doddridge, the missionary of Steubenville and

Zanesville, and Kilbourne at last found access to each other and de-

cided to do something for the church in the West in general. On

September 10, 1816, the Ohio Monitor, a Columbus paper, carried

an advertisement in which Doddridge, Kilbourne, and a clergyman

from western Pennsylvania invited delegates from all Episcopal con-

gregations west of the Allegheny Mountains to appear at a conven-

tion to be "holden" in the parish of St. John's at Worthington on

October 20, 1816, "for the purpose of constituting a regular diocese

in the western country and selecting a suitable personality for the

bishop thereof."

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It was a bold plan. As far as Worthington was concerned, it

worked quite well; when Doddridge came and preached, no less

than forty communicants showed up for the service. But the general

effect of the convention was not conspicuous. Besides the two clergy

only five laymen appeared. They wisely abstained from going be-

yond considerations and restricted themselves to a new appeal to

the authorities, the bishops, in the East.

But no answer came from them. Help came from another quarter.

Connecticut, the reservoir from which a great stream of immi-

grants had come and still continued to come to Ohio, began to feel

the loss of population caused by the westward movement, and some

of the Connecticut clergymen tried to keep in touch with their lost

parishioners, none of them more seriously than the rector of St.

Peter's in Plymouth, Connecticut, Roger Searle. He hoped to find

some young clergy "resolute enough to leave their father's fireside"

and go out and minister to the lost Episcopalians in the West. He

found none, and though no longer young, he decided to do it him-

self and so became the second of the great missionaries of Ohio, next

to Doddridge. It was not quite his own free decision that made the

Western Reserve his main field of activity. When he came to Ohio

early in 1817, he envisaged Worthington as the center for his work.

But Kilbourne evidently showed little enthusiasm for this idea; old

papers of that time indicate that there was a tension between Kil-

bourne and some Worthington families who would probably have

been glad to see Searle take over. But Searle's visits to Worthington

were few and short.

The first of them, however, is very important. It was evidently on

his advice that on this occasion the parish made up for a strange

oversight of the former years: they had never bothered to legitimize

their position in the church by formal adoption of the constitution

of the Protestant Episcopal Church, as every new parish used to do.

Now they did it by a formal document made out in a full vestry

meeting. They took care, however, to stress the fact that they had

from the very beginning "considered themselves as acting under,

and endeavoring a conformity to that constitution." Presented with

a testimony of thanks and with a purse of sixty dollars--quite a

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ST. JOHN'S PARISH, WORTHINGTON          67

 

sum in those days--Searle left. Only a few days later a third mis-

sionary arrived, the most significant man in our early church his-

tory and, with due respect to the labors and achievements of

Doddridge and Searle, the strongest of our early missionaries,

Philander Chase.

With his arrival in May 1817 a new era began in the history of

the parish. Chase's name is known to all of you. His merits are

celebrated, a little too loudly it seems, on the memorial tablet in

this church. I will not speak of him in the hymnic tones of this

monument. A candid picture of his achievements and failures will

be a better contribution to this day of historical reminiscences.

Chase, like so many of our leading men, was not born an Episco-

palian. He came from a Congregational farmer's family in New

Hampshire. He grew up as a typical farm boy, to be a hard manual

worker, a ploughman and a horseman, a builder and a pioneer. His

life gave him ample occasion to make use of these qualities. Strong

in will and body, a giant six-footer, unafraid of any kind of work,

be it ministerial or manual, enjoying hardships rather than avoiding

them, in spite of occasional fits of self-pity, entirely free of fear and

unshakable in his belief in God's providence, he was just that hardy

type of missionary which this young and raw colonial territory

needed.

Chase came to Ohio with the same intentions as Searle--to do

everything possible for the church in the whole new state--and like

Searle he realized the strategic position of Worthington. But unlike

Searle he succeeded in taking roots here at once. Evidently in pos-

session of some money at that time, which was the exception rather

than the rule in his life, he bought himself a farm here on the south

side of the settlement, where the name of Chase Avenue still per-

petuates his memory. A few months later his family followed him,

his frail and self-sacrificing wife Mary, who soon was to find her

last resting place in St. John's churchyard, and several children.

Before the year 1817 ended, Chase was appointed as rector of

Worthington--and four other parishes simultaneously: Columbus,

Delaware, Berkshire, and Radnor. Kilbourne evidently had no ob-

jection to seeing this man take over.

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68    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

The position of rector in those times and under the circumstances

of a still very new settlement was not what it is today. There was

no salary; Chase made his living by farming and teaching. A very

formal document, made out four weeks after his arrival and signed

by the leading citizens, Kilbourne, Barker, and the Griswolds, made

him "Principal or President" of the academy of Worthington and

promised him a financial reward in the amount of the tuition bills

of "such classical or Greek and Latin scholars as the same are." If

the school had developed as the optimists, including Chase, expected,

that could have been quite considerable; but the bloom was short.

In 1819 they proudly promoted the academy into a college; in 1820

we hear that the school was increasing very rapidly, beyond expecta-

tion, with thirty-one scholars studying Latin and Greek, and Chase,

never hesitant to beg for a good cause and never afraid of asking

for much, prepared to solicit congress for a land grant--"one or two

townships"--as endowment for his school. He solemnly warned

that if such grant should not come forward, "a comparative bar-

barism will ensue dishonorable to our country." The grant did not

come, and not half a year later Chase wrote of his school in muffled

tone: "Thin but interesting." And not much later it was discon-

tinued.

But the school was only a sideline in the rector's activities. For

the farm, which became the real, though narrow, basis of his exist-

ence, he used the services of a hired man when he could afford one;

but there were times when he had to do the threshing himself or

to "serve stables," as he once said with a bitter pun alluding to the

duties of a deacon described in the New Testament.

Even more than these school and farm duties it was the mis-

sionary work that kept the new rector away from his point of duty

for weeks and months in a row. It was Ohio as a whole and not

Worthington alone that interested Chase. The most urgent prob-

lem to him and to Searle was the organization of new parishes and

the combination of all of them into the working unit of a diocese

with a bishop at its head. And they achieved it with amazing speed.

Two months after his arrival Chase in a letter spoke of twenty-four

or twenty-five parishes newly organized by him and Searle.

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ST. JOHN'S PARISH, WORTHINGTON         69

 

The procedure in such organizations was simple, disregarding

the legal formalities which had been worked out so carefully here

in Worthington. In all other places it was only this: "When the

missionary arrived, a number of interested people--and who was

not interested by an event so rare as the arrival of a clergyman--

would assemble under the chairmanship of the missionary; a very

brief statement following a standard formula, which indicated

association under a chosen parish name and adoption of the con-

stitution of the Episcopal Church, would be written down and

signed by all present. Wardens and vestrymen were elected. This

was all. The rest was good resolutions and hope for the future.

Church building was never started at once. A room in a courthouse

or "an upper room above a store" was enough for the beginning.

Worthington's academy building was a more dignified place for

worship than many other congregations had at their disposal.

Not nearly all of these early parish foundations have survived.

The missionaries, with the enthusiasm and optimism which is in-

dispensable for such kind of work, often proceeded too hastily. In

some cases the initial enthusiasm of the parishioners did not last;

or people moved away and plans and hopes were silently aban-

doned. Once in a while the signing of the articles of association is

the first and last sign of life of such a parish. The list of defunct

parishes which were first characterized as flourishing or hopeful

makes melancholy reading, and even the great optimist Chase oc-

casionally characterized the situation in such a new foundation only

as "not entirely unpromising." But on the other hand, some of our

greatest and most flourishing parishes today, as Christ Church in

Cincinnati and Trinity in Columbus, owe their existence to these

early missionary visits.

The larger problem, that of creating a diocese, was not neglected

either. Searle, who represented the Ohioans at the general con-

vention in New York in 1817, elicited the permit for the election of

a bishop--the first time that the governing body of the church took

notice of Ohio's existence. For this purpose a constituting conven-

tion was convoked to Columbus in January 1818. It still was a very

small meeting--two clergymen, Chase and Searle, and eight lay-

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70    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

men, representing six parishes, were present--but this assembly

drafted the constitution of the new diocese. The election of a bishop

was left to another convention held half a year later at Worthing-

ton. The attendance here was somewhat larger, five clergymen

among them: Searle, Chase, Kilbourne, a newcomer from Con-

necticut by the name of Samuel Johnston, minister at Cincinnati,

and Dr. Doddridge. Doddridge resented it bitterly when he was

denied full membership in the convention--because he was not a

permanent resident of the diocese--and allowed only an honorary

seat without a vote, shabby treatment for the man who had worked

in and for Ohio for over twenty years, beyond comparison with the

others. One year earlier Doddridge would have been the inevitable

choice for the bishopric; but Chase's arrival had changed the situa-

tion. His strong and impressive personality, his success in organi-

zation, and, perhaps, the help of Kilbourne, then influential far

beyond the limits of Worthington, secured a unanimous election

for him.

Consecrated in Philadelphia, Chase returned to Worthington as

the bishop of Ohio, and Worthington became for some years the

center of the new diocese.

The first six diocesan conventions from 1818 to 1823 were held

here in the old academy. But in these six years the number of

clergymen in Ohio did not grow to more than seven, serving an

area for which we now have between four and five hundred. The

elevation in rank added much to Chase's responsibilities and duties,

but it did not change anything in his style of life. He remained, as

all bishops of that time did, rector of his parish; and he remained

a farmer, since the bishop received the same amount of salary as

the rector, that is, nothing.

Poverty forced him at last, in 1822, to look out for a better way

of making ends meet. He severed his relations with Worthington

and accepted a position as president of Cincinnati College, the

small school out of which the present university developed. There

were no tears shed on either side when parting. Chase, who in his

first years had lavished praise on the Worthingtonians as a class of

people "remarkable for civil and moral deportment," now ex-

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ST. JOHN'S PARISH, WORTHINGTON          71

 

pressed himself as being glad to have left the place, to see his

wife--his second wife Sophia--no longer "buried alive in the

woods, and no longer disturbed by the viper-like hissing of envy and

toad-like croakings of malice and atheism." But then, some months

later, he complained about being neglected, about not having "heard

a lisp from Worthington since I left."

It is unfortunately true that Chase, with all his great qualities,

was not an easy man to live with. What happened here in Worth-

ington had happened before and was to happen again. Chase won

many friends, but always outside of his own circles. People who had

to work with him or under him, were regularly alienated after some

time by his dictatorial ways and his inclination to identify Philander

Chase's will with God's will, to see sinister motives wherever he

found the slightest criticism. What his parishioners in Connecticut

stated in cautious language after he had left for the West is true:

"His zeal may sometimes have transcended the limits of prudence."

He was a victim of his own emotions, which always swayed between

enthusiastic elation and self-pitying despondency. Trusting in God,

but mistrusting men in general, he never learned the true art of

dealing with human beings.

Cincinnati proved a disappointment to Chase from the begin-

ning. The college president was and remained bitterly poor.

But with all this the burden of episcopal duties remained un-

changed. Chase spent about half of each year on his trips all over

the state. In this case costs were no problem. Nobody, no inn-

keeper or private host at that time would accept a cent from a

traveling clergyman. But what a life! Always in the saddle on

the miserable roads or in the roadless woods; confirming and

preaching, preaching, preaching to audiences, prepared and un-

prepared, without discrimination. A saddlebag-full of Prayer

Books was carried along to serve many congregations. Services in

the open air, in courthouses or rented rooms were quite usual in

those first years. The hospitality of other denominations, which were

ahead of us in church-building, was often offered in a friendly spirit

and gladly accepted. Chase held the first episcopal service in Cin-

cinnati, by invitation, in the new Presbyterian church. No narrow

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72    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

lines were drawn for attendance; the missionaries were always will-

ing to address non-Episcopal congregations as well as Episcopalians.

Chase's few clergymen worked as hard on their unending rounds

and lived frugally as he himself. His most trusted collaborator was

his young nephew with the awe-inspiring name of Intrepid Morse,

whom he ordained here at Worthington and who substituted here

for the rector-bishop off and on.

The difficulties in the new diocese seemed insurmountable. The

worst was the lack of manpower and money. It was natural that

Chase appealed to the East; some money came, but no missionaries.

Under this pressure he decided to see for himself. If the East would

not give him workers, he would make them himself--educate his

clergy right on the spot, out of the population of Ohio, in a special

school to be founded for this purpose. In order to get money for

this he undertook his famous begging trip to England in 1823. The

very idea of such an enterprise shocked the dignified bishops in the

East; they feared that the American church would lose caste by such

self-humiliation; they warned and protested; one of them even threat-

ened--and not only threatened--with hostile actions; but nobody

ever was able to make Chase revoke a resolution once it was taken.

The story of his journey to England has often been told; it is

much too long to be retold here. The gist of it is that against all

odds the simple pioneer bishop from the wild West met with

astonishing success in English society and made friends with lords

and lord bishops and church people of all conditions. The idealistic

sincerity of his appeal, the romantic aureole of the messenger from

so far away, the unceasing flow of his eloquence, combined with

some Yankee shrewdness which guided him in utilizing personal

contacts, brought him the result of thirty thousand dollars, much

money for that time, for the establishment of what he first planned

as a "humble school for clergy" in Ohio.

As the provisional location of this school he chose his own farm

at Worthington, where he now returned after an absence of over

two years. Officially he was again the rector of St. John's; but his

frequent absences allowed little of regular ministrations. Young men

substituted for him, also not very regularly. They were Intrepid

Morse and two other pupils of Chase who later on earned respected

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ST. JOHN'S PARISH, WORTHINGTON         73

 

names for themselves: Marcus Wing, remembered as one of the

grand old men of Kenyon College, and William Sparrow, later on

famous as a successful professor of theology in Virginia. After all

it was no blessing for St. John's parish to be under a rector who spent

much of his time on episcopal duty and even more on work for the

new school which now overshadowed even the diocese in his interest.

As for the religious life in the parish in this period, Sparrow, in

1826, looked with apprehension on the growth of the Presbyterian

congregation here in Worthington and complained: "Our people

seem very dead. You seldom find a truly zealous man among them.

They will talk about the Church and about the dissenters; of

churches, wood, brick, and stone, of pulpits, desks, chairs and

organs; of Methodists and Presbyterians; but have not a word to say

about religion. May the Lord open their eyes. They seem to have

no faith in the efficacy of prayer." The young deacon, it seems,

underrated his flock, and the talks which angered him, about brick

and stone, pulpits and organs, were meaningful enough; for just in

that moment those "dead people" began to build St. John's Church,

this same building in which we are assembled today, with their own

hands.

On Chaseland the bishop's new school was growing, and so were

his plans for the future. The "humble school" became a college or

a seminary--Chase himself was not always clear about where to

draw the line between the two. It was here in Worthington that

Kenyon College came into existence; the name was adopted two

years before the bishop, the teachers, and students left and moved

to Gambier Hill in 1828.

With this the period of Worthington's position as the center of

the diocese ended. St. John's became a normal parish. The first

rector after Chase, William Preston, still divided his time between

Worthington and Trinity Church in Columbus; from then on we see

an unbroken sequence of full-time or near-to-full-time rectors. It

was under Preston that the congregation moved from the room in

the old academy into this church building. That was in 1831. So

this is, I think, a fitting point to conclude the history of Old Worth-

ington.

It is so for another reason. In the same year, Philander Chase's

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74    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

episcopate in Ohio came to a sudden end. His relations with Worth-

ington after his transfer to Gambler in 1828 were restricted to the

fulfillment of his episcopal duties. He came only twice: in 1829 to

preach, in 1830 or 1831 to hold a confirmation service. At that

time he already was in a bitter conflict with his numerous critics and

opponents in the clergy, in the Kenyon faculty, and among the lay-

men of the diocese. In a dramatic gesture Chase made an end: he

resigned the bishopric and the presidency of the college and left at

once, to make a new start in Michigan.

Before I conclude I want you to have a look into a special section

of Worthington's church life in the years of Philander Chase. It is

unfortunate that church history speaks so much more about men

than about women. At all times St. Paul has been quoted in order

to show the women their place in the church. Yet the history of

any church is incomplete if we do not see what women have con-

tributed to its life. I am very glad to be able to show you a singular

and hitherto unknown monument of the churchwomen's work at

Worthington, a book which now belongs to the diocesan archives

in Cleveland. The archdeacon of the diocese of Ohio kindly lent it

to me for the purpose of showing it to you on this day. This old

volume contains the handwritten records of the Female Tract So-

ciety of Worthington and Its Vicinity. Extending from 1817, when

at the instigation of Philander Chase and in his house the society

was founded, to 1832 when it was transformed into a Female Mis-

sionary Society, this record book is a kind of church and town

chronicle for the 1820's. All the names of distinction and many less

well-known ones appear here. Cynthia Kilbourne, James's wife, was

the first president, Ruth Griswold, vice president; Mary Chase wrote

the draft of the constitution of the society. Such tract societies were

formed in many places; and their aim was to provide simple laymen

with Christian reading in small pamphlets, in most cases reprints

from older publications. Membership dues were twenty-five cents

a year.

The ladies put themselves willingly under the authority of the

rector: no tract was to be distributed without his approval. The

first choice however was made by the women. It is quite impressive

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ST. JOHN'S PARISH, WORTHINGTON         75

 

to see that in ten years they printed eleven such pamphlets, starting

with the reprint of an old English bishop's "Rules for Christian

Children and Youth," and a reprint of a sermon of Philander

Chase's. In general the titles show the taste of the time: "Sabbath

Occupation," "A Convincing Proof That the Bible Is the Word of

God," and so forth. How they financed this enterprise with their

small means and in spite of a quick turnover in a membership of

perhaps thirty on the average, is hard to understand, unless we

assume that the collections taken in the society meetings had good

results and that husbands were occasionally bled for the good pur-

pose. The membership lists are interesting, and I received a very

vivid picture of the quick change in population from a study of the

marginal notes added to individual names by the treasurer or

secretary: "withdrawn," "removed," "gone," "dead." Meetings

were held, with prayers, singing, and reading tracts aloud. The

secretaries sometimes characterized them as "good," sometimes

rather censoriously as "poorly attended through forgetfulness or

neglect." When a new tract came out, printed by Mr. Ezra Griswold,

at cost, I suppose, the ladies got together to fold and stitch them.

In 1826 the bishop honored them by appearing at a meeting and

reading to them "very excellent letters of pious men in England."

Or they came together to "repair garments for indigent children who

could not attend Sunday school for want of decent clothing." And

so on with little snapshots of everyday life in an old parish.

Some members who remained in the society for many years can be

traced through the minutes. The permanent pillar of the organiza-

tion was a member of the Thompson family, Clarissa Thompson,

who was treasurer for twenty-four years from 1818 to 1842. I see

in her the typical figure of a Worthington lady of old times. She

came as a young girl of about twenty years of age and was im-

mediately pressed into teaching. In her middle years she evidently

dedicated much of her time to the church. Almost in old age she

married a widower, Ozias Burr. There is a photograph in existence,

showing her in her eighties, a touching specimen of old respect-

ability.

We started with a glance at the graveyard; let us end with a

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76     THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

second one. Next to the back door of the church you will see a

small tombstone, inscribed "Clarissa Thompson Burr." When look-

ing at it, be conscious that she is representative of a whole genera-

tion of women who unpretentiously and conscientiously have done

an heroic work in helping to build up the parish of St. John's

Worthington and Parts Adjacent.¹

 

1 Besides the printed literature on Ohio's history, church history, and genealogy I

have used some manuscript material for this study. A large part of it was found in

the archives of the diocese of Ohio in Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, where Archdeacon

Wonders generously facilitated my research. The most important items were:

(1) A short, handwritten "History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Ohio"

by Whiting Griswold, 1839. Griswold (1815-1849) belonged to one of the families

of this name at Worthington, and his interest concentrates on Worthington. His sketch

contains harsh criticisms of James Kilbourne, which clearly reflect the existence of

animosity among the members of the Worthington congregation; but it also adds some

color strokes to the early history of the place.

(2) A manuscript collection of original reports on the early parishes in Ohio,

mostly written by Roger Searle, dating from 1817. In this volume there is also the

original letter of the "optimist" (James Kilbourne) quoted on page 57, and several

other letters of general interest for the history of the church in Ohio.

(3) The Record Book of the Female Tract Society, used above, page 74.

(4) Five volumes of handwritten historical sermons preached in Ohio churches in

1876. The fifth volume contains miscellaneous original letters from the early years.

With the exception of (3), this material was used by Smythe for his history of

the diocese but less intensively than in this study.

As usual in studies on Ohio church history, the Philander Chase Papers in Kenyon

College proved to be a great mine of valuable information. Here I found about

fifty letters and documents relating to Chase's years in Worthington and Cincinnati,

which contain a wealth of detail. Most of them are unpublished, among them some in

which Kilbourne is mentioned with a bitterness similar to Griswold's utterances.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Fay, rector of Trinity Church, Columbus, kindly permitted

me to use the original manuscript of Joel Buttles' diary. Only after having used the

manuscript did I see a copy of the very rare edition of parts of it, privately printed

in Albany, New York, in 1889.

To Miss Ruth Griswold at Worthington I am much obliged for the gift of a

complete copy of the rare Saint John's Banner, a parish pediodical founded in 1900

and discontinued in 1901 (4 issues). Here I found the articles of agreement of

1804, mentioned on page 63, the original of which I could not locate. The older

parish records of St. John's have disappeared.

My knowledge of the titles of the Society Tracts (page 75) comes from the record

book exclusively. I have not seen any copy or bibliographical note of the tracts

themselves. Pamphlets of this type are usually rare; they were used up by their

readers. A systematic search for these early Worthington imprints, however, was

beyond my intentions.

• 22