This Week in Texas Methodist History December 20

13th Session of Texas Annual Conference Marked by Sadness

13 is widely regarded as an unlucky number, and the 13th session of the Texas Annual Conference provided plenty of ammunition for persons who wished to believe it so. Bishop Paine conducted the East Texas Conference in Rusk the first week of December, 1852, and was on his way to Bastrop, the site of the Texas Conference. He had not been home since September and would not return until February. It was customary in that era for the conference to provide a travelling companion for the bishop who was coming to preside at annual conference. Besides the advantages of companionship, it provided a way for the bishop to learn of conference affairs and begin thinking about the appointments.

Bishop Paine’s travelling companion on the way to Bastrop was the Rev. Josiah Whipple, one of the Texas Conference stalwarts who had transferred from Illinois with John Clark in 1841. With eleven years of service in Texas, Whipple was one of the veterans of the conference. He had made his home near Bastrop, married and had one son, Wilbur Scott Whipple, age 6. Before Paine and Whipple arrived at Bastrop, they received horrible news—Wilbur had drowned in the Colorado River, and his body could not be found. Upon reaching Bastrop, the tragic news was confirmed.

On Wednesday, December 22, Bishop Paine opened the annual conference even though only a few preachers were there. The Texas Wesleyan Banner had publicized the opening date for conference as Friday, December 24. The conference couldn’t really conduct much business, but on Wednesday Wilbur’s body was found. Conference recessed, and Bishop Paine conducted a funeral service. When conference reconvened, it had to deal with another sad task, replacing Chauncey Richardson who had been Conference Secretary for several years. The previous year he had been appointed Presiding Elder of the Galveston District and died at Richmond after finishing his first round of quarterly meetings. The conference chose Homer Thrall as the new secretary.

The rigors of winter travel were showing on Bishop Paine. He had already conducted conferences in Missouri, Indian Territory, Arkansas and Texas. At one ordination service he had to get out of his sickbed. “with chills, spasms of the intercostal muscles, very sore chest, ribs drawn up as if corded, slow pulse, etc.”

Whipple was a major force in Texas Methodism for another forty years. He married three times, but poor little Wilbur was his only child. He died in Austin in 1894.

This Week in Texas Methodist HIstory December 13

CME Organized at Jackson, Tennessee, December 16, 1870

One of the most distressing problems delegates to the MECS General Conference of 1866 had to deal with was the mass exodus of African American members from the denomination. As reported in the Journals of the MECS annual conferences, about 208,000 members were “colored” before the Civil War. Although membership statistics were more difficult to obtain in 1866, it now appeared that the number of African American members had fallen to about 78,000.
Much of the loss could be attributed to the organizing efforts of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and the Methodist Episcopal Church. All three denominations were now free to organize congregations among freedmen. They were having great success. Other freedmen preferred the flexibility of the congregational polity which Baptist churches afforded. It is little wonder that the MECS was losing so many of its African American members.

A committee of 1866 MECS General Conference delegates was charged with answering the question, “what shall be done to promote the religious interests of the colored people?” That committee advised creating a parallel structure of districts and conferences. When two annual conferences existed, then a general conference would be authorized.

By May 1870 when the MECS General Conference met again, that minimum standard had been exceeded. There were now five annual conferences so an organizing general conference was called for Jackson, Tennessee, for the following December. In the meantime three more annual conferences, including Texas, were organized so that when delegates assembled in Jackson in December, Texas was represented by the Rev. William Taylor.

The General Conference elected two bishops, defined the conference boundaries, established a publishing arm, and adopted a Discipline. The theology and polity was very similar to the other branches of Methodism already in existence.

The new denomination was called the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (changed to Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in 1954). It prospered in Texas, especially in eastern Texas. Its growth in Texas resulted in the formation of annual conferences and the creation of Texas College in Tyler in 1894. The MECS and the CME continued to share close relations. The MECS quadrennial Disciplines called for special offerings for Lane College in Jackson, TN, and Paine College in Augusta, GA. Well into the twentieth century CME representatives attended the MECS Texas Annual Conference where a collection was taken up to support the CME. When the Methodist Church became the United Methodist Church in 1968, the historic relationship with the CME was acknowledged with the creation of “a Joint Commission on Cooperation and Counsel to continue the historic relationship between the Methodist Church and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.” (paragraph 1074 #4)

The CME now has about 900,000 members in about 3,000 churches in the USA and conferences in Liberia, Jamaica, Haiti, Nigeria, and Ghana.

This Week in Texas Methodist History December 6

Bishop Waugh and Thomas Summers En Route to Rutersville, December, 1840

Most regular readers of this column will know that Bishop Beverly Waugh organized the Texas Conference at Rutersville on Christmas Day, 1840. Did you ever wonder how Bishop Waugh got to Rutersville?

His journey began in his home town of Baltimore. He left his family which he described as “like the separation of death,” on August 4. He knew travel difficulties would lie ahead, and said “no secular pursuit” would induce him to undertake such a journey, but was willing because of the Methodist desire of “reforming this continent and spreading scriptural holiness over these lands.”
From Baltimore Waugh went westward through upstate New York where he became a tourist and visited Niagara Falls. He took boat passage from Buffalo to Detroit, and then visited the Michigan Annual Conference at Marshall, Michigan. Bishop Hedding presided over those annual conference sessions so Waugh was an honored guest.

He crossed Lake Michigan and arrived at Chicago where Rev. John Clark, who was later to transfer to Texas, met him, and conveyed him the 120 miles to Lacon, Illinois, the site of the Rock River Annual Conference.. Waugh conducted the Rock River Conference which included appointments in northern Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, and set out Springfield, Illinois, where he presided over the Illinois Annual Conference.

He then conducted the Missouri and Arkansas Annual Conferences at St. Louis and Little Rock respectively and headed for New Orleans. On December 1, 1840, Waugh departed New Orleans on the steamship Savannah. He arrived at Galveston on Dec. 5. Rev. Thomas O. Summers met him and found accommodations. The next day was the Sabbath, and Waugh preached three times in an empty warehouse since there was no Methodist church in Galveston yet. On Tuesday, Dec. 8, Waugh and Summers left Galveston. They obtained a carriage and rode down the beach to San Luis Pass. They found someone to row them across the treacherous currents of San Luis Pass and spent the night in short-lived town of San Luis.

Most of the next week was consumed with struggling through the muddy Brazos bottoms. They had to abandon their carriage and go by horseback. They made it Rutersville by the 16th, but they soon pressed on to the new capital city of Austin where Waugh was invited to give the invocation before the Congress of the Republic of Texas. They spent a few days visiting government officials and then headed back to Rutersville via Bastrop. They arrived in Rutersville on Christmas Eve just in time for the organizing session of the Texas Annual Conference.

When the conference adjourned, Bishop Waugh’s business was over, but he was still a long way from home. His route home took him back to Galveston, then New Orleans on the Savannah again. He sailed from New Orleans to Mobile, then up river to Montgomery. Finally in Georgia he was able to make a rail connection and eventually home the first week of February.

Bishop Waugh had been gone from home six months. He had attended the Michigan, Rock River, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas Annual Conferences. He had travelled by rail, river boat, ocean steamer, horseback, stage coach, private carriage, and on one stretch of Georgia road too muddy for the stage, he had walked. The five annual conferences over which he presided embraced the extreme western limits of Methodism. All along his route he accepted preaching invitations from the local churches. Accommodations were sometimes nothing but “log pens.” Such privations counted for little because truly, “scriptural holiness was being spread across the land.”

This Week in Texas Methodist History November 29

Southern Conference of the MEC Meets in Brenham. Conference Schools Face Challenges Dec. 2-6, 1931.

The Southern Conference of the MEC in 1931 had a tripartite heritage. It was composed of churches and preachers from three older conferences, the Gulf, the Southern Swedish, and the Southern German. The main constituency of the Southern German and Southern Swedish Conferences were linguistic minority communities. The Gulf Conference consisted mainly of churches founded to serve English speaking northern immigrants in newly created cities on the coastal plains of Texas and Louisiana.

When the three conferences merged in 1926, each brought a school into the merger. The Southern Swedish Conference owned Texas Wesleyan in Austin (not to be confused with Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth). The Gulf Conference had a relationship with Port Arthur College, a business and radio school founded by Port Arthur booster John (Bet-a-Million) Gates. The Southern German Conference’s pride and joy was Blinn Memorial College in Brenham. Blinn Memorial College had educated a very large percentage of Southern German Conference preachers and was looking forward to celebrating its 50th anniversary in 1934.

Bishop Ernest L. Waldorf gaveled the Southern Annual Conference into session on Thursday, December 2, 1931. They were meeting in Fourth Street MEC in Brenham, just one block east of the Blinn Memorial building now known as “Old Main,” erected at a cost of $28,000 in 1906.

Much of the business of the annual conference concerned the three conference schools as they faced the challenges of the Depression. Blinn Memorial was the greatest concern. The previous year Blinn Memorial College had merged with Southwestern University. President A. A. Grusendorf became Dean and King Vivion, president of Southwestern University, became president of both institutions.

The merger agreement stipulated that the Southern Conference would still support Blinn. Financial support raised by the conference would be earmarked for use at Brenham rather than Georgetown. One of the ways the conference supported Blinn was the appointment of a field agent, the Rev. A. A. Leifeste, pastor of Norhill MEC in Houston and an ex-student.

Things did not go well for Rev. Leifeste in 1931. He was involved in a severe accident and was hospitalized for two months and incapacitated for six. When he was working, much of his time was taken up trying to secure the assets of Texas Wesleyan College in Austin.

Texas Wesleyan College, founded by the Southern Swedish Conference in 1907, was also experiencing hard times, but unlike most failing church schools of the era, it had assets. It owned a 21 acre campus between 24th and 26th streets in Austin. In May, 1931, the Texas Wesleyan Board agreed to sell its property to the University of Texas for $135,000. (The UT Law School now occupies that site.) That windfall would seem to be a godsend for the Southern Conference and its educational efforts. Why not use that $135,000 to rescue Blinn Memorial College? Much of Rev. Leifeste’s effort as field agent was directed to trying to do just that.

It wasn’t that simple. Although Texas Wesleyan sold its property, it intended to keep operating. The University of Texas agreed to let Texas Wesleyan continue using the property gratis. Since Texas Wesleyan was still operating, its board saw little reason to give the sale proceeds to Blinn which was now a part of Southwestern University.

The conference also investigated closing Port Arthur College and using sale proceeds for Blinn. That idea also came to nothing. Under the agreement with Gates, if the property ever ceased to be used for educational purposes, title would revert to the city of Port Arthur. If the president’s house were to be sold, those funds would revert to the Board of Education of the MEC rather than the Southern Conference.
As the Southern Annual Conference grappled with these educational issues, President Vivion came to Brenham from Georgetown to address the conference in person. The MECS preacher in Brenham, John V. Berglund, was a welcome guest at the conference. (Berglund was later a faculty member at Southwestern.) The Conference Board of Education reported, “. . . the experiment (merger of Blinn and Southwestern) has proven successful beyond all expectations, and this Board is convinced that the merger was a step in the right direction.”

It was not to be. In 1934 Blinn and Southwestern went their separate ways. Blinn continued and thrived as a non-sectarian institution renamed Blinn College (dropping “Memorial”). Southwestern University also survived the Great Depression and entered the 21st century as a widely-recognized liberal arts university.

How about Texas Wesleyan and Port Arthur College? Most of the $135,000 from the sale of Texas Wesleyan College in Austin ended up at Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth in a process I will save for another column. Port Arthur College became part of Lamar University in 1975. After the unification of 1939 the churches and preachers of the Southern Annual Conference of the MEC became members of the various annual conferences of the MC in Texas and Louisiana. All three of the Southern Conference’s schools have some continuity of heritage in contemporary institutions.

Finally, what about the 4th Street Church in which the annual conference met? It is still there, one block from Blinn College. It is a beautiful church now occupied by the First Presbyterian Church of Brenham.

This Week in Texas Methodist History November 22

Francis Asbury Mood Attends Texas Conference for the First Time November 25, 1868

Few preachers in Texas Methodist history have transferred into more dismal prospects than did Francis Asbury Mood who came to the Texas Conference from the South Carolina Conference in the fall of 1868. The thirty-eight year old Mood had had already accomplished much in South Carolina and had accepted the presidency of Soule University in Chappell Hill. Unfortunately Soule University did not appear to have a bright future. It had a charter, a building, and a board of trustees, but the building was in bad shape, it lacked students, and was $17,000 in debt. The Civil War and yellow fever epidemic of 1867 (see column for July 23, 2006) had all but killed Soule University.
Mood arrived via rail in Chappell Hill and was greeted by chair of the trustees R. W. Kennon. He also met another transfer from South Carolina, W. G. Connor, who had previously arrived to take over the Chappell Hill Female College. That night a heavy rain fell so the next day when he went to inspect the facilities, Mood discovered the difficulties of the “black waxy” soil. It was wonderfully fertile cotton growing soil, but almost impossible when wet. Mood arrived at the building and found that the roof leaked badly. The whole building wet and musty.

Mood settled his family in Chappell Hill. That was easy. The yellow fever epidemic had created an exodus. The Mood family was offered their choice of six empty houses. He then hurried the short distance to Brenham where the Texas Conference convened on Nov. 25. The rains had delayed the arrival of most preachers. On Monday, Nov. 25, only 8 were present so they adjourned to await more arrivals.
The presiding bishop was David S. Doggett who had presided at the South Carolina Conference the previous winter. He was thus in a good position to introduce Mood to his new colleagues in Texas.


It was only when the Education Committee gave its report that Mood discovered the $17,000 indebtedness. The Soule Board of Trustees met at conference, and Mood asked for $150 to repair the roof. He was told that even that small sum was beyond their means.
He returned to Chappell Hill and threw himself into the difficult task at hand. Mood did reopen Soule in January, but he realized that a stronger university, a “Central University” supported by all the conferences in Texas, was needed. He devoted himself to that task. The result was Southwestern University.

This Week in Texas Methodist History November 15

Reformers Meet In Baltimore to Begin Planning for Methodist Protestant Church, Nov. 15, 16, 1827

The Methodist Episcopal Church’s early years were marked by bitter disputes between rival factions. Most readers of this column would be aware of the dispute over slavery in the 1840’s that resulted in northern and southern branches of the church. Less well known was an earlier dispute between democratic reformers and guardians of the old order.

The reformers had a strong argument. The Methodist Episcopal Church was an authoritarian, hierarchical organization. Enormous powers were vested in the bishops and presiding elders. As the United States entered the 19th century, forces were at work expanding social and political equality. The age of Jacksonian Democracy and the “rise of the common man” saw a reshaping of civic life with the expansion of the franchise. There were corresponding democratizing forces at work in commerce and industry.

The MEC was not immune to the forces of democratization. Two of the flash points were the participation of the laity in church governance and the office of presiding elder. As early as the 1812 General Conference Nicholas Snethen introduced a resolution calling for the election of presiding elders by the annual conference. The resolution failed. The 1820 General Conference took up the issue again. It voted that presiding elder vacancies would be filled by a two step process. The bishop would name three candidates for each vacancy, and the annual conference would vote on those candidates. Joshua Soule, newly elected bishop, announced that he would not serve under such a restriction of episcopal power and refused the office. The General Conference then voted to delay the implementation of the rule for four years.

The General Conference adjourned, but the controversy simmered. It was kept alive in the pages of a new magazine, the Wesleyan Repository, founded by a layman, William Stockton. The official denominational organ, the Methodist Magazine, refused to print articles from the reform faction. When the General Conference of 1824 convened in Baltimore, some of the reformers were present as delegates. This Conference focused on allowing lay preachers and laity to have some representation in annual and/or general conferences. When they failed to achieve that change, seventeen reform delegates caucused and began planning their next moves. Out of that caucus came a new periodical, The Mutual Rights of the Ministers and Members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and Union Societies of reformers.

Reform leaders after the 1824 General Conference found much to criticize. They claimed that they were punished by receiving inferior appointments. Local preacher’s licenses were not renewed, and known reformers were denied ordination. In other words, they felt the entire weight of episcopal Methodism coming down on them.

The controversy was especially strong in the Baltimore Conference. Preachers and laymen were expelled for circulating Mutual Rights and participating in Union Societies. Some of the expelled Methodists met Nov. 15 and 16, 1827. They drew up petitions to the 1828 General Conference to reinstate Dennis Dorsey and William Pool to Baltimore Conference membership.

The reformers lost, but their reform efforts spawned a new denomination, the Methodist Protestant Church. It had no bishops. Appointments were made by a “stationing committee,” and voted on by the annual conference. Laity had equal representation in conferences. The denomination, which began in 1830, merged with the MEC and MECS in 1939 to become the Methodist Church.

What about Texas? There were Methodist Protestant preachers in Texas by the 1830s. The most prominent was William P. Smith who participated in the Caney Creek meetings and attended Dr. Ruter at his death in Washington.

This Week in Texas Methodist History November 8

West Texas Conference Passes Resolution Asking Old Preachers Not to Come

“Stay away! You are not welcome.” That may seem like a strange thing to declare, but that’s just what the West Texas Annual Conference said while meeting in Beeville in 1893. The operative language in the resolution was

That our bishops be requested to transfer to the West Texas Conference no one that is not young, healthy, and efficient.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries people who suffered from tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases had few effective therapies. Those afflicted often moved to a warm, dry climate. The territory embraced in the West Texas Conference had warm winters and a dry climate. San Angelo and Kerrville both became popular for tubercular patients. There was even a town in Tom Green County called Sanatorium. The Journals of the West Texas Conference (today the South West Texas Conference) reveal the reception of nine transfers in 1890, eight in 1891, six in 1892, and six in 1893. At least some of those transfers seem to have been sickly men trying to move to a healthier climate.

The pension policy at the time was that the conference from which the preacher retired was responisible for the pension. If a preacher served 30 years in the Kentucky Conference and then transferred to the West Texas Conference where he served five, the West Texas Conference would be responsible for the pension. The budget amount needed for superannuated preachers and widows and orphans of preachers rose. It was $3326 in 1890, $4000 in 1891 and 1892, and $4500 in 1893.

The 35% increase in expenditures for the superannuated preachers, widows, and orphans in only three years came at a bad time. The Panic of 1893 began in February. Eventually about 500 banks and 15,000 businesses failed. Among those businesses were rail road giants, Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe. The markets for cotton, beef, and wool had been depressed even before 1893. Times were tough in the West Texas Conference, but still semi-invalid preachers wanted to transfer in.

The resolution had little effect. In 1902 the West Texas Conference received 16 transfers and in 1904 it received 18 more. The superannuated preachers, widows, and orphans fund increased to $5500.

The 1893 Annual Conference was historic for another reason. This was Homer Thrall’s valedictory. The Grand Old Man was a month away from his 74th birthday. That would be relatively young today, but Thrall who had come to Texas in 1842 was blind and in poor health. He addressed the conference for the last time. The following October he died.