This Week in Texas Methodist History  Nov. 1

 

Methodists Dedicate State Historical Marker at Rutersville, Nov. 6, 1936

 

To say that Texas Methodists embraced the Texas Centennial would be an understatement.  The celebration actually began in 1934 with the celebration of the Texas Methodist Centennial in San Antonio.  That celebration brought the Texas conferences together, and the members liked being together.  In 1936 the European-American Conferences of the MECS and MEC met jointly in Houston in celebration of the Texas Centennial.  As part of the celebration, they toured the San Jacinto Battleground.

 

About the same time Travis Street Methodist Church in LaGrange sponsored the unveiling of the Texas Historical Marker at Rutersville, just a few miles from LaGrange, and the site of the organization of the Texas Conference on Dec. 25, 1840. 

 

The text of the marker, which still stands, is as follows:

 

Rutersville College

First institution of higher education in Texas.  Recommended by Martin Ruter, D. D. Chartered as a Methodist school in 1840.  Granted four leagues of land by the Republic of Texas.  After educating more than 880 students, it merged in 1859 with the Texas Monumental and Military Institute.  Erected by the State of Texas.

 

The site also contains the grave of Chauncey Richardson, First President of the college.

 

The main speakers for the dedication were Dr. Frederick Eby of the University of Texas and Bishop Hiram Boaz.  Eby was a historian of Texas schools. 

 

 

 

 

This Week in Texas Methodist History  October 25

 

William Dickinson, later Highland Park Minister, Writes about World War II Experiences, October,  1943

 

William H. Dickinson (1913-1972) is widely known as the pastor of Highland Park Methodist Church in Dallas from 1958 to 1972.  He was part of the “greatest generation’ who served in World War II.  In October 1943 one of his letters home from Sicily was published in the Southwestern Christian Advocate.   October 28, 1943)

 

Dickinson entered the chaplaincy in January and sailed on June 5.  He participated in the entire Sicily campaign. 

 

I wish I could tell you of some of the experiences with the men.  The other night after I preached, a boy, out of a crowd of about fifteen, asked me what I thought were the chances of a German soldier being saved.  After we talked to him for a few minutes, he said, “I’d hate to think that those who were killed today didn’t have a chance to be saved.”  I think that attitude is pretty general.   All though the outfit I find a thoughtful and unusually wholesome attitude, and I’m confident that a large per cent of our Army is going to work as hard for  a just deal as they are now to win the war.  That is my goal and the aim for which I am striving.  I just wish I could get around to more men. They are all thinking now and are anxious to come to some definite conclusions.  On thing sure==if the Church does not recruit a strong membership of thoughtful Christians who will be able to exert a tremendous force in the settlement of international conflicts that arise after this war, it will be no ones fault except the churches.

 

Dickinson also wrote of holding Religious Emphasis Week and holding a song service among the olive and almond trees with 385 men singing as one.   He had been assigned to the 45^th Division which was part of the Oklahoma National Guard.   In his letter Dickinson said he was tempted to transfer to the Oklahoma Conference after his chaplaincy. 

 

This was one of several letters home---all revealed that he was already looking ahead to the post-war world and the need to bring Christ to that world.

 

This week is also the anniversary of Dickinson’s death.  He died in Baylor Hospital on October 29, 1972.  I quote from his death certificate 

Metastasis of adenocarcinoma of pancreas (body)

Arteriosclerotic heart disease with old myocardial  infarction and bundle branch block.

 

He was 59 at the time of his death.  His interment was at Restland Memorial Park.  Mrs. Dickinson (Nina) survived him and lived until 2006, 

 

 

 

This Week in Texas Methodist History October 20

 

Seventy-ninth Session of West Texas Conference Opens.  Sterling Fisher Fails to Answer the Roll Call, October 20, 1937

 

The seventy-ninth session of the West Texas Conference of the MECS convened in Travis Park Church in San Antonio on October 20, 1937.   This conference was the succession to the Rio Grande Mission Conference and the predecessor of the Southwest Texas and Rio Texas Conferences. 

 

Bishop Hiram Boaz was in the chair, and after the singing of And Are We Yet Alive, the roll was called.  Sterling Fisher was ill and did not answer.   This was his first time to miss the roll call since his joining the conference in 1883.   Presumably he had attended sessions even before joining since his father, Orceneth Asbury Fisher was a conference member as was his grandfather Orceneth Fisher.

 

When he was 27, Fisher was elected Conference Secretary.  He held that post every year since then-a record of 46 years.  Although he was absent, his friend, T. F. Sessions moved that he be elected for a 47^th year.  The motion passed with overwhelming support.  Assistant Secretaries were elected, including Olin Nail, J. Fisher Simpson (another member of the Fisher family), and R. F. Curl. 

 

The next order of business was the vote on unification.   It passed 246 to 5 without debate.  Delegates were then elected who would go to both the 1938 session of the General Conference of the MECS and also to the 1939 Unification Conference.   L. U. Spellman led the clergy delegation and W. W. Jackson, president of San Antonio College led the balloting for the laity.

 

The rest of the conference consisted of the usual worship and business that constitutes a Methodist Annual Conference.   My three uncles in the conference received their appointments ---Charles to Ward Memorial in Austin, Louis to Kyle/Buda, and Dan to Skidmore.

 

Sterling Fisher asked for a superannuate relationship.   He was 74 years old, having been born at Texana in 1864.   Before joining the Conference in 1883, he had received his education at Coronal Institute in San Marcos.  He later returned to assume the presidency of that college.   In addition to his appointments and secretarial duties, he had been a delegate to the 1898, 1902, 1906, 1922, and 1924 General Conferences.  

 

His conference secretary duties included annual conferences presided over by 20 bishops—a record that will never be broken. 

 

Sterling Fisher died in San Antonio on Easter Sunday, April 25, 1943.

 

 

 

This Week in Texas Methodist History October 11

 

Methodists Honor War Casualties, Including Chaplain Burton Coleman, October 1942.

 

In October 1942 the United States had been fighting World War II for less than a year, but, sadly to say, there were already casualties among the Methodists of Texas. 

 

On the convocation called to install John Nelson Russell Score as President of Southwestern University in October 1942, former SU students who had already died in the service were honored.  The alumni who had received decorations were also  honored.

 

Here is a list of those honored with decorations:

 

Rodney Ross Wilder (Taylor) who had been part of the Doolittle Raid.  Distinguished Service Cross

Calvin Leonidus Lee honored by the RAF

Rowland Franklin Holbert, Jr., (Granger)  awarded the Purple Heart for wounds received at Pearl Harbor

Ben Freeman Mays (Wharton)  Missing in Action in the RAF

 

The deceased were as follows:

 

Captain Charles Irvin Perrin (Georgetown)

Lt. Hal Browne, Jr. (San Antonio)

Lt. George Womack Foster (Calvert)

Lt. Duncan Spence Hughes (Georgetown)

Lt. Raymond Elmer Miller, Jr. (Temple)

Lt. Melvin John Price (Georgetown)

Lt. Edward Everett Warren (Conroe)

Chaplain Burton Henry Coleman (Maypearl)

 

Chaplain Coleman was one of the first, if not the first, Methodist Chaplain to give his life in World War II.  He had been born in Itasca in 1910.  His family moved to Hillsboro where he grew up.  He attended Southwestern University and then Southern Methodist where he received his B. D.  He was admitted to the Central Texas Conference in 1935 and served circuits at Olney, Britton, and Bardwell.  While at Olney, he met and married his life companion Fay Lucile Smiddy. 

 

He was then appointed to Maypearl in the Waxahachie District, but Coleman then responded to the call for Chaplains and left Maypearl on April 26, 1942 , for his training at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana.  After six week of training, he was commissioned and assigned to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. 

 

While driving to his new post on June 7, he was hit by a train in DeQuoin, Illinois.  Rev. and Mrs. Coleman were both killed.   A double funeral service was held at First Methodist Hillsboro and their bodies were laid to rest in Hillsboro.   

 

In case you were wondering, the 1942 Central Texas Conference Journal shows 14 appointments to the chaplaincy. 

 

 

 

This Week in Texas Methodist History   October 4, 2020

 

SMU President Selecman Stresses Heroes in Formal Opening Address, Fall Semester, 1935

 

The question “Whom should we honor?” has been thrust into public consciousness with the debate over statues and institutional names.   We only argue about matters of importance, and this issue has generated contentious confrontations in many states, so this is obviously an important question.

 

Should we continue to give public esteem to heroes of a previous generation, or does each generation have he right to show its admiration to new and different heroes?    A favorite question of a previous era was “Do men shape their times or do the times shape men?    Besides the obvious sexism of such a question, most of us would not even consider the question---but it was widely used in debating societies.  I do not propose to answer that question but will provide another perspective.,

 

The Confederate statues which are the center of the controversy were erected in an atmosphere in which individuals tended to be given more credit and blame than today.  Nowhere is the sentiment better illustrated than in Thomas Carlyle’s (1795-1881) On Heroes, Hero –Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841).    Included in that work is his assertion, “History is the biography of great men.” 

 

Few, if any historians, believe that assertion today.  Modern historical scholarship incorporates social, political, economic, institutional, and intellectual analyses in addition to biography—although biography is still a best selling genre.  A subset of that genre is demythologizing the “formerly great.”   A good example is Thomas Jefferson---one of the heroes of my youth whose sexual relations with the enslaved is now reliably documented., 

 

The “Great Man” theory of history was very influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  As I became interested in history, my father steered me toward biography in my reading.

 

President Charles Selecman chose a restatement of the theory when he addressed the assembly which opened the 1935  Fall Semester at SMU.   As part of his formal address he mentioned his list of heroes.  The list is very interesting.  It includes, Ghandi (sic), Chiang Kai Chek (sic), Einstein, Edward Bok, John R. Mott,  Sun Yat Sen,  Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Ramsey MacDonald,  Masserik (sic), the Roosevelts,  President Eliot, Jane Addams, Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thos. Edison, and Luther Burbank. 

 

If the reader can identify all of those named, I want you as a partner on my next triva contest. 

 

 

Selecman said that the most important part of their university education was to develop character, and the best way to do that was to emulate the heroes such as he had listed.  Character education is still important in Christian higher education, but I hope we have found more ways of inculcating it than Selecman’s 1935 effort.