This Week In Texas Methodist History January 29

The Mystery of the Gavel

Gavels have been one of the favorite presentation objects given to presiding officers of conferences.  In our conference journals we find many reports of gavels presented to bishops at annual conference.  Often the gavel has been fashioned from wood from a tree on some historic site or the remains of an old church.  

One such gavel is the source of a mystery.  In 1905 Bob Noble gave C. A. Tower wood from a sill taken from the original church building at McMahon's Chapel.  That church was dated to 1838.  Tower fashioned a gavel from that wood and on Aug. 9 of that year presented the gavel to the State Epworth League in Corpus Christi.  In 1906 the Advocate ran a picture of the gavel and the history behind it.  

This was at least the second gavel made from McMahon Chapell wood.  In 1898 E. J. Gates had presented another gavel from the church to Bishop Galloway when he presided over the East Texas Conference.  That was the second gavel Bishop Galloway received that year.  The other was from a cedar tree from Nacogdoches County.  The tree was purported to be the one which shaded the first Protestant preaching in Texas.  To further muddy the waters in 1914 L. M. Fowler presented Bishop McCoy with a McMahon's Chapel gavel.  Was it the Gates gavel, the Tower gavel or a third one?  No one knows.

The next mention of the gavel is in 1923.  John W. Goodwin gave Bishop Moore a McMahon's Chapel gavel.  Was it the Tower one?  The Gates one?  or another?  No one knows.  BTW  Goodwin's daughter was married to Tower's son. 

The odd story continues.  H. H. Brown was digging in his garden in Port Neches and he dug up the silver plate Tower had affixed to the 1905 gavel.  The plate was no longer attached to the gavel.  Brown took the plate to his Presiding Elder, J. W. Mills.  Mills knew that the preacher in Kountze, H. B. Moon was an avocational woodworker.   Mills gave the plate to Moon.  Moon went to McMahon's Chapel and cut a branch from a tree.  From that branch he made a new gavel and affixed the 1905 silver plate to it.  At the Texas Annual Conference of 1934 Moon presented the gavel to Bishop Frank Smith, presiding over his first session of his home confererence.  Smith then sent the gavel to President C. C. Selecman of SMU for the university's Methodist collection.  Selecman then told a Dallas Morning News reporter about the acquisition of the gavel.  The result was a DMN article.    

C. A. Tower was still alive and saw the news article.  Naturally he was interested in how the silver plate he had made for  the gavel in 1905 and given to the Epworth League that year ended up in ttnjshe soil of a Port Neches garden.  He published an appeal for an answer, but did not receive an answer.  What a mystery!

Other notable gavels include one made by Olin Nail from a tree at Pecan Point under which William Stevenson may have preached and a gavel Takuo Matsumoto, principal of a Methodist high school in Hiroshima presented to Ralph Diffendorfer, Secretary of Foreign Missions.  That gavel had been made from the stump of tree killed in the atomic bomb blast.  

This Week in Texas Methodist History January 22, 2023 Galveston Presiding Elder, Ed Harris Sets Goals for 1937, January 1937 Yesterday the West District of the Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church held a District Meeting. It was on Zoom. Not that long ago District Meetings were much more important in the life of the church. In the 1870s and 1880s they often lasted as long as five days. After all, it might take participants several days to get there and return home, so you might as well make the most of it with days of preaching. By the 1920s and 1930s District Meetings were still important, but were usually conducted in one day. Improvements in transportant had made it possible for particpants to go and return via either rail or private auto. The district lines had been redrawn to take advantage of rail transportation. For example, the small town of Calvert was a district seat because of its excellent location on the Houston and Texas Central just a few miles north of that line’s junction with the International and Great Northern Line in Hearne. The Galveston District included the obvious counties, Galveston, Wharton, Fort Bend, Matagorda, and some partf of Harris and Waller Counties, but it also included churches in Austin, Washington, and Burleson Counties. (Bellville, Brenham, and Caldwell). That was due to the route of the Gulf Coast and Santa Fe Railroad whose main line ran from Galveston to Temple. The Galveston District Meeting to set goals for 1937 was led by the Presiding Elder, Ed Harris who deserves our recognition. At any one time there are only a few preachers in our conference with a great interest in our history, and Ed Harris was one of those for his era. He was instrucmental in celebrating the Centennial of McMahon’s Chapel in 1934 and helped collect materials now housed in Bridwell Library at SMU relating to early Texas Methodism. In January 1937 Texas Methodists were between the two great celebrations of the era. In Novewmber 1936 all of the conferences in Texas met in Houston so they could celebrate the Texas Centennial of1936 and go to see the San Jancinto Monument. That monument had been made possible by funds from the U. S. government thanks to Secretary of Commerce and Chair of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Jesse H. Jones, a member of St. Paul’s Methodist in Houston. The architect was Alfred Finn, the architect for St. Paul’s and many other buildings in the Jones real estate portfolio. 1937 was also the year before the bicentennial of John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience. The actual date to be celebrated was in May 1938, but it was such a big deal, Methodists were already making plans for it. What were the goals Harris set our? He wanted every church in the district to have a revival. He wanted all benevolences paid in full. He wanted three missionary meeting during the year, and he wanted more support for thd Methodist Home in Waco. One should remember that this was during the Depression. Funds for missionary support had fallen dramatically, and missionaries had been recalled from foreign missions. The Methodist Home was in great need too. Some destiutute families could not afford to keep their children with them so they placed them in the home hoping for better days. One such Home resident was Billy Walker (b. 1929) from Ralls. His mother died when he was six and his father took him to the Home where he lived until he was old enough to do farm work. He later became a famous Country Western singer. The Methodist Home became a hugely popular charity for Methodists during this perios, and the appeal from Ed Harris was consistent with others across the state. On a personal note, I never met Ed Harris but much later I became friends with his son Bill who was a member of the Texas and Southwest Texas Conferereces. I knew about another participant in the Galveston District Meeting through my father. Although Harris preached the main sermon of the meeting, the meeting was closed with a message from a local preacher “Uncle Jim” Wilson. Although Wilson never was a full conference member, he was a greatly beloved Texas Methodist preacher. In later life, without a home of his own, he lived with partsonage families willing to take him in. One of those families during the 1930s was my grandparents when my grandfather was serving Brookshire/Fulshear/Pattison. The parsonage in Brookshire was large enough for my grandparents, my father, my two aunts, and a neice whose mother, my aunt, was a single parent unable to care for her daughter during the Depression. My father told me that Uncle Jim would show up with his suitcase and live for a while, then move on to anoter parsonage. My father was 12-14 years during the Brookshire pastorate and developed a deep affectiuon for Uncle Jim, often discussing news stories together as the octagenian read the newspaper.

This Week in Texas Methodist History January 15 Advocate Editor A. J. Weeks Reports on Missionary Council Meeting in Savannah, January 1938 Methodists eagerly anticipated the bicentennial of John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience which was to occur in May, 1938. Most Methodists recognized Wesley’s “heart warming experience” as the birth of the Methodist movement. In 1938 Methodists were also celebrating the ancipated reunion of the northern and southern branches of the church along with the Methodist Protestan Church. Deleghates had been working on the details of merger for years, and sentiment in favor of unification was running high. The annual conferences of 1938 would vote to approve the merger of the three denominations which would be consummated in 1939. The editor of the Southwestern Advocate, A. J. Weeks, decided to attend the the Missionary Council meeting to be held in Savannah, Georgia, in January 1938. He also decided to fly rather than take the railroad. When he reported on the trip and the conference, he reveled in the Methodist connections along the way. He left Dallas by air. The first stop was Tyler where he commented on the CME college. Then on to Centenary where Centenary College existed. Then to Jackson, the home of Millsaps College. Birmingham was next, the home of Birmingham Southern. After that was Atlanta, the home of Emory, and finally Macon, Georgia, where he switched to ground transportation. The meeting in Savannah was a love fest in which both MEC and MECS luminaries spoke eloquently about walking on the same streets John and Charles Wesley had walked. The union was still 16 months away, but the two denominations had already started the process of merging the missionary efforts of the northern and souther churches. It was a grand example of how history=in this case the Georgia experience of the Wesleys brought the denominations closer.

This Week in Texas Methodist History January 8 Travis Park, San Antonio, Launches Innovative Family Night, January 1948 In the years following World War II, the rhythem of Methodist life continued much as had been before the war. There were still many circuits whose constituent churches had services once or twice per month. In towns and cities churches continued to have both a morning and evening worship service. The evening service was less formal than the Sunday morning service and often reminded worshipers of the church service of their youth. The evening service was often preceded by a meeting of the Methodist Youth Fellowship—which had succeeded the Epworth League. Wednesday night was reserved for “Prayer Meeting,” and Thursday was the most popular night for choir practice. The post World War period saw an explosion of suburban development in Texas, and with that develelopment, downtown churches felt they needed to offer more incentives so that suburbanites would come back downtown during week nightss. Few suburbanites who had commuted to jobs downtown in the morning, worked all day, then drove back home at the end of the work day would want to come back downtown for a prayer meeting that might last only 30 minutes. In January 1948 Travis Park Methodist Church in downtown San Antonio expaned its Wednesday night offerings in an attempt to provide an incentive to keep its members coming on Wednesday night. The program was Family Night and its centerpiece was the installation of a complete wood shop and the introduction of woodworking classes. They remodeled existing space, brought about $3500 worth of tools, recuited volunteer woodworking instructors and began. They started at 5:00 p.m. with an hour of hands on instruction for youth in basic woodworking. At 6:15 a dinner and devotionals were held. At 7:30 woodworking classes resumed, but this time for adults. Members who did not wish to participate in woodworking were offered classes in Bible, drama, poetry, etc. Early reports showed that the first adult class of woodworking consisted of 25 men and 10 women. In addition to the increased skills of the members and the good fellowship, the classes produced useful objects for the church such as cabinets, tables, etc.

This Week in Texas Methodist History Jan. 1 Advocate Faces Difficulties amid Transitiions, January 1940 As Texas Methodist publishing approached the celebration of its centennial, it faced serious challenges. The death of long time editor, A. J. Weeks in 1939 was only one of the problems. No one knew what role the Southwestern Christian Advocate would be in the transition from the Methodist Episcoopal Church South to the Methodist Church. The denominational organ which covered Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma (and sometimes Colorado) had grand ambitions to become the Jurisdictional newspaper. That would mean adding Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana to the three existing shates. There were singnificant obstancles to such an expansion. The first was that the Jurisdictional Conference that would authorize such a move would not meet until May, and the newspaper was in financial difficulty. Another was the opposition of Methodist journalists in the states not already in the coverage area. Methodist readers wanted local news about their conferences and the bishops who presided over them. A wider lens on Methodist activity was already provided by the Christian Advocate which was published in Nashville. After the death of Weeks, retired Bishop John M. Moore, who had retired to Dallas, assumed the office of general editor, and representative from each of the constituent conferences was named to assist. These associate editors were among the most prominent preachers in Texas and Oklahoma, but they were all full time pastors with all the duties of pastoring some of the largest churches in the regions. They included the following: Marshall Steel of Highland Park in Dallas, John N. R. Score of First Methodist Fort Worth, Dawson Bryan of St. Paul’s Houston, Edmon Heinsohn of University Methodist in Austin, J. O. Haymes of Big Spring, and W. N. Crutchfield of Oklahoma. Bishop Moore introduced each of these associate editors in the first issue of the SW Advocate in January, 1940. In short blurbs about each of them, he stressed how several of them had connections throughout Texas. For example, Score and served St. Paul’s in Houston, and Bryan had been born in El Paso. On a curious note, in introducing Crutchfield, he noted how the Oklahoma editor had played center on the Vanderbilt football team. Also in the January 4 issue, there was an open letter signed by Bishops, Holt, Selecman, Moore, Boaz, and Smith literally begging for subscribers not only to renew their subscriptsions but to solicit new subscriptions. They stated that paper was $3900 in debt with no cash on hand. To raise the money they offered a special deal. If one could not subscribe for a year, they would accept a 6 month subscription for $.75. If they could get 20,000 new subscribers, the paper would be solvent and be in a position to expand its coverage after Jurisdictional Confernce authorized it as the denominational newspaper for the South Central Jurisdiciton. Such authorization did not occur, but the Advocate perservered.