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.