EXPANDING THE EFFORT
By the 1890s the Society was firmly established as one of Chicago’s foremost social service institutions. As it began its second decade the Society’s leaders saw the need for increasing their efforts to set up industrial schools and Sunday schools as well as new missions and churches. At the same time the Society continued its campaign against such moral and social “evils” as saloons, idleness, and prostitution. But the biggest challenge was to find the funding for these ventures.
The members of the Society’s Board of Directors were the prime movers in finding this support. Their number included accountants, bankers, lawyers, ministers, and men active in commerce and real estate. In 1891 the 35 members of the Board of Directors were appointed to standing committees so that they could work more effectively for the Society. Along with assignments to five committees concerned with auditing, insurance, judiciary, printing, and finances, three board members were assigned to each of the 58 churches and missions so each “field” would have “personal supervision.” [1891 A.R., 20] The five committees served these churches and missions as well as the Society’s internal functions. The demands on the directors were such that Superintendent Armstrong lamented in 1908, “We find it impossible to keep our Board full because men cannot be found in sufficient numbers who have the time or…who are willing to put themselves under the load required of our Directors.” [1908 A.R., 24]
Those who did serve as directors gave much in time as well as dollars to the work of the Society. Others, whose time commitments prevented them from serving as directors, made their contributions in the form of substantial financial support. For several years the directors had sought to establish an endowment fund. The man who set up that fund was Dr. D. K. Pearsons of the Hinsdale Union Church. Although he had been giving donations to the Society regularly, he took it upon himself to begin the endowment fund by donating a two-flat and a three-flat apartment building to the Society in 1898 and 1899. Then in 1902 he pledged to give $50,000 if the Society could raise $100,000 by the end of 1903. This was a difficult task but the enthusiasm generated by the directors and supporters resulted in an excellent response. A total of $106,322.02 was raised with the directors themselves giving $43,215. Dr. Pearsons had given donations to many Christian organizations and educational institutions and in submitting the remaining amount of his $50,000 pledge wrote, “it is one of my very best gifts.” Evidently he was pleased with the Society’s use of his support because he continued to contribute. By 1911 his gifts totalled $152,000.
He was not alone. Each annual report listed hundreds of donors who gave amounts from less than $1 to more than $1,000. The yearly reports also detailed the work and the programs of the Society, describing both progress and needs. There were basically two aims: to establish lasting churches through various forms of aid; and to minister to the neglected neighborhoods where there was little hope of creating self-supporting churches.
From 1895 to 1914 the majority of these churches were within the city limits because the Society was prohibited by agreement from doing work outside the city limits during that time. The Illinois State Home Missionary Society, which had been established in 1871, was responsible for church extension and mission work throughout the state and by the early 1890s there was “confusion in appeals and overlapping territory, as the two societies were jointly aiding churches in Chicago and outside.” In 1895 the two societies entered into an agreement by which the Chicago City Missionary Society would do all of the church aid and mission work within the city limits and the Home Missionary Society would care for the rest of Illinois. This meant that some churches just outside Chicago, such as Clarendon Hills, Oak Lawn, and La Vergne, which the Society had founded and aided, would no longer receive support from the Chicago society.
By 1914, however, that agreement would be replaced by another with the Congregational Conference of Illinois. (This organization had been formed in 1910 by the merger of the Illinois Home Missionary Society and the General Congregational Association of Illinois.) At that time, the “Society’s field of labor was enlarged to include the entire Chicago Association, the territory covered practically by our Society for the first thirteen years of its existence.”
The Society grew tremendously through these years, and with expanded support from the area Congregational churches was able to record considerable achievements. This can best be seen by looking at the specific missions of the Society and the contributions of its dedicated workers.
One of the Society’s primary goals continued to be the education of the city’s children. After the Great Fire of 1871 not enough effort had gone into rebuilding the public schools. In 1886, when the first compulsory education laws were passed, the schools had seats for only one-third of the city’s children and additional seating had to be rented. While half of the population was foreign born, only 16 percent of the children who attended the public schools had foreign-born parents. Many parents preferred religious schools associated with their neighborhoods and cultures. The need for education was obvious and efforts to teach the children on a variety of levels were an important part of all the Society’s mission work.
By 1902 the Bethlehem Church Sunday school had between 600 and 700 children, and Mrs. Adams’s class of 150 was said to be “a model of its kind.” The industrial school had “one of its most successful years. Owing to the persistent and self-sacrificing efforts of Mrs. Sydney Strong, of the Second Church of Oak Park, to secure teachers, there has been a pretty fair quota every Sunday, and the school has nearly doubled in size….Mrs. S. E. Page supports the Kindergarten, and Mrs. Victor F. Lawson the Kitchengarden, both of which are doing admirable service.” [1902 A.R., 20-21] In 1905 the “Sewing School” had about 250 children and “twenty or more Christian women, each surrounded with about ten to a dozen little girls....” [1905 A.R., 14]
In 1907, the Reverend Adams retired at the age of 70. But the work went on--25 classes of various kinds filled all the available space of the building and it was said, “No loophole appears where any other service can be slipped in.” The Sunday school was superintended by Mr. E. H. Pitkin who came “from his home in Oak Park, a distance of 10 miles, through sunshine and storm, to minister to this little army of four to five hundred Bohemian children.” Also, “Mr. Kimball and others, of Oak Park, and Mr. W. L. Richardson of Evanston, are rendering self-denying and most valuable service to the Sunday school” [1909 A.R., 9; 1910 A.R., 11] The Bethlehem Church, at 1853 S. Loomis, continued to serve its community with the guidance and care of the Society until 1966, when the church merged into the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church.
The Clinton Street Church, begun around 1884, flourished with poor quarters in a very depressed neighborhood. This church benefited from the services of Mrs.
M. L. Hull, a “church visitor” who “made about 1,200 house calls during the year, held mothers’ meetings ...and has helped in the Industrial School.” The industrial school had 250 children in 1888 but was closed the following year for lack of workers. This was a depressed area in which the “rearing [of] children in the atmosphere of saloons and brothels” demonstrated the need for the mission work to continue.
The Harrison Street Mission, organized in 1888 near Halsted Street, had a Sunday school of 350 in 1889 and needed new facilities. So the Harrison Street Mission and the Clinton Street Church merged, along with the newly formed Twelfth Street Mission, into the Ewing Street Church. The Ewing Street Church site was located a block west of Halsted near Harrison. The church building, completed in 1891, cost $10,000 to construct and covered the entire 48 by 104 foot lot.
By 1901 Mr. Butler W. Firman, of the Second Congregational Church of Oak Park, was superintendent of the Sunday school and other members of the Second Church “visit[ed] the work from time to time” and contributed substantially to the financial needs of the enterprise. The entire Firman family dedicated itself to the service of the Ewing Street Church:
Mr. Butler W Firman and his family, of the 2nd Church of Oak Park, are illustrating beautifully what a suburban home can do for a mission field. Summertime finds them on the way to the mission church in their own carriage and in wintertime they go by the electric cars. The distance from their home to the Ewing Street Church is about five miles. The following extract is from a beautiful paper by Mrs. B. W. Firman, on “A Personal Touch in Missions”…We go as a family. Hard to arrange? Well, you try it, and see particularly when the thermometer is fifteen degrees below zero, and the South Halsted street cars crowded to overflowing. But thank the good Lord, He makes a large part of the year good weather, when it is possible for us to drive into the city. We have more than summered and wintered this plan and it has now become a permanent factor in our family life. All summer, as we drive into the city, our carriage looks like a moving flower garden, for we never take less than two hundred bouquets, these being largely provided by members of the church, who do that as their personal touch. And when the cooler fall days make flowers an impossibility, we become a travelling rummage sale, for there is seldom a week that we are not asked to take things down to our needy friends. [1907 A.R., 17-18]
In the summer of 1905, the mission opened a kindergarten with 52 children. The teacher, Miss Florence Towne, came from Warren Avenue Church. By the next year she and her assistants were conducting the kindergarten “5 days each week, with the 50 or 60 little children, literally waifs, unmothered and unfathered in any proper sense.” [1906 A.R., 15]
Two years later, the Reverend DeLuca came to the church “to carry on work among the growing number of Italians.” And in 1910, he opened “an Osteopathic Clinic with medical and surgical treatment when necessary, Monday evenings. The doctors, half a dozen or more, come from the Littlejohn College, volunteering their services.” The clinic was begun shortly after a similar program at the Bethesda Church.
The statistics for the Ewing Street Church in 1910 showed: The Kindergarten has an average attendance of 52; King’s Daughters 50; girls’ circle 82; boys’ club 30; working girls’ circle 22; mothers’ meeting 80; sewing circle 60; dressmaking class 15; boys’ brigade 35; Sunday-school 260; prayer meeting 18; morning preaching 50; evening 85;…
A very large factor in this mission field, as is also true of Bethesda and our Chinese work is the untiring and efficient Mr. B. W. Firman. [1910 A.R., 16]
In the next year Butler Firman died and Mrs. Firman became the superintendent of the Ewing Street Sunday school. A parish house was purchased two doors east of the church and named Firman House. A $10,000 gift from Mr. Henry M. Hooker and $5,000 in donations from the Second Church in Oak Park nearly paid for the building, which provided a home for Mrs. Firman, Miss Towne, and the family of the pastor, Reverend Marshall.
The Society’s 1916 annual report noted that, “Mrs. Firman’s absence in Arabia and Mrs. Marshall’s removal to Montana made necessary the reorganization of the staff of workers on the part of the Society and Second Church, Oak Park,...Mr. Frank Kimball, President of the Society, and other friends are present practically every Sunday and Mr. W. L. Richardson has added the superintendency of the Ewing Street Sunday School to his otherwise crowded Sunday program.” The name of the church was changed to the Firman Church and the dedicated staff of seven workers continued these programs for many years.
One block east of the Ewing Street Church was Hull House, in which Jane Addams had begun her settlement work in 1889. Miss Addams became a member of the Ewing Church and maintained a long association with it. As a later director, Niel Hansen, would note in his account of the Society, “The Congregational Society in Chicago thought highly of Miss Addams and cherished the memory of her association with the Congregational denomination.” [Hansen, 264]
The Tabernacle Church, established in 1866, came under the Society’s care in 1883. It was a poor English and Danish congregation at Grand Avenue and Morgan Street that, despite large numbers of congregants, led a difficult existence. It had a Ladies Aid Society “that made up and distributed 365 garments” in the winter of 1884, a kindergarten, a large industrial school for girls, evening meetings and a Sunday school of about 1,000.
In 1894 Graham Taylor, his family, five theological students, and three physicians rented a large house two blocks west of the Tabernacle Church. Professor Taylor had joined the faculty of the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1892, as he said, for “the opportunity to pioneer the first department devoted to sociological teaching in any professional school. I made my acceptance conditional upon permission to conduct socio-educational work on the field.” [Hansen, 268] Taylor’s work, known as the “Commons,” soon found itself connected to the efforts of the Tabernacle Church. Taylor received “charge of the pulpit” and did “the larger part of the teaching gratuitously” in 1897. Two years later, the church building was leased to the Chicago Commons and the Society was “relieved of all expenses for the continuance of mission work in this important field.” [1897 A.R., 18; 1899 A.R., 19]
Another early mission, the third begun by the Society, was the Ashland Avenue Mission, which later became the Porter Memorial Mission. Founded on June 17, 1883, and staffed mostly by nearby Union Park Church teachers, it quickly established several classes. The industrial school averaged 200 in 1886 and made “a quilt a week besides making large quantities of aprons and underclothing.” By 1890 the Sunday school and industrial school had over 400 children each and Mr. and Mrs. George Dorr gave considerable aid and “oversight.” The mission was moved a few blocks to Paulina and 12th Street and continued until 1896.
In 1883 the Society aided the ladies of the Plymouth Congregational Church in establishing a kindergarten on Portland Avenue. After three years of service this moved and became the Doremus Mission and, in 1891, the Doremus Congregational Church. By 1892 the staff was teaching a Sunday school of 650, a large industrial school, the kindergarten, a day nursery, Christian Endeavor societies, and a church membership of 75. The Plymouth Church supported this mission and church until 1903 when it came under the care of the Society. At that time Mr. I. H. Pendrick, a director of the Society, served as superintendent of the Sunday school, which numbered about 400, and Miss A. B. Holmes superintended the kindergarten of 65 children. The Doremus Church, at 3039 S. Normal, still stands today at the same location, just one mile from the Union Stock Yards.
The Berea Church and Mission, located west of Bethlehem Church on Hoyne Avenue near 19th Street, received substantial support from the members of Hinsdale Church. Mr. Buffington of Hinsdale was Berea’s Sunday school superintendent in 1904, and other volunteers aided in the operation of the Sunday school, the boys’ club, sewing classes, and a chorus, as well as the general church services. The small facilities -as many as 600 children attended some services-led to its being disbanded in 1924. However, during the 51 years of its existence, this church had touched thousands of lives. The same could be said of scores of other missions and churches that ceased to exist but the effect of whose efforts continued to be felt by the people they had served for years beyond the life of a particular church. As Superintendent Armstrong stressed in 1902, “into these churches and Sunday-schools are now gathered more than 16,000 children, who are receiving Christian education at that period of life when the foundations of character are being formed.”
Another church that needed the Society’s help was Bethany Congregational Church on the Near North Side. Although Bethany had 279 members in 1890, a “long standing debt…and unpaid bills… [caused] great discouragement” and by 1900 the church had only 132 members. [1898 A.R., 10] The Society helped this church for several years and William Spooner, Secretary of the Society, gave them much counsel. Volunteers, some coming from as far as the First Congregational Church of Oak Park, conducted the Sunday school and sewing classes, but the arrival of large numbers of foreign speaking people made the work difficult. The only woman minister in the Chicago Association was assigned to this church in 1919, at a time when the building was being used by the Baptists for work among the Polish people through an agreement with the Cooperative Council on City Missions. Even though Bethany’s Vacation Church School was very successful, with 975 attending in 1928 and some new members added in 1930, the Great Depression made it necessary for the church to merge into the First Congregational Church in 1933 in order to survive.
One of the oldest and most active churches in the early period was the Ravenswood Congregational Church. The church had many prominent members and one, in particular, was very significant in the life of the Chicago City Missionary Society. Mr. Robert]. Bennett was on its Board of Directors for 33 years, served as second vice-president for the last 17 of those years, and was the president in 1899 when Professor Curtiss took a year’s leave.
In 1888 the Ravenswood church members began a Sunday school in Summerdale at 1700 W. Farragut, and a church was organized a year later. A mile south of Summerdale the Ravenswood church conducted another Sunday school that grew into the Rose Hill Church. Bennett made payments on the lots and building for Summerdale Church. He “aided them, not only very generously with money, but also gave much valuable time in planning their building and in superintending its construction.” Members of the community who were out of work during the 1894 depression came to help build the church. Four years later it was said that “The poor look to the Summerdale Church for assistance in their poverty, and the vicious find it an obstacle in their way.” [1892 A.R., 31; 1904 A.R., 29]
Robert Bennett continued to donate money to the Society’s building projects in the following years. In 1895, he helped fund the construction of the Waveland Avenue Church at 1416 W. Waveland. Later, the Washington Park Church on the South Side was also helped by Bennett, who was chairman of its building committee and became “responsible for their funds when needed to pay bills.” In 1911 the Addison Street Congregation Church reported that it was “greatly indebted to Mr. R.J. Bennett, as are several more of our dependent churches.”
The Sedgwick Street German Mission, the second mission established by the Society, was another work to which Bennett gave his time and money. This mission had a strong start, with a Sunday school attendance of 375 and a five-day-a-week kindergarten in the first year, along with regular German and English services. In 1885 volunteers from the New England Church helped build a chapel. In that same year the English Sunday school counted “over 600 names enrolled,” and two years later the Sedgwick German Church was formed. In 1891 it moved to a new location and changed its name to Johannes German Church.
Although some time later this church withdrew from the Congregational fellowship to become a Lutheran church, the Sedgwick Street Mission continued to be very active, and in November 1896 two churches were formed at the same location: the Sedgwick Street English Church and the Saint James Evangelical Church. Within a year, the latter church moved to a new home but continued to receive aid from the Society. The Sedgwick Street English Church grew, and in two years reported that it had “numerous organizations, well attended, for Christian culture, kitchen garden, girls’ meetings, boys’ brigades, kindergarten and industrial school, and all are doing substantial work for the church and the community.” These activities, including the kitchen garden which was supported by Mrs. Victor F. Lawson (wife of the publisher of the Daily News), had a large attendance, but several changes in pastors led to a decline in church enrollment after the turn of the century. In 1913 its future was tied to the Bethesda Mission a few blocks away. The Bethesda Church had been formed in 1893 and five years later moved from Larrabee Street into a large theater building at 1225 N. Clybourn, about three blocks southwest of the Sedgwick Street Church. Commenting on this new location and opportunity, Superintendent Armstrong said:
There seems to be almost no limit to the possibilities of usefulness for this church. The location, as previously reported, is ideal, and the opportunity for mission work unquestionably among the largest in the city and not surpassed in its need anywhere. The people are crowded together, and on a half-mile square, in the center of which this building stands, a recent canvass shows 75 saloons, two breweries, 7 dance halls and one theater. Against these forces of evil are arrayed a feeble Episcopal church, a German church, a small mission, and our Bethesda. No one church could take care of the 15, 000 to 20,000 people in this tract. The streets literally swarm with children. The Sunday-school can be increased, with a suitable force of teachers, to 1,000. The opportunity is ours to care for this large and needy field. What we do there we ought to begin to do quickly. [1899 A.R., 8]
The strong influence of the evangelical Puritan tradition demanded a high standard which the Congregational churches sought to uphold. Armstrong was proud that the Bethesda effort yielded 14 people who chose to enter mission work as their vocation, but he complained of the “low standard of religion in some of the foreign speaking churches near by.”
The Second Church of Oak Park aided the Bethesda Church substantially as did the Evanston Church. In addition to “fifteen to twenty” volunteers who came from Evanston to conduct the Sunday school, several women from the North Shore Church conducted a sewing school which had about 150 children in 1908. A large and useful playground was constructed for the children and many volunteers supervised the outdoor activities as well as the 22 meetings during each week. In 1909 a kindergarten was begun and the following year a small osteopathic clinic was established. The Evanston Church provided “a large sum” to purchase a parish house for full-time workers at Bethesda, which they occupied in 1911. Three years later, both the Bethesda and Sedgwick Street missions were sold to the Olivet Institute, which continued to work in that neighborhood.
Many churches were organized and many moved, merged, united, federated, and closed. In the course of its existence, the Society has been involved in founding well over a hundred churches. Some remained independent, a few merged with other denominations. The majority, however, became Congregational, and of those, many are still active today. Unfortunately, many also disappeared. In 1944 one church historian would lament: “Although many of our smaller congregations have formed unions, it is to be noted that within the last half a century over seventy Congregational churches have disappeared from our rolls.” [Ernst, 159-60]
Urban life in the late 1880s was precarious. There was much disease and medical treatment was often either inadequate or unavailable. Immigrants poured into the city daily, usually moving into already overcrowded ghettos. Churches organized during this period frequently found existence difficult, even outside the city. The Des Plaines Congregational Church, now a large and prominent church, had only 11 members in its 14th year. As late as 1900, the Chicago Association Yearbook listed Rose Hill Church with 6 members in its 13th year, Oak Lawn with 11 members in its 11th year, Clarendon Hills with 7 members in its 13th year, and La Vergne with 12 members in its 6th year.
On the other hand, the Society established several churches that grew quickly as they met significant needs in their neighborhoods, then faded as the population moved on and the character of the neighborhoods changed. In 1915, looking back over his 33 years as superintendent of the Society, Armstrong proudly recalled that 33 of the churches formed by that Society had more than 100 members and 18 of those had more than 200 members.
The Society did not confine itself to opening new schools and churches. Like all organizations engaged in helping the poor, the Chicago City Missionary Society was deeply concerned about the evils of drink and its effects on families as well as individuals. The 1910 annual report recorded the comment of one of the workers at the Doremus Church, a Miss Prince, who estimated that “about nine-tenths of the misery of these poor families seems to be caused by intemperance.”
Although the Society was not directly involved in the temperance movement, all the missions stressed abstinence as part of decent Christian living. But the attractions of the saloon were hard to combat. As writer George Ade explained:
The saloon gave boisterous welcome to every adult male, regardless of his private conduct, his clothes, his manner, his previous record or his ultimate destination. The saloon was the rooster-crow of the spirit of democracy. It may have been the home of sudden indulgence and a training school for criminality, but it had a lot of enthusiastic comrades. [Ade, The Old-Time Saloon, 1931]
In the 1880s, “there was one pair of swinging doors for every 149 men, women, and children” in the city. In the competition for customers, many saloons offered free lunches, but it was the character of other customers and the spirit of camaraderie that was the real draw (although for some, the “charity” of a free lunch filled a physical hunger). One newspaper estimated that the Chicago saloonkeepers were giving lunches to sixty thousand men a day; and one historian noted that “None was more lavish than Michael ‘Hinky Dink’ Kenna, alderman in the First Ward, who fed eight thousand destitute men in a single week in his saloon....Nobody for-gets that sort of friend when election day comes, and the First Ward regularly returned Democratic majorities of 80 percent.” [Ray Ginger, 92] The saloons often doubled as offices for ward aldermen as many of them were, in fact, saloon owners.
The presence of saloons, theaters, and houses of prostitution made some neighborhoods particularly undesirable for children. The annual reports of the Society frequently showed maps of mission neighborhoods depicting the locations of the saloons and theaters in order to impress the readers with the need for a Christian presence in that area.
The city’s reformers were aided in their fight against vice by the local newspapers. Every day Chicago’s papers carried yet another story of the decadent and “ugly side” of life in the vice districts. Finally, public support of these operations stopped.
[a] reform wave, aided by the newspapers, began to be successful in turning public opinion against public vice. In the fall of 1911, Mayor Carter Harrison II decreed that disreputable activities must cease on South Michigan Avenue, which had become tainted with corruption from the Levee [district] a few blocks west. And on October 24 the Mayor caused a sensation by ordering the closing of the Everleigh Club….on November 20, 1912, Mayor Harrison ordered the police to close all resorts still operating in the Levee, and his orders were carried out. Like his father [who had been mayor of Chicago for five terms], this second Carter Harrison had done good things for Chicago, and when he shut down the Levee, he put a stop to all openly tolerated vice districts in the city. [Farr, 308-9]
While the activities within some communities were an embarrassment to church people, so, in one case, was the very name of the community. The pastor of Cragin Congregational Church reported, “We are all at work hard, trying to change the old name of our community, ‘Wiskey Point.’ It means hard work, with apparently little results, yet we are sure our good Lord is with us.” [1898 A.R., 14]
Equally pressing was the need for new church buildings. In 1895 thirteen churches met in rented rooms, and at least one of these, the North Robey Street Mission, met and prospered in the rear of a saloon, according to the 1889 annual report. By 1893 this became the Cortland Street Congregational Church, with 78 members, 260 in Sunday school as well as active Christian Endeavor societies, an “enthusiastic” boys’ brigade, and well-attended prayer meetings. Three years later a “church visitor,” Miss Susan Poxon, was hired to teach a kindergarten class of between 30 and 50 children. By 1900 the Sunday school enrolled 375 children and the church had 101 members, but the neighborhood was changing and self-support was not possible. In 1913 it was reported that the Wilmette Church had been providing the pastor’s salary and covering other mission expenses. Mr. F. 1. Joy, of Wilmette, purchased a lot and donated it to the church, and Mrs. G. M. Peck, from Elgin, “provided the salary for a Polish visitor to minister to the increasing number of Polanders in the neighborhood.” Three years later, in 1916, the Cortland Street Church joined with two other churches in the neighborhood to form the Fourth Congregational Church.
In 1914 the Society sold two neighborhood missions and, in agreement with the Congregational Conference of Illinois, assumed total responsibility for church aid and extension for the area covered by the Chicago Congregational Association. This meant that the Society’s work was no longer restricted to the city limits, but now covered eight other churches as well as a new responsibility for church extension.
In 1904 Professor Samuel Ives Curtiss, one of the original committee of seven who had established the Society in 1882, a director from that time on, and president from 1888 on, died. Curtiss had had a great interest in mission work and was the person who had persuaded Graham Taylor to join the faculty of the Chicago Theological Seminary; he also persuaded many of the seminary students to participate in the Society’s mission activity.
This loss was soon followed by another when in 1915, J. C. Armstrong, superintendent of the Society since its founding, retired. A graduate of the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1874, he served on its Board of Directors from 1888 to 1900 and, for a time, on its Executive Comm