USA > Ohio > Hamilton County > Cincinnati > The First Congregational church (Unitarian) of Cincinnati; a historical sketch with some account of the Church of the Redeemer, and Unity church > Part 4
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The Unity Club, promised $2,000, while the Ladies' Aid Society agreed to give $1,000. The Unity Club became a very useful auxiliary of the church, as well in the matter of money raising as in promoting an educational campaign for the benefit of the community. In the later years of its existence which continued until the removal of the congregation to its present house on the Reading Road, it conducted regular literary studies, with weekly meetings, which often attracted large companies of men and women to the vestry, a good many of these persons having no other identification with the church.
But in its beginnings it was ambitious of more public and financially profitable activities than quiet discussion of books, and engaged in elaborate public entertainments in the leading theatre, Pike's Opera House. Among these notable exhibitions was the performance of the comic opera of Pinafore, twice repeated, and the presentation of the operetta of the Doctor of Alcantara with the aid of Theodore Thomas' famous symphony orchestra. With the proceeds of such enterprises added to numerous smaller affairs, not only were the $2,000 pledged to the church debt paid, but another thousand dollars went towards the purchase of a church organ, while the Associ- ated Charities and similar public benevolences received gener- ous gifts. The leading officers of the Club during these early enterprises were Edward Goepper, President; William H. Taft and James B. Stanwood, Vice-Presidents, and Stephen H. Wilder, Secretary.
More lasting in influence was the series of Sunday after- noon popular lectures begun in 1880, in Pike's Opera House and continued in the Grand Opera House under the pastorate of Mr. Wendte's successor, Mr. Thayer, until 1910, when the competition of the moving picture exhibits and other Sunday afternoon diversions made it necessary to put an end to a course which had been of remarkable continuous success, usually filling the opera house, at the popular entrance price of fifteen cents. Albert W. Whelpley, the Public Librarian, and chairman of the Unity Club special lecture committee, with Harold Ryland acting as treasurer of the Sunday receipts, assumed the chief part of the conduct and planning of the lec- tures, which had a judicious admixture of the amusing and picturesque, and the instructive. Among the more notable
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lecturers, some of whom appeared annually for several courses, were Wendell Phillips, Mary A. Livermore, William Parsons, Thomas Hughes, George J. Holyoke, A. R. Proctor, eminent English astronomer, Edward S. Morse, with addresses upon various phases of scientific evolution of which he was a dis- tinguished teacher; Archibald Forbes, and James E. Murdoch, our fellow-citizen of distinction in the dramatic art. At first viewed with disapproval by the orthodox as an entering wedge of the violation of the sanctity of Sunday, these lectures eventually came to be recognized as serving an important office of profitable opportunity for the people who were not habitual churchgoers, and the many others to whom Sunday afternoon was an idle time. The coming of Wendell Phillips had its especially dramatic significance; for twenty years before, in the height of the anti-slavery agitation and on the verge of the war for the Union, Mr. Phillips had attempted to speak from the same platform and was received with mob violence. Now he discoursed to a receptive audience upon the life work of his great collaborator in the abolition cause, William Lloyd Garrison, and was entertained with honor by prominent citizens.
Another public service in which Mr. Wendte took the foremost initiative was the organization of the Associated Charities, a new type of philanthropic work for the intelligent treatment of poverty, in place of the traditional methods of poor relief. This new organization, which has now largely superseded the antiquated fashion of giving to whosoever asked and making little investigation into the daily life of the recipient, had some of its most faithful supporters in the members of the church, led by its minister. And to this day that active co-operation of the church with all forms of public service has been maintained.
In January, 1880, the half century of organized Unitarian- ism in this city was celebrated by services in the church, on Eighth and Plum Streets, which consisted chiefly in reading many letters of congratulation from ministers and laymen in other cities who had taken some part from year to year in the history of the church. These services have been recorded in a pamphlet, published by the congregation, Memorials of the Fiftieth anniversary of the First Congregational Church
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of Cincinnati, in which is contained the first attempt at a history of the society.
Of the church members of this period that one who has left the most lasting memorial of a lifework was Sallie Ellis, a mature woman incapacitated for active affairs by chronic invalidism, who evolved the idea of systematic distribution through the mail of Unitarian literature, a project which eventu- ally was copied by many other churches throughout the country. The rise and progress of that activity which became known as the Post Office Mission has been described, effectively, in the story of Miss Ellis' life, written by Mrs. Fayette Smith of the church, "Sallie Ellis' Mission."
In February, 1882, Mr. Wendte closed his pastorate which had involved the settlement of many difficult problems and the expenditure of much nervous force, which made a change of field desirable. His later pastorates were in Newport, Rhode Island; Oakland, California; Los Angeles; Newton Centre, Massachusetts; Boston (the Theodore Parker Memorial) and Brighton, Massachusetts. For several years until his recent retirement he occupied the important post of Secretary of the Department of Foreign Relations of the American Unitarian Association, in which responsibility he organized and inspired a series of international congresses of Liberal believers which have been held at many capitals of the old and the new world. For his services in this domain he was hon- ored by the academic distinction of Doctor of Sacred Theology from the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
Upon his decision to withdraw, Mr. Wendte entered into correspondence with his Divinity School classmate, George Augustine Thayer, then settled for thirteen years over the Hawes Church in Boston, to persuade him to consider the possibility of undertaking the charge of the Cincinnati church. A visit to this city in the latter part of March, 1882, and the occupation of the pulpit for two Sundays, resulted in a prompt invitation, under date of April 7, 1882, signed by Fayette Smith and Aaron B. Champion, respectively the President and the Secretary of the Trustees, to Mr. Thayer to become the pastor of the church. This invitation was accepted in the course of the Summer and on Sunday, October 1, 1882, he began his ministry here, which continued until Sunday, January 9, 1916,
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when he was retired with the honorary title of Pastor Emeritus. The services of installation of the new minister were held on the evening of Thursday, October 5, 1882. President Fayette Smith of the Trustees made the opening address of installation in behalf of the congregation, and the following ministers bore parts in the service, viz., Samuel R. Calthrop, of Syracuse, N. Y., preached the sermon; George W. Cutter, of Buffalo, offered the prayer; William H. Ryder, of the Cincinnati Uni- versalist Church, read the Scriptures; Jenkin Lloyd Jones, of Chicago, gave the Right Hand of Fellowship, and John Snyder, of Saint Louis, and Frederick L. Hosmer, of Cleveland, made addresses upon the mutual relations of minister and people.
His predecessor had established the custom of a free use of printer's ink, in the way of newspaper advertisements and church circulars for the spread of the public acquaintance with our doctrines and the reason for our existence among the city churches, and this habit was maintained by Mr. Thayer. The Cincinnati Commercial, one of the morning papers, edited by Murat Halstead, was especially generous in its offers of space for the publication of accounts of the church activities, many sermons and special addresses being printed in full in the Monday morning columns. Among such publications which occasioned much notice by the community and which may be alleged without excessive pretension, to have contrib- uted an effective part towards the awakening of civic pride for a much-needed uplift of the character of the city govern- ment, were several Sunday evening discourses in the Autumn of 1885, upon some diseases of the body politic; the subjects being: The Crime against the ballot; The misgovernment of a great city; The saloon as a social regulator; and The menace to the public schools.
The early years of this ministry were subject to some disturbances of the usual placid order of the community which had considerable effect upon church attendance. The Ohio River, which had not gone beyond its banks for a generation, reached excessive high-water mark in 1883, but in February, 1884, it transcended all recorded experiences in the height of its flood, which covered many hundreds of dwellings and business houses in the lower terraces of the valley and submerged the gas-works so that the streets were without
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light for about a week, except from house windows, and a wedding which took place in the church had to depend for its illumination upon oil lamps. This flood hastened the removal of many families to the suburbs.
Close upon the heels of this misfortune came a serious civic explosion, which was a symptom of a radical disease in the body politic. This was the notorious Courthouse riot of March, 1884. The occasion of the outbreak was a series of miscarriages of justice in the criminal courts of Hamilton County, with regard to several homicides, some of them of an aggravated type, whose perpetrators were left for weeks in the county jail without trial or were sentenced to moderate penalties. A mass meeting held in Music Hall on the evening of March 28, 1884, for protest against the law's inexcusable delays, had been addressed by well-known respectable citizens in severe criticism of the courts, but, as Mr. Thayer had occasion to report to his congregation on the Sunday in the midst of the terror prevalent during the outbreak, none of the orators mentioned the specific cause of the disgrace whose cure was not far to seek, in the municipal apathy which allowed corrupt party politicians to fill the judicial offices with their own legal tools. When so-called bosses selected the judges and these party managers were often gamblers, saloon keepers and other lawless men, it inevitably followed that the courts would be incompetent and venal. For it should be recorded for the benefit of posterity that even to the present writing, as through most of the history of Ohio, the office of judge of the courts of law has been elective like all other offices, and therefore subject to all the manipulations of party politics which notoriously for many years abounded in frauds and violent assaults upon the rights of the free voter. The city election was but ten days ahead, when a judge of the Superior Court, a clerk of the Police Court and two magistrates were to be chosen and there were five or six thousand voters in the hall. But taking no hint from these facts, the indignation of the meeting effervesced in some violent resolutions, and the return to their homes of the majority of the attendants. A few of the audience were disposed to make tangible show of their feelings and drifted towards the Courthouse, upon the site of the present building, to make some noisy demon-
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strations and perchance to scare the inmates of the jail. As is common with the harmless impulses of mobs, the demon- strations developed into violent attempts to break open the jail doors, and, thwarted in these, in attacks upon the adjoining Courthouse, setting it on fire, and piling upon the flames precious court records, books and furniture, meanwhile resisting the efforts of the firemen to extinguish the flames by cutting the hose. For the larger part of a week the vicinity of the conflagrations was filled with the shouts and shots of the contending mob and the state militia, some thousands of whom were called to the emergency. A considerable number of the rioters and some peaceable citizens were killed and business in the main city was at a standstill.
The long standing traditions of the participation of the minister of the church in discussion of political problems again asserted themselves, although this time in a direction in which there was not likely to be any discord among the members of the congregation. The riot was a furious manifestation of radical ails in the system of the local government; there was excessive partisanship and small public spirit and courage to resist evil, among the voters; and to awaken the citizens to the only remedy of malign civic conditions became the self- appointed task of a group of leading citizens, known as the Com- mittee of One Hundred, which had been at first appointed by the Mayor during the progress of the riot, but which con- tinued its existence for two years after. Of this committee Mr. Thayer was a member and an appeal to the legal voters of Cincinnati to do their duty at the election of April 5, 1886, widely circulated through handbills, was written by him at the request of the Chairman of the Committee, Isaac J. Miller. That active concern for honest local government independent of docile subserviency to party claims, has always been maintained in this ministry, one of the latest mani- festations being in the Presidency of the City Club for three years held by Mr. Thayer and a cordial expression of appreci- ation of the value of his work in this field being given upon his retirement from the office at a public dinner at the Gibson House, April 10, 1915.
The Unity Club continued to be active in various ways; its membership in 1885 numbering 225 persons of whom
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many were outside of the regular church members. The Sunday afternoon Grand Opera House lectures maintained their popularity; the Wednesday evening literary meetings of the Club had some especially enthusiastic sessions under the Presidency of Judge D. Thew Wright, Aaron B. Champion, E. Cortlandt Williams, and William H. Knight, and initiated plans for the establishment of a Day Nursery for the care, during working hours, of the babies of poor mothers who had to give their hours of daylight to labor away from their homes. This benevolence was soon turned over to the control of a committee of the church women, who for several years supported some attractive rooms at 544 Race Street, in charge of a capable nurse; and for a short period maintained a second nursery upon East Third Street. A very generous portion of the cost of maintenance of these nurseries was given by Mrs. Maria Longworth Nichols. The nurseries were eventually closed for lack of patronage by the mothers, who preferred to risk their children in locked homes, or under the care of other children, than to pay the moderate charge of two cents a day. The abandonment of the Third Street institution was also due to certain sectarian religious prejudices, although care was always taken by the managers to avoid any semblance of theological expression to the patrons.
In 1886, on the 11th to the 14th of May, the Western Unitarian Conference met in the church with an attendance of eighty-three delegates, including the six persons appointed to represent the Cincinnati Church, viz .: Mr. and Mrs. George Thornton, Robert Hosea, Fayette Smith, John D. Caldwell, and Alice Williams Brotherton. Mrs. Fayette Smith, repre- senting the Woman's Auxiliary Society, the old title for the Woman's Alliance, and Mr. Thayer, were also delegates ex officiis. This session became notable in the annals of Western Unitarianism for its warm discussion of what was termed for many later years as The Western Issue; whose substance was a proposition to omit the words Christian and God from the Conference statement of faith, not because any member of the Conference disbelieved in either of the terms, as reason- ably interpreted, but for the sake of certain tender consciences of men and women who were in essential agreement with the best religious and moral sentiments of our Unitarian churches
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but to whom even the most venerable terms of ancient creeds savored of exclusiveness; the life and moral ideals of each soul being the vital things, which might be expressed in new forms of words which had no reminiscence of ancient feuds and bigotries. The objections to this proposition to enlarge the terms of Conference fellowship were of two kinds. One class of opponents attached great value to the identification of the Unitarian church with the especial traditions of Christi- anity, and moved to make the allegiance to Christianity more explicit than it had been in previous platforms. The other class, with whom Mr. Thayer and a part of the Cincinnati delegation acted, held that it was beyond the province of a conference of independent congregations to speak for the whole body except under definite instruction from the individual churches; and that any decision which the meeting might make would give a false impression of the sentiment of Western Unitarians as a body since only a few individual delegates, and not every distinct church, would be behind the vote. There was a good deal of heat and storm in the convention during the discussion, which was disturbed much by tempestu- ous conditions of the weather. A series of tropical rains fell nearly every day, flooding the streets and making travel difficult, while the temperature was high. Eventually the advanced proposition was carried in the closing hours of the Conference, only thirty persons remaining to cast the vote. The matter was vigorously agitated all through the Unitarian churches of the country for the rest of the year, and the debate was resumed in the Spring of 1887, at Chicago, where a fuller delegation reiterated the conclusion of the Cincinnati Confer- ence, but with the qualifying explanation that the statement thus agreed upon expressed the opinions of those alone who joined in the declaration. Twenty-nine years later, the Western Conference returned once more to Cincinnati under more harmonious conditions which effaced any possible lingering grievance; and the sessions of that week of May, 1915, with the hospitality extended upon a scale not precedented in previous gatherings, have remained as among the most satis- factory in the history of the Conference.
The ordinary revenues of the church, while sufficient to meet current expenses, had not a surplus needed to pay some
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remnants of old indebtedness. Hence the treasury reported a deficit of $1,600 at the close of 1884, which was met by the subscriptions of twenty men and women.
But one cause of the slow increase of the church income was the movement of population of the class from which the congre- gation was likely to be drawn towards the cleaner air and wider spaces of the hilltop suburbs of Clifton, Walnut Hills, Mt. Auburn and Avondale. The journey to town was slow by horse cars, and only the most devoted churchgoers were willing to make the long passage on Sundays, when the mornings and evenings of the working days had been spent by many of the male members of the families in the same tedious journey. All the downtown churches began to feel the strain upon their successful existence caused by these changes of residence. The Orthodox denominations met the condition by establishing new churches in these several suburbs; and some experiments were made towards testing such a possibility for the Unitarian church. Sunday afternoon services were held, first in the private school building of White and Sykes, on McMillan Street near Gilbert Avenue and later in the public school house in Avondale. A Sunday School of thirty members assembled for a season in the residence of R. B. Field upon Walnut Hills, and afterwards in the more spacious residence of Mrs. Thomas T. Haydock. But none of these undertakings prom- ised permanence. On Saturday afternoon, October 22, 1887, a meeting of the congregation was called to consider the recom- mendation of a previously appointed committee, consisting of Joseph W. Wayne, George Thornton, Charles Truesdale, Charles A. Kebler and George A. Thayer, that a lot of land upon the northwest corner of the Reading Road and Linton Street be purchased as a site for a new church, and that a mortgage of $15,000 be placed upon the present church property for that purpose. Eighteen persons voted in favor of this action and six voted against it. At the annual meeting of the congregation, January 25, 1888, plans for a church edifice, drawn by James W. Mclaughlin, architect, were submitted. On the afternoon of May 3, 1888, the formality of turning the sod for the coming building was participated in by the following company: Mr. Thayer and George Thornton who represented the masculine element of the church; Mrs. Theodore Stanwood, Miss Elizabeth
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Stanwood, Mrs. Joseph Wilby, Mrs. Seth Evans, Mrs. Fayette Smith, Mrs. Frederick Brown, Mrs. George A. Thayer, Miss Elsie Field and Miss Elizabeth Goepper; and the following children, viz .: Ruth Wilby, Agnes Smith and Abbot Thayer.
Satisfactory offers not having been received for the pur- chase of the property on Eighth and Plum Streets, a special meeting of the congregation, held at five p. m., of May 7, 1888, authorized the Trustees to pledge the property as security for bonds to the value of $20,000 for the erection of the new building. The officers of this meeting were Judge Fayette Smith, Chairman, and Aaron B. Champion, Secretary. The motion to give the desired authority to the Trustees was made by Seth Evans and seconded by Judge Manning F. Force. The Trustees were Melville E. Ingalls, Aaron B. Champion, Edward Goepper, Charles A. Kebler, Herman Duhme and James B. Stanwood. The plans which had been drawn by architect Mclaughlin, were put into the hands of the follow- ing contractors for execution; viz .: J. W. Cotteral and Co., builders; Dennis Flaherty and Brothers, masons; Scully, plasterer; Gibson, plumber; Bertling Brothers, painters; and Witt and Brown, roofers. $10,500 was paid for the land and the original estimate for construction was $18,500; to which sum'about a thousand dollars was later added. There was, as is often the case, an unexpected delay in completing the building, so that it was not ready for occupation until March 10, 1889. Before the carpets were laid a "Kermess," for raising funds was held upon the church floor with proceeds of $800. The first preaching service was held Sunday, March 10, 1889, with an audience of 170. The public dedication was on Wednesday evening, March 27, the audience filling the house. Rev. Dr. Minot J. Savage, of Boston, preached the sermon, Rev. Frederick L. Hosmer, of Cleveland, offered the prayer, and other participants were Rev. David Philipson, of the Mound Street Jewish Temple, Rev. E. W. Whitney, pastor of the Universalist Church, and Rev. Judson Fisher. Original hymns for the occasion were contributed by Alice Williams Brotherton and Virginia Ellard. A Sunday School of fifty members was organized.
Meanwhile, during the process of discussion of the removal of the church to its new location, an active movement was
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on foot among some of the members to form a new church with its worship near the old location. This action was a manifestation of an invariable experience in every large city where there is but one Unitarian church of reluctance upon the part of many worthy persons to recognize that the churches must conform to the changes of centre of the residences. In a circular letter sent to the members of his congregation and to the Unitarian missionary organizations which might be interested, Mr. Thayer set forth the reasons which actuated the leaders of the proposed church removal by some statistics which showed that for several years there had been a steady drift of members to the suburbs and only in rare instances the settlement in the lower city of any family which joined our church. Already a slight majority of families contributing to the church were in the suburbs, and even while the resistance to any transfer was being made some of its participants were choosing homes farther out into the country than the proposed church location.
Nevertheless the formation of a second church went on; and although it was warmly felt by the majority to be a highly unwise action, still no other opposition was presented than a declination to divide the already small church valuation into two parts. The first meeting of the friends of the second church was held on the evening of May 17, 1888, in Nelson Hall, Melodeon Building, on Fourth and Walnut Streets, but subsequent meetings were in the church vestry on Eighth and Plum Streets. At the first meeting articles of incorpora- tion of "Unity Church," were accepted and Trustees chosen to serve until their successors were selected. These were James R. Paddack, William H. Knight, William H. Bellows, Albert S. Longley, Marcus Ruthenberg, Albert E. Brooks, Charles E. Brickett. In the following October, formal services of worship were begun in a vacant Universalist Church, on Plum Street, between Fourth and Fifth Streets, and Rev. Judson Fisher, recently of Alton, Illinois, became the minister. He was succeeded by Rev. Leon A. Harvey, who was ordained on Wednesday evening, February 5, 1890, the services being participated in by Mr. Thayer, who offered the prayer and gave the Right Hand of Fellowship, the sermon being by Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, of Chicago. Ere long the place of
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