USA > Pennsylvania > Erie County > North East > The centennial commemoration of the founding of the First Presbyterian Church, of North East, Pennsylvania > Part 2
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1825734
WILLIAM ANDREW ROBINSON, Elder, 1830.
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ready of horses and oxen, of ploughs and spinning wheels, a grinding of axes, a mustering of pans and pots and household furniture, the bagging of grains and beans and flour for the journey and the housekeeping until the new crops came in; the barreling of pork and beef, a few books of substantial sort -- no light literature -- and beyond all the Psalm-book and the Cate- chism and Confession of Faith-and the family Bible.
It was a small company, Joseph McCord and Elizabeth, his wife, with their two children, Eliza, subsequently the wife of Col. James Moorhead, Thomas Robinson and Mary McCord, his wife and two children, William A. and Hetty, and James Mc- Mahon with his wife and one child. Mr. McMahon and his family settled later near Westfield, New York. Their goods were sent by boats up the Allegheny to French Creek, and thence to LeBoeuf, the site of the famous fort of that name and the rest of the way in wagons over the wildest of roads to their destination. The three households came from Pittsburg by horseback. The children, then of tenderest age, were carried in the arms of their parents. The two boys brought hither in the arms of their fathers, in later years took the places in the Eldership of this church miade vacant by death. In following years others came from the same region in central Pennsylvania, Moorheads, Blaines, Crawfords and many others.
Our fathers who came hither from New York and New England found it no easy and pleasant jaunt. The first stage route from Albany west was laid out in 1810 and reached Buf- falo nearly twenty years after the first settlers began to fell the forests of this region. The journey from Buffalo hither was one of extreme difficulty. The swamps and bogs of Cattaraugus county were equalled only by those that imperilled the way of Bunyan's Pilgrim to the Heavenly country. Corduroy roads scarcely availed to keep the pilgrims to this Canaan from being submerged in unfathomable mud. Many came, as did some of my own ancestry, in small boats following the line of the lake. shore and landing at the mouths of the creeks along the way. One of my owa grandfathers landed direct from Ireland at the month of the Twelve Mile Creek and the other was one of the contractors for the first public road built from Erie to Buffalo.
The present generation and their children, surrounded as they are with the conveniencies and luxuries of to-day, may well
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listen with wonder to the tales of the hardships and privations of the early settlers. More than thirty years ago I heard from . the lips of one of the earliest settlers, a woman then of 86 years, her story of a journey she had made in 1813 from her home on the lake shore some four miles away to her old home in Lancaster- county, accompanied only by her son of eleven years. The journey thither and return was made on horseback, a trip of nearly nine hundred miles.
The mode of living in their early forest homes was simple and rugged. My own memory, running back for nearly seventy years, began in the second quarter of the century of the history of this church, but my eyes saw the faces and my ears heard the voices of some of the good and brave men and women who dug and laid the foundations of what is now visible to every eye. It was done as every thing good and great is done, by hard work and self-sacrifice. They were not afraid of hard work. They believed in it. They kept it up all their lives long. Nor had
they anything to say by way of complaint. It was a part, the chief part, of their religion and their philosophy, that to have the loving fear of God in their hearts, to love their fellow men and to keep their hands busy for useful ends, was the essence of highest happiness. The great majority of them were farmers. It was serving God, who led them hither, as surely as He led Israel of old to the hills and vales of Palestine, for them to fell the big trees and burn the huge log heaps, to build their cabins for family prayers and get ready for the good time coming. It is a matter of history that when William Dickson, an early Ruling Elder and the father of my school mate, Rev. Dr. Cyrus Dickson, came, the neighbors helped him to build a log cabin that was without board or nail or bit of iron in its construction, and with a fireplace reaching from wall to wall. It was as good as any of his neighbors had. There was no multiplication of parlors and halls and dining rooms, of chambers and closets and libraries, of smoking rooms and kitchens and verandas. At first the floors were nature's own, for it took time to build along the streams the saw mills and grist mills and fulling mills of a later day. The ceilings were guileless of plaster and stucco and the windows of damask and lace. Sofas and sideboards were not to be seen. The family silver and plate was no temptation for thieves. Coming so far they could bring but
HARMON ENSIGN, Elder, 1834.
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little with them, though it is written that the largest of the "Old Pennsylvania Wagons" would carry one hundred barrels of flour.
No silver knobs graced their doors; no engraved plate in- formed the passer-by who was the lord of the primitive mansion. The latchstring hung out a welcome to all. The hearths of their fire-places were ample and broad, and the large-throated chim- neys welcomed the blaze of the hickory and maple. Their chairs were the primitive stool and bench, unless they had been able to bring from the old homes something of better fashion. They were a social people, though living on farms often miles apart. When on a winter's evening the friends and neighbors gathered and sat around the old broad fireplace, with its huge back log of hickory all ablaze and crackling, and the hosts of the evening brought out the pitcher of cider, the pumpkin pie, and the plates of apples and nuts, and they talked of their clearings and crops, their spinning and weaving, the mothers with knitting work in their hands, or recalled the earlier days of the Revolution, of the old New England and central Pennsylvania homes and neigh- bors, the children playing about the room, or listening with eager eyes and open mouth, we have, I think, a vision of social life, the like of which few of us have ever seen, or will ever see. They were happy times, for the men and women who settled here an hundred years ago were loving and sympathizing and lived in sweet harmony and fellowship. They helped and were helped in turn in the spirit of brotherhood, erecting their cabins and barns, cutting down their forests, reaping their fields, husk- ing their corn, and doing many another work in friendly aid. They were up in the morning with the sun or before it. The men and boys ont in the fields, the mothers and daughters, when the early breakfast was over, spinning the wool, carding the flax. singing the hymns to God or patriotic songs of love songs brought across the water, weaving the linen for trousers and white table spreads-noble women, noble mothers were they. They had few of the things our later civilization has brought -- pianos, square, upright and grand, Brussels and Axminster car pets, sideboards, and an hundred things now so necessary. But they had the open arms of nature around them, the smell from the meadows of the new-mown grass. the fragrance of the pines and hemlocks from the woods nearby, the scent of the clover,
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and the blooming apple trees, they heard the lowing of the kine, the songs of birds and brooks, the murmuring swish of the waves along the shore of the lake, and that grandest music man may hear, the roar of the deep woods when the storm was up. Did they love nature? Did they hear its hymns and see its glories of spring, and its brighter glories of frosty autumn and whitened winter? . Of course they did. They were an intelligent people, thoughtful and observing. They read the Bible, psalms of na- ture and of God's handiwork in sky and on land. One of the Ruling Elders of this church, who joined the Eldership on high thirty years ago, testified that the happiest years ever known along the sands of this blue lake near by were when the homes were all log cabins and the people for miles were all neighbors. The manners of the people were simple, open and hearty. Plain- ly dressed they were to be sure, the fathers and sons in the best of homespun. It was an age of homespun. The indolent, weak-minded and nerveless were not the class of men that were likely to undertake the enterprises that brought our fathers here. It required fortitude and courage and resolute wills to face the hardships of a pioneer life. Money was scarce. The products of the forest and the soil were a substitute for legal tender. A cord of bark or of wood would buy a pair of shoes. A bushel of wheat was equivalent to a day's work in the harvest field.
They had no daily papers nor daily mail. Slowly came the mail-boy on horseback, then the stage coach with crack of whip and sounding horn, to be followed at last by the "fast mail" screaming along its rails of steel.
Quickly after the building of homes came the log school houses. A huge fireplace occupied one end of the interior and the teacher's tal le: the other. Writing desks, in unbroken lines, extended along the sides and in front of them rough benches of slabs without backs. Goose quills and homemade ink were furnished from the home. Books were few and plain, the Bible, a spelling book, Pike's or Daboll's Arithmetic, an English reader, mayhap a geography. A capacity to keep order was one of the main qualities of a good teacher. The birchen twig and the ferrule were the insignia of office and the implements of law. Nor was school law confined wholly to the school-room. The scholar was under the jurisdiction of the teacher from the time he left the parental roof until he returned. While going to and
DR. JAMES SMEDLEY, Elder, 1834.
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from school he was on his good behavior, and if he chanced to meet a traveler by the way he was required to remove his hat in token of respect. Courtesy and obedience were primal laws of that early time. They were on the statute book still in the days of the next generation. The teaching, too, was generally as thorough as the discipline. What was taught was well taught. The schools were maintained without state help. School mas- ters were few and untrained. They were taken out of the homes. Young men who followed the plough in summer were the peda- gogues of the winter.
With the school came the church. To our grandsires edu- cation and religion were alike necessities. There was not at the time our fathers came hither a church or an organized congre- gation of Christian believers within an hundred miles. They brought thrift, civilization, and godliness. with them. As in New Testament times, the church was in the house. Meetings were held in dwellings, in barns, in school houses, or under some spreading beeches and shady maples. Missionaries came as occasional supplies, but their visits were few and very irregular. At length came the rude log churches and preaching, song and sacrament. Organs and quartet choirs were unheard of. Solos were unknown. The singing master had not yet appeared. Hymnbooks were scarce. The Psalms were lined out by a lead- er who stood by the preacher's desk. There was no affectation of seriousness, no putting on of any religious airs. The services were free from all mannerisms. Some of us might say there was too little of the manner and forms of worship. The people universally stood at prayers, for they believed that was the Bibli- cal way. The prayers were usually of good length and the sermons much longer. Their length was not criticized; their orthodoxy was a fair subject for debate. The people came to church to hear and learn. They had a digestion for strong meat and for a good supply of it. The pulpit was their teacher and the old log church their school-room. The pastor was ex- pected to be an oracle and leader, the man of learning for the community. They had but few books in their homes, no light literature, but solid, substantial matter that would bear frequent
re-reading. Nothing was dull to them that had matter and orthodoxy in is. They were ready for deep thought and spiritual digestion. Two things were great in the eyes of our fathers,
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education and religion, and they were willing to pay for them by close living, hard work, and serious thinking. The muscles of their outward man were no tougher than those of the in- ward man.
For want of church buildings and preachers they at first held meetings for worship, prayer and singing and the reading of a sermon by some sound divine of the past. Later when missionary preachers visited them they met in dwelling houses, school houses, barns, shady groves. When their log churches appeared the people would travel many miles and many hours, rising at early daybreak, coming not in any stylish equipages, but on foot, on horseback, man and wife, brother and sister on the same animal, in lumbering wagons large enough for their large households, ploughing through the mud of spring and fall, wallowing their way in winter time on oxsleds through the deep or drifting snows, that they might together worship the God of their fathers. Mothers brought their babies. Often no one was left to keep house.
The earliest churches were never warmed in the coldest winters. The great stone chimney and ample fireplace were necessary for the farm house, but for a meeting house they were nnessential and inappropriate, savoring of sinful luxury. If the preacher spoke through the frosty air in his great coat and thick gloves while the blasts of winter howled without, so also were there great coats and mittens and moccasins and foot stoves for a few of the mothers in the listening congregation. In the interval between the sermons, they ate their lunch, looked after their horses, discussed the sermon, talked of the crops, greeted friends and relatives from miles away, and when the second service was over wended their way homeward with something to think of in their brains and to be glad of in their hearts.
As we look back it may seem to us there was too much rigor in their piety and too little gentleness in their lives. Their Christian graces sccm solid rather than beautiful, to possess less of grace than of strength. The memories of my boyhood recall some of the lingering sires and dames of that early day. I shall never forget the stately bearing of John McCord one of the first Elders, the dignity of Judge Baldwin, the winsome grace of some of the gran !mothers, and one who knew him well told
1
WILLIAM DICKSON, Elder, 1837.
Father of Rev. Cyrus Dickson, D. D.
--
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me of another of the earliest Elders that he was the most courte- ous and gentlemanly man she had ever known.
We have been speaking mainly of what the founders of this church did and whence they came and only incidentally of what they were. They were a hardy, intelligent and noble race of men. You need not go into the old burial places and look about for tall monuments and titled names. The epitaphs on their lowly head stones displayed no eulogies. They were simply honest, worthy men and women, who unconsciously laid the good and strong foundations for coming years.
I have said that two streams of population sought this re- gion in the early days. They were the men and women who had been born and educated in New England and in the central parts of Pennsylvania. The New Englanders were Puritans in blood, Puritans in their principles and habits, and originally English in their descent. They were Congregationalists mainly in their church polity. They had inherited the stern Calvinism of their ancestors and were for the most part men who feared God and trusted in Him, men who revered the Sabbath and the Sanctuary, the Bible and God's ministers, and taught their children to walk in their steps. They were a reading and thinking people. They believed in mind as they did in God. Their religion was the choice of free, thoughtful minds. They lined the memories of their children with Catechism and Bible truths as conscientiously as they covered their bodies with coats of wool and tow. They were staunch in character, temperate, frugal, religious.
As they came hither they met the men and women from central Pennsylvania, the descendants of the Covenanters and the martyrs of olden times in Ireland and Scotland. Men they were of like type, trained in stern schools, with like memories of revolutionary sires and of battles for religious freedom. They, too, were the Lord's freemen. They held to the book their mothers read. They believed that "the chief end of man was to glorify God." They never thought of doing anything heroic or divinely great, or of making splendid history for coming genera- tions to read. I don't think they looked far into the future. [t has been even impossible to learn what was the names of some of them. It does not matter, we should be none the wiser if we could name them and they themselves none the more honorable. Enough that they were kings and queens of a good old time gone
4
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by, when farmers gave good measure for their wheat, and millers took honest toll of the rye, when social manners and customs were beautified by simplicity, and piety was deep and true.
I do not mean to say that they were all saints, nor that any of them were stainless in their lives. I mean only to say that they met, here in the wilderness-New England Puritan and Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, clasped hands as brothers, and deter- mined by close living and hard work, by building schools and churches, by maintaining order and honesty and exalting God and religion to make this a happy place for Christian homes. They did not fail. The victory was won.
It was no holiday task, for I now tell you, that with our grandsires other and rougher and more lawless settlers came, some who had no religion to bring, some who lost all their piety on the rough journey hither. They loved a free and border life, where every man should be a law unto himself. There were some who neither feared God nor regarded man. It took time to subdue the savage spirits of men who had left other places to get free from the restraints of law and morals. It took time and hard struggles (so I have learned from one who was nearer the period of conflict) to make righteousness the law of daily life and to lead men to see that virtue is beautiful and God is to be feared. It is due mainly, under God, to the men and women who planted this church one hundred years ago and who nourished it with marvellous love and self-sacrifice that the lawlessness and barbarism which came hither in the earliest times were conquered and the spirit of Christianity took the throne. I would that I were able to picture an event that took place close by where we now are on September 27, 1801. It was a great day, the birth-day of this church, awaited, heralded and prepared for. Missionary preachers had been sent from near Pittsburg as early as 1797 and 1798 on tours of visitation to the scattered settlements north of Pittsburg and the Ohio River. They came into this region seeking their brethren in the wilderness. In 1801 the Rev. Elisha MeCurdy, who may justly be called the Father of Presbyterianism on the lake shore, was sent hither, accompanied by his. famous Praying Elder, Philip Jackson, and three brother ministers, James Satterfield, William Wick, and Abraham Boyd, to preach and organize
-
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churches. The news of their coming was sent everywhere, and from near and far the people came to greet them. On the 27th of September they met in a grove of forest trees' on the farm of William Dundass, a few hundred rods west of the place where we are now gathered, and near the little stream beside which the parsonage of this church stands, a congregation of three hun- dred people. It was a marvellous assembly for this thinly settled region, but they were hungering for the word of God, for the Sacraments of His House, and for a church organization, and they counted not the miles of their journey. At that ser- vice held under the shade of oaks and maples, this church was organized, the first of the Presbyterian order, and it is believed of any other, on the shores of Lake Erie. About forty persons participated in that first communion service, of whom twenty- five pledged themselves to be true and loyal servants of their Divine Lord and to keep this fair land for Him and for His Kingdom. This number united in the organization of this church.
Most of them were young men and their wives in their early manhood and womanhood. Some of them entered other churches that were soon organized nearer their homes. It is impossible to give the names of all the twenty-five who formed the first organization of this church. Two brothers, Joseph and John McCord, and their brother-in-law, Thomas Robinson, formed the first Board of Elders. Their wives were also in that first band. With them were Thomas Moorhead and wife, Judah Colt and wife, Mr. Colt uniting upon the profession of his faith, William Dundass and wife, James McMahon and wife, Robert Hampson and wife, Alexander T. Blaine and wife, Seth Loomis and wife, Timothy Tuttle and wife, Mrs. Jacks, Mrs. Brawley, and others of the Stewart, Shadduck, Wilson, Burras, Gallagher, and Lowry families. A few of these may only have shared in the first Sacrament, but not in the church organization.
During the first quarter of the century's life of this church many new families came into its membership and took part in its strenuous and noble history. I mention a few names that were familiar to my boyhood, some of whose descendants still are connected with the church :
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Baldwin, Crawford, Culbertson, Dickson, Duncan, Ensign, Hall, Mellen, MacIntosh, Nettleton, Orton, Smedley, Selkregg, Milliken, Silliman.
We have been thinking of the men and the women of the earliest days of this church. Unconscious heroes and heroines were they, and the more so because they were unconscious that the Providence above them was shaping all their doings to the issues of to-day. No grand schemes had they for themselves or their children, for the state or for the dear Kingdom of Christ. They were working quietly and patiently at the root of things, seeking no praise of men, families of righteous men they were laying the sacred beginnings of Christian homes, planting the seeds of civil order and nursing the germs of religious liberty in the hard grindings of practical life, standing as they could for faith and duty. Let us uncover our heads in grateful mem- ory of what they were and what they did. Down the stream of time they have sent to us a gracious heritage. We are the heirs of what they won with no light struggle and contest. They lived for us. Their successcs are our possession. Their cour- age and patience made this a goodly land for us. Let us enter into their labors. Let us enter into sympathy with them as in those lowlier, harder times they trod the path to God. And let us see to it that we pay over with large interest to the coming generations the goodly things we have received from the men and women who have helped each other, and served their God and ours.
HYMN-"A Mighty Fortress is Our God."
PRAYER AND BENEDICTION-By Rev. William Grassie.
Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we look to Thee this hour with thankfulness for all the goodness and mercy with which Thou hast followed this Thy people in the hundred years that have gone by. We praise the Lord for the existence and the continuance of this local church of Christ, for the faith and self-denial, the energy and persistence of the fathers and mothers that unto God were the seed of this church, for the holy men of God that preached and sought their way through the wilderness wherever they might find the people scattered in their homes and gathered them together as followers of the Lord.
God bless this church. We thank Thee for its faithfulness, for the revival seasons that have greatly augmented its numbers
OSEE SELKREGG, Elder, 1843.
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and increased its spiritual force. The Lord God remain in it, and dwell in it by His Holy Spirit, and bless the truth that is preached, and O God, we pray that at the beginning of another century of Christian work these men and women who are now members of the church and bearing the burdens and heat of this day may be undergirded with the might of God, and take to themselves new heart, new faith, new courage, and with conse- cration such as the holy spirit of God gives to men and women, go on making themselves a power unto God in this community. We commend them to Thee, the word of Thy grace.
We thank Thee, Lord, for this history and unfolding of the life of the church and we pray that these men and women and chil- dren who live at the end if one century and the beginning of another, may go forward and be a part of the church of God, may be a power for good in the land. We ask it in Jesus' name. AMEN.
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