My great-grandmother's little sister Henrietta was married in 1894 and buried in 1895. Etta's husband, Thomas E. "Eddie" Newland, served Methodist churches in the area and went on to prominence among Illinois Methodist clergy. He married again after his first wife died and the couple lived well into old age. The Newlands traveled on the Queen Mary in 1937 (an example of the fun stuff a person can find on Family Search). Etta, I am sorry your life was cut so short, but Eddie seems to have found a good companion.
Here is a reminiscence the Rev. Dr. Newland wrote about his parish. It's from Facts and Fancies of a Country Parish, by Willard E. Woods. It was published in 1925 as a history of the Walnut Grove charge of the M.E. church. The first half of the book is maudlin poetry and it appears the current pastor, the Rev. Woods, was working through deep personal sorrow. He dedicates the booklet to the memory of the "little girl who used to call me 'Daddy'."
The area is northern McDonough and southern Warren counties. Advertisers are from Bushnell (home of a Chevrolet-Hudson dealership in 1925, among dozens of other commercial enterprises), Prairie City, Lynn Grove and Swan Creek. We were in Bushnell and Prairie City a few weeks ago.
Here is a reminiscence the Rev. Dr. Newland wrote about his parish. It's from Facts and Fancies of a Country Parish, by Willard E. Woods. It was published in 1925 as a history of the Walnut Grove charge of the M.E. church. The first half of the book is maudlin poetry and it appears the current pastor, the Rev. Woods, was working through deep personal sorrow. He dedicates the booklet to the memory of the "little girl who used to call me 'Daddy'."
The area is northern McDonough and southern Warren counties. Advertisers are from Bushnell (home of a Chevrolet-Hudson dealership in 1925, among dozens of other commercial enterprises), Prairie City, Lynn Grove and Swan Creek. We were in Bushnell and Prairie City a few weeks ago.
T. E. NEWLAND
Pastor 1893 — 1897
When I came to Walnut Grove as pastor, the charge was composed of Pleasant Mound, Lynn Grove, Greenbush and Youngstown. At the end of the first year Greenbush and Youngstown were taken elsewhere by Presiding Elder Crumbaker and Holly Hill school house as an appointment was added. In the latter arrangement distances were shortened and drives lightened, though for weeks at a time snowdrifts must be overcome,bottomless mud "forded," and clay hills climbed. Congregations were good at all seasons of the year when roads and weather made it possible for the people to come. "When the Elder came 'round" for the Quarterly Meeting, or at the time of Sunday School conventions, Children's Day and Christmas Exercises, the churches would not accommodate all those who were always eagerly anticipated. Special revival services yearly in each of the churches was the rule and results were expected and secured. We believed in "a heart-felt religion" and the only way to get it was "to pray through." Frequently men were known to come to church to scoff who remained to pray.
The fathers and mothers of that day have largely gone to their eternal home. With their passing the system of resident ownership passed also, and the modern program has prevailed since. In that other day community interests were vital, for the farm owner and his family and his life-time neighbor and neighbor's family were all greatly concerned. The church, at once the social center as well as the spiritual supply station of the community, held chief place in the thought and favor of the community. Only the openly hostile remained outside the influence of its program.
Since those days "much water has passed under that bridge". The telephone has telescoped homes until neighbors converse as from adjacent rocking chairs, the radio has radiated from all centers of the earth until the humblest farm home has "listened in" to the voices of the world, the auto has demolished distances until the Sunday dinner is possible one hundred miles from home and modern magazines and all sorts of alluring literature, make the program of the modern church well nigh impossible in some localities. Added to all this the transitional change in the emphasis of the church from a religion of other worldiness to one vitally concerned with the service due to the world in which we now live. These are not matters of discouragement, however, tho' there are some sinister aspects. The swing of the pendulum has started back. The day of the country church is not over. Its message is too vital to humanity and its program as far reaching as eternity. We are not facing the sunset, brother preacher, but it is the rising sun which is smiting our faces. The strength of Protestantism has always been in the rural sections From the hills and the prairies the circuit rider and the city preachers alike have sprung. Our city work is still in the stage of uncertainty while the evangel of Methodism has had and still must have its mightiest triumphs in the country.
Of the great revivals, of the first Epworth League, of the fine congregational singing, of the genuine whole souled hospitality, o the strong virile man-like characters, of the womanly women, manifestly such by the adornment of the grace of God, of these and more I can only speak in reference in passing. It may be that distance does lend enchantment to the scene, but faith "draws nigh/' and once more I feel the thrill of those early labors and conquests and through memory am refreshed as in the presence of those whom we have "loved and lost awhile.”
The traditions of Walnut Grove, Lynn Grove and Holly Hill are rich in the memories they bring of faith in God and zeal for His cause. It may be that there were human weaknesses and frailties, but one must needs be large in soul and fervent in spirit if he would serve the Lord as perfectly as they did. "According to their lights" they "lived, loved and labored" to be "worthy of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus". It is an ambition ennobling to the soul to desire to be worthy sons and daughters of such sires.
George William Curtis makes one of his characters say: "The hills beyond the river lay yesterday at sunset in purple gloom. They receded into airy distances of dream and fancy. They sank softly into the night, the peaks of the delectable mountains. But I knew, as I gazed enchanted that the hills, so purple, soft of seeming, were hard and gray and barren in the wintry twilight, and that in the distance the magic that made them fair. So beyond the river of time that flows between, walk the brave men and the beautiful women of our ancestry grouped in twilight upon the shore. Distance smooths away defects and with gentle darkness rounds every form into grace. It steals the hardness from their speech and every word becomes a song. We acknowledge our inheritance. We accept our birthright. We own that their careers have pledged us to noble action. Every great life is an incentive to all others."
Very sincerely yours,
T. E. Newland,
Chicago, Ill.