The Standard of King Immanuel: Meta Chestnutt's Mission to Indian Territory

Meta Chestnutt, c. 1888

Meta Chestnutt’s first night in Oklahoma was not what she had imagined it would be. Shivering in her bed during the wee hours of the morning, she stared down at the floor of her room. Her “room” was actually a lean-to with one hole in the wall to serve as a window. The lean-to was attached to the Grand Avenue Hotel, "which was not very grand at that time." The hotel stood in "a town of shacks and tents" known as Oklahoma City, then barely four months old. Beneath the floor, a wolf had entrenched himself with no intention of leaving his new home. Earlier that evening, a few of the leading men of the town, including the mayor and marshal, had tried to evict the wolf. But all such attempts were angrily rejected. Afterwards, no one above or beneath the floor got much sleep as the wolf yipped and howled through the night.[1]

The next morning, September 6, 1889, W. J. Erwin, a former U. S. marshal, accompanied by his daughter Grace, picked up a load of lumber in Oklahoma City. Then, they picked up their new school teacher, recently arrived by train from North Carolina, who had with her a large trunk. Among its contents were "two big feather pillows made of feathers picked from the geese of the old plantation home, sheets, pillowcases, and clothes for a five year stay." Grace, who had turned ten years old that May, and “Miss Meta,” as people came to call her, climbed onto the lumber stacked on the wagon and used the trunk for a seatback. Then, the father, daughter, and school teacher rode the many hours to Silver City, Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory, a trip that included a crossing of the Canadian River swollen to its banks by recent rains.[2] It was no doubt during the trip that Meta discovered what the lumber was for. Mr. Erwin would build on the side of his house another lean-to. This one would be Miss Chestnutt's living quarters not for one night, but for the next seven years. Little did she realize that during those years, when dry spells came, for days on end she would eat nothing except corn meal moistened with a bit of milk.[3]

Upon making it to Silver City in the afternoon, Chestnutt discovered that she had missed her welcoming party. The arrival of a new teacher in Indian Territory must have meant a great deal, because the night before, when everyone had expected her, "the little settlement had staged a big dance," with some in attendance from fifty miles away. By the next afternoon, however, "the cowpunchers had all returned to their herds, the ladies had ridden their ponies away with their sidesaddles and long riding habits, the hacks and wagons had rumbled off along the trails." In stark contrast to the festivities of the night before, at that point "there was no sound save the prairie chicken's squawk, and no curious eyes save the jack rabbit's stare." Still, the lady from eastern North Carolina found her new home enchanting: "that first sunset over miles and miles of prairie was a blaze of glory one could never forget."[4]

Meta Chestnutt began teaching on her twenty-sixth birthday, two days after she arrived in Silver City. The tiny community had prepared for her as best they could. Fifty years later, she described that first schoolhouse they had waiting for her. It was built, she said, 

by a few cowmen and some of the “nesters” down near Silver City cemetery. It was a frame building 24 by 36 feet, with a log rolled up to the door for a step. Rough cottonwood lumber was nailed up for seats and desks. Three twelve-inch boards four feet long were nailed together for a blackboard and painted black. Pieces of chalk were chipped from a large lump and served as crayons with which to “cipher.”[5]

Photo c. 1892. Back row, left to right: W. J. Erwin, Ann "Annie" Tuttle Erwin, Grace Erwin, Meta Chestnutt. Front row: Mary Ann, Wilma, Claude Tuttle Erwin. All of the children were born in Sherman, Texas, before the family moved to Indian Territory.

Someone had ordered school books, and they had been delivered--to Silver City, New Mexico![6] So Chestnutt, as she had to do countless times in Indian Territory, improvised. She began by announcing, “The first thing we will learn today is the ‘Golden Rule.’ We will memorize it and then we will begin to learn how to live it.” At that point, she had only seven students. Before the first school year was over, there were thirty-seven.[7] This was the beginning of thirty years of teaching and school administration, first at Silver City, and later at Minco, I.T. Through it all, the conviction that sustained her was that she had come to Indian Territory by the will of God; that her work was not merely educational, but missionary and redemptive. She once wrote that her goal was “to fix firmly the standard of King Immanuel.” But the mission was not hers alone. This was church work. “Our battle,” she continued,

has been a fierce one all along the line, and our burden a heavy one, but the Lord has blessed us in all our fiery trials. Our little band has grown from two to fifty or sixty. Some zealous brethren belong to our band now. It is a glorious sight to see whole families coming to service, one in Christ Jesus. At our regular Lord’s day service our attendance sometimes runs to seventy-five, and our Bible readings on Lord’s day night are well attended.[8]

A few times a year, the congregation would hear the sermons of visiting preachers like R. W. Officer, J. H. Hardin, Volney Johnson, and D. T. Broadus. On Sundays when they had no preacher, which was most of them, Meta would “teach the Bible” and “spread the Lord’s table.” That is, she would preach a sermon and preside at the Lord's Supper, which the congregation observed every Sunday. In time, the Church of Christ that met in the schoolhouse at Minco, I.T., would grow to well over one hundred in attendance.[9]

Over three decades, Meta taught some 2,500 students, and provided a Christian example for them and their families. Many of her students became Christians. Several went on to become political and business leaders in the new State of Oklahoma. In recognition of her life's work, in 1939, she was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. In short, Meta Chestnutt, who died at Chickasha, Oklahoma in 1948, was one of the most successful bi-vocational missionaries in the history of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement.

Notes

[1] Mrs. J. A. Sager, "Some Wildflowers from My Garden of Memory," Meta Chestnutt Sager file, box 10, Historic Oklahoma Biographies Collection, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma. See also Eva Heiliger, "Born to Meet Adversity (and Rise Above It)," 1-3. Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, box 1, folders 6 and 7, Research Division, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City.

[2] Sager, "Some Wildflowers."

[3] Heiliger, "Born to Meet Adversity," 33-35.

[4] Sager, "Some Wildflowers."

[5] Meta C. Sager, "Early Grady County History," Chronicles of Oklahoma 17, no. 2 (June 1939): 187. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "nester" as "a person who settles permanently in a cattle-grazing region as a farmer, homesteader, etc." The earliest example of the use of this word dates to 1880.

[6] Gwen Jackson, "Pioneer Teacher in First Graded Grady County School: Meta Chestnutt Sager of Silver City and Minco," Grady County Historical Society, Chickasha, OK.

[7] Heiliger, "Born to Meet Adversity," 42-43.

[8] Meta Chestnutt, "Minco, Ind. Ter.," American Home Missionary 1, no. 4 (April 1895): 61-62. As in the passage quoted here, Meta sometimes used military metaphors to describe her missionary work. This matches up nicely with something David Hackett Fischer has described. Fischer observed that the inhabitants of the American backcountry (including Miss Chestnutt's North Carolina) were the descendants of people who had immigrated to American from the borderlands of North Britain. Because the borderlands witnessed perennial violence, people from the region often spoke using figures from armed conflict. Even their sermons and hymns abounded in the language of battle. See Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 618.

[9] Chestnutt, "Minco."