Meta Chestnutt Appeals to the Disciples for Support, 1895

In late November 1894, Meta Chestnutt used the local paper to announce that the college would host a Thanksgiving Day social for the community. She asked friends of the college to bring a book to add to the school library. It would be a wonderful time of "music and social conversation."[1] By then, C.O. Robertson, who had apparently been Silas Kennedy's choice for president of the new college, was preparing to leave Minco for good. Also by then, it was clear that donations to the school would not be coming from Kennedy's network of churches and Christian friends. And that, of course, left open the issue of finances. How could the new college pay off its debt? In response to that question, Chestnutt decided on a path that Kennedy had avoided: a direct appeal to Disciples at large to support the college. In a long report she sent to the American Home Missionary, Chestnutt told readers about the origins, progress, and potential of El Meta Christian College. "This mission was established at Silver City, seven miles from its present location, September 8, 1889." Since then, the town had moved to meet the railroad. In the new town that residents established and named Minco on July 4, 1890, the school had flourished. The first term of the current school year had seen 94 students. For the second term, there were 97. The new building was "four stories, including the basement," and the five rooms on the first floor were nearly complete. With the growth of the school, more instructors would come on to the faculty.[2] But, Chestnutt added, the mission always involved more than education. When she had first arrived at Silver City in 1889, she not only began her school. She also "went to work in earnest, teaching the Bible every Lord's day." Five years later, the church that she planted still did not have a "regular preacher." Yet the congregation had never failed to meet "each Lord's day to study and teach the Word, break bread and contribute of our means to the Lord." About once every three months, the church at Minco got to hear a sermon from a visiting preacher like R. W. Officer, T. B. Larimore, Volney Johnson, and D. T. Broadus. With their help, the congregation had grown "from two to some fifty or sixty." Given such promise and the strong record of growth, "all Christians," said Chestnutt, should "consider favorably the efforts being made here in Minco, and help us raise the $1,000 needed to meet the present demand of patronage." Contributors would be helping "this little band of Disciples to fix firmly the standard of King Immanuel" in Indian Territory.[3]

Notes

[1] Minco Minstrel, November 23, 1894, 4. By this point, Joe Rogers, and not C.O. Robertson, was listed as the manager and publisher of the Minco Minstrel.

[2] Meta Chestnutt, "Minco, Ind. Ter.," American Home Missionary 1, No. 4 (April 1895), 61-62.

[3] Ibid., 61.

Meta Chestnutt in 1894

Previous posts have taken up the the story of the crisis and resolution that unfolded in Minco, Indian Territory in 1894. What follows here is a bit of interpretation. Why would at least some church and school leaders in Minco and Chickasha be motivated to more or less take over the school that Meta Chestnutt had established some five years earlier?

A young, unmarried woman, Meta Chestnutt was highly unusual for her time. As historian Richard White describes the U.S. during the Gilded Age, "single women who left their paternal homes to work were considered women adrift, moving outside of the usual and accepted cultural categories, and their conditions very often were unenviable."[1] Miss Meta had successfully defied the norms. She had earned a professional degree in Nashville. Later, she had left behind the comfort and security of her home in North Carolina and traveled halfway across America by herself in order to establish a school in Indian Territory. Just five years later, that school would soon be adding college-level courses in a brand new three-story building. Meta Chestnutt sometimes made it clear that she had come to I.T. "neither land hunting, nor man hunting." If she was merely looking for a man, she said, "there were plenty of them where I had come from."[2] For the moment, she was resolutely single, enjoying high status and a stable livelihood. She would have been the first to say that her life was far from glamorous. But to many people at the time, her social prominence and entrepreneurial success seemed more suitable for a man, especially a married man with a household to support.

Notes

[1] Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 239.

[2] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, September 3, 1944, box 1, folder 10, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City. In her letter, Mrs. Sager underlined "man hunting."

S. E. Kennedy's Silence about the Christian College at Minco

In January 1895, Silas Kennedy sent word from Chickasha, I.T. to the American Home Missionary, a brand new, official publication of the Disciples of Christ dedicated to stateside missions. His report made it into the very first issue. Kennedy wrote that eleven people had recently been added to the congregation at Chickasha where he served as minister, and that he had recently established a church at nearby "Ninakah" (present Ninnekah, Oklahoma). Soon, along with "Bro. Hardin," Kennedy would dedicate a congregation at South McAlester. He noted that there were "ten towns on this Rock Island Railroad without a Christian preacher" and that Indian Territory would "perhaps double in population in the next year." The needs and opportunities were tremendous. Yet Kennedy said not one word about El Meta Christian College in Minco, an omission that by this point was a familiar pattern.[1]

It is hard to imagine that Kennedy's treachery would not become public knowledge. Before 1895 was over, he would be gone. In early December, the Chickasha Record reported, "Elder Kennedy who left here some time ago for Oklahoma City has moved to Lexington, O.T. where he has opened a store." The very next item in the paper said, "Elder Grogan has engaged as pastor of the Christian Church at this place."[2]

Notes

[1] S. E. Kennedy, "Chickasha, I.T." American Home Missionary 1, No. 1 (January 1895): 29. 

[2] Chickasha Record, December 5, 1895, 5.

S. E. Kennedy's Scheme Exposed

My post for June 14, 2020 raises a question: Why was it that in August of 1894, C. O. Robertson, the manager of the Minco Minstrel newspaper, was named the president of the new Christian college in Minco, Indian Territory? And why did Robertson leave Minco for good on Thanksgiving Day that year?

Here we must rely on Eva Heiliger, a great niece and frequent correspondent of Meta Chestnutt's and her uncritical biographer. According to Heiliger's unpublished book manuscript, in the early months of 1894, S. E. Kennedy, preacher for the Christian Church in nearby Chickasha, I.T., was telling the people of Minco that he had friends and knew churches in the east who were willing to sponsor a Christian school in Indian Territory that was under his direction. Their donations would lighten the financial burden associated with the college. Locals liked what they heard. Soon, townspeople who supported the school were suggesting to Miss Chestnutt that for the good of the future college she should let go of her leadership and make way for a new direction. What could she do but comply with that consensus? Broken-hearted, she immediately began packing for a trip to her old home in North Carolina.[1]

What no one at the time realized was that Kennedy had been sending photos of the impressive facility to friends and congregational leaders in distant places, telling them that it was a church building. As he described things to potential contributors, Kennedy was himself the minister of the church, a vital outpost of the kingdom of Christ in Indian Territory.[2] Why the deception?

Kennedy understood that many members of Christian Churches and Churches of Christ were reluctant to contribute to Christian colleges. Ambivalence about colleges affiliated with the Restoration Movement reach back all the way to the very first one: Bacon College, founded in 1837 at Georgetown, Kentucky. As the school began, John Allen Gano, a well-known Kentucky evangelist wrote:

I am unwilling . . . that the birth of [Bacon College] . . . be viewed as a part or even an appendage of the reformation for which we plead. The cause of Christ is one thing--the college another--as essentially distinct as the Church of Christ and this republican government. Let every Christian parent bring his or her children to the Lord's house on the Lord's day, and teach them the Lord's word. This is the school of Christ--this is training up children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. The College, if they want, should have a paper of their own. The Christian should plead for Christ.[3]

Fifty years later, people of Gano's persuasion looked to leaders like Daniel Sommer, publisher of the Octographic Review. To his thousands of readers, Sommer emphasized that the churches of the New Testament spent money on two things: evangelism and benevolence. Christians of the apostolic age did not establish schools. Besides, Christian higher education tended to promote a clergy class and the idea that one could not be a worthy preacher without a college education.[4] Such prejudice against church support for Christian colleges generated the temptation for Kennedy to suggest that the building under construction was a church house, not a school. Meta Chestnutt's original school house in Minco served as both a school during the week and a church on Sunday. Perhaps Silas Kennedy rationalized that the college under construction would eventually double as a church house.

What he did not count on was the possibility that one of the men he had solicited for church funds would actually make a trip to Minco, Indian Territory, in order to see this "church building" for himself. When the unnamed visitor realized that he had just taken a tour of a school building and not a church house, he immediately notified others who were planning to send money to Silas Kennedy. It seems that the visitor also notified locals about the scheme. Soon, community leaders in Minco sent word to Meta Chestnutt, who had recently traveled from Indian Territory to her old home in North Carolina. She was welcome, they wrote, to return to Minco and assume control of the new college, the flower of the school she had established five years before.

Notes

[1] Eva Heiliger, "Born to Meet Adversity (and Rise Above It)," 93-95. This manuscript is part of the Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection housed in the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City.

[2] Ibid., 94.

[3] John Allen Gano, Millennial Harbinger, August 1837, 384 (misprinted as 284).

[4] See, for example, in Octographic Review 31, Daniel Sommer, "Preachers and Preaching" (Feb. 16, 1888), 1; "Concerning Colleges" (Nov. 15, 1888), 1, 8; "Colleges Again" (Nov. 22, 1888), 1. For a brief description and analysis of Sommer's position on colleges, see Robert E. Hooper, A Distinct People: A History of the Churches of Christ in the 20th Century (West Monroe, LA: Howard Publishing Company, 1993), 20-21.