D. T. Broadus on El Meta Christian College in 1895

The college at Minco is moving on. The building is not complete yet. It will require patience and perseverance to complete the building and get the school in good running order. W. J. Erwin, J. H. and R. S. Tuttle are trustees, and will push it to completion as fast as they can. They now have three teachers, including the music teacher. There are now about ninety pupils and others ready to start as soon as they get more of the boarding department ready. Brethren, let us all encourage this much-needed work. Some good brethren who have money can do a grand work by contributing some of it immediately to assist in finishing up the boarding department. Send your money to either of the trustees, or to Miss Meta Chestnutt, who has labored so faithfully for five long years in bringing the school up to what it is now. She began with a small number of children in a little schoolhouse on the wild prairie, but all the time with this work in view. She has, by persevering until now, brought it to where it is. She is a graduate of Peabody Normal, of Nashville, Tenn., and is a practical, energetic teacher. She begins a thing to succeed. She has but little use for the word fail. Other good teachers will be added as fast as they are needed. One other will be added soon.

D. T. Broadus, "Kansas Notes," Gospel Advocate 37 (January 3, 1895), 14.

Meta Chestnutt Complains in the Gospel Advocate, 1895

The issue of the Gospel Advocate for August 22, 1895, includes an article titled "El-Meta Christian College." Although it appears unsigned, it was no doubt written and submitted by Meta Chestnutt. Several personal notes and a distinctive style mark the piece as hers. For example, in her unmistakable rhetoric, Meta refers to her school as "that from which early childhood was the star that glimmered in the distant future."[1] She credits T. B. Larimore for his encouragement and "wise counsel" while the school was still in the planning stages. But since her arrival in Indian Territory, only two other preachers had issued "one word of private cheer or public encouragement": J. H. Hardin and D. T. Broadus.[2] 

In addition to a lack of support from leaders, she complains about a dearth of financial support. She was "beguiled" by a promise now unfulfilled, a failure that now branded the movement "with deception and lying." Both "prog" (progressives among the Disciples) and "antis" (those who stood against instrumental music and missionary societies) "silently refused to send one dollar to aid in planting the standard of Jesus." In addition to the monies contributed by members of the Minco church and by other residents of the town, it would require only three thousand dollars more "to clear up the outside debts and finish the present building." Mission work like hers certainly merited "the consideration of those who feel it their duty to 'go teach all nations'."[3]

Although he disagreed with the assumption of Meta's article, true to form David Lipscomb, editor of the Gospel Advocate, published it. But he did include his own remarks at the end: "I have no doubt the El-Meta College deserves the help and good will of Christians, . . . but when any think they can lay the brotherhood of disciples under obligation of honor for work they undertake, they are mistaken. To charge a forfeiture of honor is a wrong charge."[4] In spite of what Lipscomb wrote, over fifty years later, Meta still believed "The church in the East gave me a mighty raw deal."[5]

Notes

[1] "El-Meta Christian College," Gospel Advocate (August 22, 1895), 532.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 532-33.

[4] Ibid., 533. Lipscomb sometimes gave space in the Gospel Advocate to dissenting views. For example, on the subject of women's roles in the church he published a number of articles with which he disagreed, written by a woman, no less. See, for instance, Selina Holman, "Let Your Women Keep Silent," Gospel Advocate (August 1, 1888), 8; "The Scriptural Status of Women," (October 10, 1888), 2-3; "The 'New Woman'," (July 9, 1896), 438; "The New Woman, No. 2," (July 16, 1896), 452-53. For a good discussion of the exchange between Holman and Lipscomb, see C. Leonard Allen, "The New Woman," in Distant Voices: Discovering a Forgotten Past for a Changing Church (Abilene, TX: ACU Press, 1993), 126-35.

[5] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, November 18, 1946, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, box 3, folder 20.

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.

El Meta, Lockney, and Hereford: Comparing Three Christian Colleges

One idea I have is to compare the brief careers of three Christian colleges:

El Meta Christian College (later, El Meta Bond College, 1889-1920)
Lockney Christian College (1894-1918)
Hereford Christian College and Industrial School (1902-1912)

Why were these colleges established? How did they get their start? And, why did all they have such short lifespans? Three factors combine to make these schools good candidates for comparison.

Religious Connections

In the first place, all three were private institutions founded by Christians with strong ties to the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement. This movement, a powerful impulse on the American religious scene growing out of the Second Great Awaking, eventually gave rise to the Disciples of Christ denomination, the independent Christian Churches, and the Churches of Christ.

Because of their connection to the Restoration Movement, the founders of these schools shared the same vision regarding the purpose and goals of formal education. They inherited this outlook from their religious ancestor Alexander Campbell. Far more than any other person in Restoration history, it was Campbell who shaped the movement's philosophy of education.[1]

For Campbell, education was not an end in itself. Rather, it was a means to an end. The true goal of education was a knowledge of God which, in addition to its eternal benefits, would lead to a morally-sound, well-ordered society, one that would promote human flourishing. According to Campbell's educational philosophy, a person's intellectual growth went hand in hand with his religious and moral development. Ideally, all of these accompanied and aided the other. Education was vital.[2]

For example, writing in the pages of The Millennial Harbinger in 1836, Campbell asserted that whatever a person's natural capacities might be, "without education neither intellectual greatness nor moral goodness can be attained." He went on to say that "it is the primary duty of all parents to educate their children." Naturally, Campbell assumed that parents themselves would serve as their child's first teachers. But, he added, "schools, primary and secondary, or schools and colleges, are the most ancient and useful inventions for this purpose."[3] In an 1856 address, Campbell indicated the significance he assigned to teachers:

I have come to the conclusion that no class of men, in any department of society, have more of the good or evil destiny of the world in their hands and under their influence than the teachers of our schools and colleges."[4]

Campbell's commitment to formal education led him to establish Buffalo Seminary in 1818, the year he turned thirty. He conducted the boarding school in his house. Classes met on the ground floor. Students were housed upstairs. And Campbell and his growing family lived in the basement.[5] As one might guess, this experiment lasted for only a few years (1818-1823). But it must have provided several practical lessons that Campbell was able to put to good use when, in 1840 and '41, he planned and opened Bethany College. Sometimes called the mother of all Disciple colleges, nearly 180 years old, Bethany College is still in operation.

Time Frame

Another reason why El Meta, Lockney, and Hereford can be compared is that all three operated at roughly the same time. The school known for many years as El Meta Christian College began at Silver City in the Chickasaw Nation in 1889. The next year, almost all of the tiny community of Silver City moved seven miles to the west to be near the railroad, the Chicago Rock, Island and Pacific, which was laying track, extending the line south out of Kansas. Meta Chestnutt and her schoolhouse made up part of of the migration and helped to start a new town they called Minco, which was home to the college until its closing in 1920.

Charles Walker Smith and St. Clair W. Smith, of no relation to one another, established Lockney Christian College in Lockney, Floyd County, Texas, in 1894. The school remained in operation until 1918.

Hereford Christian College and Industrial School in Hereford, Texas, opened its doors in 1902. Randolph Clark, the school's first president, was a co-founder of what is now Texas Christian University. For a few years, the school at Hereford was known as Panhandle Christian College. After only a decade in operation, the college closed in 1911.

Regional Relations

A third factor that makes these three schools comparable is that they were located in what is essentially the same region. Whites who settled in Texas and Oklahoma were a nineteenth-century extension of a pattern of migration that began more than a century before. Around the year 1718, waves of migrants from northern Ireland and from the border regions of southern Scotland and the north of England began arriving at the ports of Newcastle, Delaware, and Philadelphia. Typically, these people, who represented a distinctive cultural type, moved past the cities of the American east coast to the wilderness of the western frontier. They were the white settlers of the backcountry, especially the lands that became the the American South [6] It would be hard to overestimate the significance of the size of this migration and its meaning for the future of the United States. For example, during the six decades leading up to the American Revolution, over 100,000 people from the province of Ulster in Northern Ireland alone had immigrated to British North America.[7]

Beyond the historic similarities between Texas and Oklahoma, one can say that far more than any other part of Texas, the Panhandle Plains region of the Lone Star state bears a close resemblance to Oklahoma. Historian Donald Worster takes note of this in his monumental study titled Dust Bowl. He observes that by the 1930s, especially in the area from Lubbock to Amarillo, "the cultural patterns were almost identical to those farther east." Worster mentions that this is not surprising because, for example,  in spite of the 100th meridian, the line dividing western Oklahoma from the Texas Panhandle, both sections were part of a regional cotton kingdom. He suggests that Woody Guthrie personifies this connection. Born in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1912, Woody "moved to Pampa, over in the Texas panhandle, in 1929 and remained there through the dust storms until he hitched a ride to California in 1937."[8]

Looking for links between Oklahoma and the high plains of Texas, students of Restoration history might point to R. W. Officer. At the turn of the twentieth century, Officer made his home in Atoka, Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory. But sometime after he buried his wife, Lota Venable Officer, he moved west to what is now Turkey, Texas in Hall County. He died and was buried at Turkey in 1930, having lived to the age of 85.

Notes

[1] John L. Morrison, "Education, Philosophy of," in Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), 292-94; M. Norvel Young, A History of Colleges Established and Controlled by Members of the Churches of Christ (Kansas City, MO: Old Paths Book Club, 1949), 25-33. Significantly, Young's entire section on the "Attitude of the Movement toward Education" is an overview of the attitudes of Alexander Campbell. For more on this topic, see also the fine essay by Thomas H. Olbricht, "Alexander Campbell as an Educator," in Lectures in Honor of the Alexander Campbell Bicentennial, 1788-1988 (Nashville: Disciples of Christ Historical Society, 1988), 79-100.

[2] Morrison, "Education."

[3] Alexander Campbell, "Remarks," Millennial Harbinger, 1836, 201.

[4] Alexander Campbell, "Address on Education," in Popular Lectures and Addresses (Philadelphia: James Challen & Son, 1863), 245.

[5] Leroy Garrett, "Campbell, Alexander," in Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, 120.

[6]  David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), notes that peak years were 1718, 1729, 1741, 1755, 1767, and 1774. The decade from 1765 to 1775 witnessed two-thirds of the entire migration (605-08). For Texas and Oklahoma as two places where the descendants of these immigrants moved during the nineteenth century, see 633-39.

[7] Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1-8.

[8] Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 61. Worster might have also mentioned that even before Woody Guthrie moved to Pampa, his father, Charlie, broken by tragedy, moved there first.