El Meta and the Church of Christ at Minco in 1919

In 1919, the newspapers in Minco were mostly quiet about El Meta Bond College. The local school system and business colleges in the area appeared to be in full swing. At the end of August, for example, the Minco Herald reported that local public schools would open on September 2 and that the teachers for the coming term had all been employed. The next page of the paper contained an advertisement for the Chickasha Business College, which had been operating for sixteen years.[1] In nearby El Reno, Oklahoma, there was another business school, apparently with wild aspirations. In a city of 8,000, it was called Metropolitan Commercial College.[2]

Finally, on September 19, a notice appeared in the Minco Herald: "Thirtieth Re-Union El Meta Bond College." That night, the college would host a community gathering at which the grounds would be "lighted and decorated." The faculty and students would provide entertainment. Locals were encouraged to "come and welcome the old students back, and to let the new ones know that you are glad to have them in your community." The notice concluded with a nod towards the near future: "This might be your last opportunity to attend such an occasion as no one can tell what a year will bring forth."[3] Meta would soon complete three decades of nearly non-stop work in Oklahoma, and it seems the Sagers were already thinking about closing the school the following spring.

Meanwhile, Minco public schools started the year with 229 students. Superintendent J. W. Morgan warned parents that a new law made it "compulsory for all children between ages eight and sixteen to attend school six months," and he was determined to enforce that law.[4]

Both the Methodist and Baptist churches in Minco held revivals at the end of the summer.[5] But the papers made no mention of the congregation that met on Sundays at El Meta Bond College.

Notes

[1] "Schools Opens September 2," Minco Herald, August 29, 1919, 4, 5.

[2] Minco Herald, September 5, 1919, 3.

[3] "Thirtieth Re-Union El Meta Bond College," Minco Herald, September 19, 1919, 1.

[4] J.W. Morgan, "The Minco Schools," Minco Herald, October 10, 1919, 1.

[5] "Baptist Revival to Begin Sunday," Minco Herald, September 12, 1919, 1; "Revival Meeting at the Methodist Church," Minco Herald, September 19, 1919, 1.

Reaction to Meta Sager's 1936 Speech in Minco

The reaction to Meta's speech that night was a fond memory of hers for the rest of her life. A few days after the event, she wrote to Clara:

"I sold the old College ground in Minco, and a United States Armory has been built on part of it. I was asked to make a dinner speech at the Dedication Banquet . . . I was on the program with all of the biggest Generals . . . in the state. I was given the last speech . . . and when I had finished the whole house stood to cheer, led by all of those high officials. I was surprised that my little speech was so well received by those army grandees. I had been introduced at the laying of the Corner Stone in the afternoon, and at night in the Armory exercises was introduced on the platform as the most honored guest of the evening."[1]

Note

[1] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Clara Sager, December 20, 1936, MCSC, box 3, folder 26.

Meta Sager's 1936 Speech in Minco, Oklahoma

On Tuesday, December 15, 1936, Meta Sager spoke during a large banquet held in Minco. The occasion was the laying of the cornerstone for the U.S. armory, which stands to this day. It was built on the land where El Meta Bond College had stood not many years before. Local men, employed by the Works Progress Administration, a popular jobs program in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, built the armory. Perhaps the organizers of the day's festivities decided that a speech from the president of the old school might give the place a greater sense of history. Whatever their reasons, they had asked her to speak. She delivered a gem of nostalgia, patriotism, and religion.

She began with a commonly-known couplet, the first two lines of "Rock Me to Sleep," an 1859 poem by Elizabeth Akers Allen: "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight. Make me a child again just for tonight!"[1] From there, she told of Silver City on the Chisholm Trail and the town's move several miles west, to the site of Minco, founded in 1890. This was where for thirty years she operated her academy, a school that "carried all the grades and some Junior College work." She decided to have a little fun. A number of the men in attendance had been her students, she noted, and they were not always well-behaved. In fact, she said, "in almost any audience I can look around and see men whose pants I tanned when they were little boys. Some were not so very little either."[2]

Meta recalled that during the Great War, "there hung in the window of El Meta Bond a flag with thirty white starts on a blue field. They were our boys . . . for all we knew, then asleep on Flanders Field." Yet, they all came back "from somewhere in France." Sometime in 1919, after their return, "under the shade of the trees of the college campus," the school had hosted a picnic for all sixty-five service men from Grady County and their families. The day's festivities had been complete with "a brass band, a big barbecue, and hearts full of love for our boys and gratitude to the Prince of Peace for their return." With great satisfaction, no doubt, she claimed that El Meta's 2,500 alumni were then sustaining "the better institutions of learning in the greater Oklahoma of today."[3]

She concluded with a toast: "So now with abiding love to that which was, and with all honor to that which has come to be, I lift my glass and drink to the last drop--then 'Fold my tent like the Arab, and silently steal away.'"[4]

Notes

[1] Allen's poem "Rock Me to Sleep [, Mother]" appeared in Hazel Felleman, ed., The Best Loved Poems of the American People (New York: Doubleday, 1936), 371-73.

[2] Meta Chestnutt Sager, "A dinner speech at the Banquet given in Minco at the Laying of the Corner Stone and Dedication of the U.S. Armory, Dec. 15, 1936," MCSC, box 5, folder 17.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

"For Five Years I Even Buried the Dead": Meta Chestnutt's Ministry, 1889-94 (1)

In a brief retrospective piece she wrote near the end of her life, Meta Chestnutt Sager spoke about her thirty years of work as an educational missionary in Indian Territory and Oklahoma: "Christian work was always paralleled by the intellectual and social training, for five years I even buried the dead."[1] The "five years" ranged from 1889, when she first arrived at Silver City, Chickasaw Nation, until 1894. By then, several more preachers affiliated with the Stone-Campbell Movement had come to the area and sometimes visited the congregation at Minco, the town along the railroad that replaced Silver City in 1890. Around the same time she penned those words, she also wrote her own funeral service. The document details the order of her funeral, Scripture selections, prayer leaders, the songs to be sung and who should sing them. It also includes five pages of her life story, a eulogy of sorts. It even provides specific directions for the committal service: "The three ministers standing at the head of the open grave, Brother Smith give the words, The others join him in the 'Amen'."[2] (Even in death, the old school teacher and college president would direct everyone and everything). In the eulogy section of the service, she wrote, "In that early day, beginning September 8, 1889, I taught school, I taught the Bible, I buried the dead, I set the Lord's table. There was no man to do it then."[3] There is no record of her officiating at a wedding or baptizing a new believer.

Notes

[1] The two-page document written in her hand is titled "Meta Chestnutt Sager," box 3, folder 12, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[2] "Funeral Arrangements Written by Mrs. Meta Chestnutt Sager before Her Death," box 3, folder 13, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[3] Ibid.

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.

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.

The School at Minco in late 1894

In late 1894, the Minco Minstrel reported on the opening of the new college on October 1. But earlier, a few other reports indicated a strange turn of events related to the school. Because S. E. Kennedy, minister of the Christian Church at nearby Chickasha, seems to have been the main person behind the construction of the college, it likely surprised readers when in mid-August the paper announced the following: "C. O. Robertson, formerly connected with the Minstrel, will have charge of the Christian college and church paper to be established here. Charley is a good man for the business."[1]

The Minstrel, published by Lewis N. Hornbeck, regularly listed C. O. Robertson as its manager. So, why was the manager of the local newspaper suddenly going to become the top person at the Christian academy? Why not S. E. Kennedy? Why not, of all people, Meta Chestnutt, a highly-trained educator and the town's very first school teacher? Was it then, around late August, that Meta Chestnutt, brokenhearted and without recourse, left Minco for North Carolina?

Either way, the paper indicated that she returned from the east coast to Minco on Friday, September 7, and that C. O. Robertson left Minco on Thanksgiving Day, November 29. Robertson was on his way to Indiana where, said the paper, "he will remain." His wife, still in Minco, would soon be joining him in Indiana. [2] What had happened?

Notes

[1] Minco Minstrel, August 17, 1894.

[2] Minco Minstrel, September 14, 1894; November 30, 1894.

Meta Chestnutt, S. E. Kennedy, and the Christian College at Minco, I.T., 1894

Chickasha, Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory, early 1894. The tallest man (second from left) is Silas E. Kennedy. Standing in front of him is his wife, Charlcy. The two men standing to either side of Mr. Kennedy are his sons. The woman standing quite close to one of the Kennedy sons is Meta Chestnutt. Further right is yet another Kennedy son, Luke M., a dentist. There came a time, later in the same year, when Meta Chestnutt would likely not stand so close to S. E. Kennedy.

For almost all of 1894, while some people were planning and building a college at Minco, the local newspaper barely mentioned the person who had always stood at the center of local academics, and never in connection with the college. Early that year, Meta Chestnutt appeared in the news only because she was sick. In January, after students had returned, the paper reported that "Miss Meta Chestnut [sic] was taken seriously ill," and had to temporarily close her school. Two weeks later, readers were informed that Miss Meta was "slowly improving." As late as March 2, the paper noted that Chestnutt was still "improving in health" [1] Was emotional stress the source of her condition? Did a prolonged illness make the single woman seem unreliable and vulnerable?

Either way, just a few months later, construction of the college received plenty of publicity. Throughout the summer, the paper offered regular reports. In early July, for example, readers were told, "Workmen are engaged in excavating the basement of the Christian College." Six weeks later, the foundation was nearly ready and timbers were "all cut for the first and second floors."[2] It appears that the community supported the project. For example, near the end of August the school hosted a fund-raising "phantom party," at which performers wore disguises. Although concealment was likely not the goal, the paper failed to report the names of those who had organized the event, and did not know the amount of money that had been raised.[3] In fact, over the first eight months of 1894, not one newspaper report identifies anyone connected with the construction of the college.

But that changed in September. In a lengthy article titled "An Appeal for the College," S. E. Kennedy announced a celebration for the opening of the school on October 1. It would be a grand event. Attendees would hear "the Silver Cornet Band of Chickasha," see a parade, and take in something straight out of a Wild West show: a "blood-curdling warwhoop by the Comanche, Kiowa, Wichita and Caddo Indians from Anadarko." After the Indians had whooped, several white men would speak. They included J. H. Hardin from Cincinnati, Corresponding Secretary of the American Christian Missionary Society, G. W. Muckley, from Kansas City, one of the original trustees of the Disciples' Divinity House at the University of Chicago, and Ira Joy Chase, Christian church minister and former governor of the State of Indiana.[4] Although it seems clear that they did not attend, Governor Jim Hogg of Texas, father of Ima, and President Grover Cleveland were sent invitations. Kennedy spoke directly to "the people of Minco." Triumphantly, he reminded them: "when I came among you and asked you to give ten acres of land and $3,000 in money to start this College I gave you my sacred word of honor that if you would be patient and trust me I would build in your town a College of which you and your children would not be ashamed."[5]

Over the next few weeks, things did not turn out the way he imagined they would.

Notes

[1] Minco Minstrel, January 12, 1894, 3; January 26, 1894, 3; and March 2, 1894, 3.

[2] Minco Minstrel, July 13, 1894, 3; August 24, 1894, 3.

[3] Minco Minstrel, August 31, 1894, 3.

[4] S. E. Kennedy, "An Appeal for the College," Minco Minstrel, September 18, 1894, 3. On J. H. Hardin, see John T. Brown, Churches of Christ (Louisville, KY: John P. Morton and Company, 1904), 156. On G. W. Muckley, see The Disciples' Divinity House of the University of Chicago: Preliminary Bulletin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1894), 6. On Ira Joy Chase, see Alan K. Wild, "Ira J. Chase," in Linda G. Gugin and James E. St. Clair, eds., The Governors of Indiana (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 2006), 198-202.

[5] Kennedy, "An Appeal for the College."

S. E. Kennedy's Designs on Meta Chestnutt's Christian School at Minco, Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory, 1894

In some previous posts here at Frankly Speaking, I've discussed the two main characters in the story that follows here: Meta Chestnutt and Silas Kennedy. To read more of their stories, use the search window at the top left of this blog. Especially during these days of COVID-19, may you be healthy and happy. --Frank Bellizzi

Apparently, sometime during the year 1894, Disciples minister Silas Kennedy developed a plan to gain control of Meta Chestnutt's school, to seize what she had built up over the previous five years. In a report on the Indian Territory dated March 10, 1894, Kennedy commended Chestnutt as "the tall sycamore of North Carolina and the giant teacher and true missionary of the West."[1] At the time, Kennedy and his family were new arrivals, having come to Indian Territory from New Mexico just three months prior.[2] And Meta Chestnutt made a favorable impression. She was a well-educated, articulate, and attractive daughter of the South, thirty years old and at least six feet tall. Even in dusty Indian Territory, though never showy, she always managed to dress immaculately. Yet this would be the last time Kennedy would say anything in print about Chestnutt, the founder of the school he later sought to promote and lead.

One can only imagine what Kennedy's motives and justifications might have been. Perhaps he simply reasoned that this was his moment, that taking Meta Chestnutt's school to the next level was a task for which he was specially qualified. Kennedy was born in 1849, in Wetumpka, Alabama, the third son of a blacksmith.[3] At age twelve, he was drafted into the Confederate Army. He soon saw action, and just a few weeks beyond his thirteenth birthday was wounded at the Battle of Shiloh in southwest Tennessee, April 6-7, 1862.[4]

In 1866, the year he turned seventeen, he moved to Fannin County, Texas, where he met Charlcy Dockary, who was also from Alabama. The two were married in Texas in 1868 and soon started a family. According to the federal census of 1880, the couple had three sons, all born in Texas, and Silas worked as an "itinerant minister."[5] But in 1885, for financial reasons and for the sake of his family, he "quit the regular work of the ministry and went to merchandising." Two years later, in 1887, he moved his family to New Mexico where he "engaged extensively in the mercantile business." In 1893, looking back on his previous eight years, Kennedy said that he regretted how going into business meant that he had to "harden" himself and "partake of the ways of the world." His never-ending desire to preach, and what he perceived as his loss of sympathy for others, brought him to a life-changing decision:

On the fifth day of last December I cut loose from all my business relations with the full determination and with a vow to Almighty God to devote the reminder of my life to building up the cause of Christ. I have selected the Chickasaw Indian Nation, which is now rapidly settling up with white people from every state in the Union. I got here, at Chickasha, on December 8, 1893.[6]

Having lived the previous twenty-five years in Texas and New Mexico, Kennedy had come to Indian Territory looking for a new start. He found it. In the spring of 1894, when he reported to J. H. Garrison, editor of the Christian-Evangelist, Kennedy sounded like a promotional agent for the future State of Oklahoma. The potential of the place was nearly boundless. Indian Territory was, he wrote,

situated almost in the very geographical center of the United States, embracing the five civilized tribes of Indians, with the Kiowa, Comanche, Osage, Kickapoo, Cheyenne and other small tribes as well as that of Oklahoma, a scope of country larger than three of the average States of the Union, with soil, water, climate, timber, grass and many other advantages equal if not superior to any spot on earth, . . . [7]

Kennedy had found more than that in Indian Territory. He had also found at Minco, just eighteen miles north of his new home in Chickasha, a growing school, a five year old Christian academy poised to become a college. It was true that in Meta Chestnutt the school had an adequate leader. But the designs Kennedy had for the school--which were really no different than what Miss Chestnutt had in mind--would require his leadership. He was different. As tall as Meta Chestnutt was, Kennedy, who stood about six feet, five inches, was even taller.[8] And, he was fourteen years older. But most importantly by far, he was a man, a preacher, and not merely "a Bible teacher," the phrase Chestnutt was most likely to use when referring to her role in the Sunny South Christian Church at Minco. By contrast, Kennedy explicitly led congregations, baptized new believers, and published articles in brotherhood journals. And he dreamed of making more of Meta Chestnutt's school at Minco. Why have a local Christian school, when you could have a regional Christian college? So it was that by the early fall of 1894, Kennedy sent word to the Christian-Evangelist:

We are now building a college at Minco . . . I have raised up to date $6,400 in the Territory alone, nearly all of which is a clear gain of wealth to our church, as five-sixths of it has been raised from parties who are not members of the church. Of the above mentioned $6,400, $3,600 has been raised at Minco to build the college. . . . I promised the people of Minco that . . . I would undertake the building of a ten thousand dollar college. I further told them that I would have rooms open and ready to accommodate one hundred children by Oct. 1, 1894, and that by Jan. 1, 1895, I would try to have it ready to accomodate [sic] three hundred pupils. I began this work July 1, and on Oct 1, we will open this school.[9]

Kennedy's report nowhere mentions Meta Chestnutt, or that five years earlier, in 1889, she had arrived in I.T. and started the school that had been thriving ever since. Judging from what Kennedy published in the second half of 1894, one would never guess that Minco already had a Christian academy still led by its founding teacher. The stage was set for a struggle.

Notes

[1] S. E. Kennedy, "Letter from the Indian Territory," Gospel Advocate (April 26, 1894), 253.

[2] Ibid.

[3] "Gone to His Reward. Rev. S. E. Kennedy," Davis  (Oklahoma) News (April 25, 1918); 1850 U.S. Census, Coosa County, Alabama, population schedule, 1st Ward City of Wetumpka, p. 4 (stamped), dwelling 59, family 59, Aotho and Jane Kennedy, digital image, Ancestry.com, accessed March 21, 2020, http://ancestry.com.

[4] Jay S. Hoar, Callow, Brave and True: A Gospel of Civil War Youth (Gettysburg, PA: Thomas Publications, 1999), 230. On June 2, 2018, the writer visited Silas E. Kennedy's grave in the Greenhill Cemetery, in Davis, Oklahoma, and found the C.S.A. Cross of Honor attached to the gravestone.

[5] 1880 U.S. Census, Bell County, Texas, population schedule, Enumeration District No. 7, p. 8, dwelling 58, family 58, Silas and Charlsy [sic] Kenedy [sic], digital image, Ancestry.com, accessed March 22, 2020, http://ancestry.com.

[6] Kennedy, "Letter from the Indian Territory."

[7] S. E. Kennedy, "The Indian Territory," Christian-Evangelist (June 14, 1894), 381.

[8] Note how Kennedy is taller than every other person, including Meta Chestnutt, in Photo 23196.2, Photograph Box 1, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Special Collections, Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City, Okla. To see the photo online, click on the link that follows here. Then, click on Archives Catalog. In the search window, type "Meta Chestnutt Rev. Kennedy."  http://okhistory.cuadra.com/star/public.html

[9] S. E. Kennedy, "A College in the Indian Territory," Christian-Evangelist (October 4, 1894), 636.

R. W. Officer Writes from Minco about Meta Chestnutt

Part of R. W. Officer's report from Indian Territory in the fall of 1890 includes the following, written at Minco, I.T.:

Miss Meta Chestnutt of Nashville, Tenn., formerly from N. C. is teaching. I said once that she was a whole state convention by herself. I am not going to take it back. With brother and sister Erwin to co-operate with her I would not take a national convention for them, with the Y. M. C. A. thrown in, for the work needed in this country.

R. W. Officer, "Indian Territory," Octographic Review 33 (November 20, 1890), 2.

Clearly, Officer mixes his admiration for Miss Chestnutt and her educational mission with his objection to para-church organizations and religious societies, none of which are the church described in the New Testament.

R. W. Officer's Letters to Meta Chestnutt 1890

Sometime in June of 1890, the evangelist R. W. Officer sent a handwritten letter addressed to "Miss Meta Chestnutt, Silver City, I.T."

Dear Sister:

Yours to Bro T. B. L. was sent to me by him. Enclosed I send you his. Please, let me know where Silver City is, on or near what R. R. I will try to get to you as soon as I can after I learn where you are. I was near Silver City, New Mex. during the massacre a few years ago, but I am almost sure that is not the place. I am 60 miles N. of Denison, Tex on the M. K. and T. R. R. I hope I hear from you at once.

Your Bro
R. W. Officer
Atoka, I. T.
June, 90

P.S. Since I came to look I can't find Bro L's letter, but will say he requested me to fill his promise to you. R.W.O.

What seems clear enough is that Meta Chestnutt had sent a letter to her mentor and favorite preacher, T. B. Larimore, who lived in northern Alabama. Could Larimore, the popular traveling evangelist, come to Silver City, I.T., to preach to the community there?

In response to her request, Larimore, writing from Alabama, had contacted Officer, already in Indian Territory, to pay a preacher's visit to Miss Chestnutt and her fledgling church. Neither Larimore's letter to Officer, nor Chestnutt's reply to Officer survive. But when she wrote back to Officer, Miss Chestnutt no doubt told him that, already, she and many others at Silver City had moved seven miles west of there to a new settlement the founders called "Minco," a Chickasaw and Choctaw word meaning "chief."

Officer wrote her a second time in letter dated July 3, 1890, the day just before the official founding of Minco, I.T.:

Dear Sister: Yours of June 30th in hand. In reply I will say I start on next Saturday for your place. I think I will be there by Monday or Tuesday anyway. And will remain as long as I can. I will come in a buggy and the roads are not good, I will be bound to guess my way more or less, but I will get there as soon as I can.

Your Bro. R. W. Officer
Atoka, I. T.

Perhaps Miss Chestnutt complained in her letter to Officer about the lack of news in her remote locale. On the back of the foregoing note, he added a postscript: I will send you our town paper. R. W. O.

The correspondence reveals how religious leaders used the postal service and their personal networks in order to advance far-flung ministries in places like Indian Territory.

Source

The letters quoted here are located in box 3, folder 33, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City, Okla.

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."

Meta Chestnutt and the Sunny South School

Sunny South School and Church, Minco, Indian Territory, early 1890s. Teacher Meta Chestnutt at left. At right is Kansas preacher D. T. Broadus (?) Click on the photo for a better view.