Beacon Street Blog

Another successful seminar was held on October 25. We hosted 11 participants from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Our next Research 101 will be held in the spring. Please contact Jessica: jsteytler@14beacon.org if you are interested in future seminars.

Participants in the Research Seminar received our two new publications: "Preserving Your Local Heritage : a guide for church historians" and "Records Management for Local Churches." Both are available for downloading from our website.

If you have ideas or recommendations for future seminars, please contact us at info@14beacon.org.

Last Wednesday we had 8 visitors (1 from Connecticut and the rest from Massachusetts) to learn about various aspects of keeping church records. We had a very lively group and they asked a lot of great questions. There's nothing like good interactions with the participants to make a seminar more exciting.
We will be having our second session this coming Wednesday. Unfortunately for the folks who called in late this week, but great for us: We've sold this one out, plus one. Clearly, there's still interest in this topic.

A new section of this seminar has been a records management discussion. The library staff and some board members have helped me create a guideline that's designed for Congregational churches. It's available by request in hardcopy from the library and it's on our website.

Peggy Bendroth's talk about "Children, Family Values, and the Congregational Way" was attended by 30 people yesterday. Some interesting tidbits I learned was that Horace Bushnell's work with churches and Sunday schools had a profound effect on the way in which Americans viewed child rearing. The concept of always being extra nice and polite was one of the cornerstones of his work. Peggy further explained that the problems that people feel we are facing these days in regard to how much time there is for family and kids has been at the forefront of our culture's concerns since the mid 19th century.

The afternoon roundtable panelists included Rabbi Debbie Cantor and Jane Smith to discuss the topics of conversation in relation to Judaism and Islam, respectively.

There has been a significant number of people interested in having Peggy give this talk again. If you are one of these people, please contact her.

The following is picture taken during the main talk with one of our board members, Susannah Baker, introducing Peggy (in green). Veteran board member, Arvel Steece sits opposite Peggy. Click on the image for a larger view.

Registration is still open for our lecture "Children, Family Values and the Congregational Way" on October 12, 2006 at the South Congregational Church, Hartford, CT. Students may attend free of charge.  Don't miss this opportunity for an engaging and enlightening day.

In the afternoon, our discussion of "Congregational Distinctives" will be an open roundtable with Jane Smith, Director of the Duncan Black Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian/Muslim Relations and Debra Cantor, rabbi of Congregation B'Nai Shalom in Hartford.

The registration form is available on our website. Please contact Peggy Bendroth mbendroth@14beacon.org with any questions.

If you see our Executive Director, Peggy, at the Haystack Bicentennial Celebration in Williamstown, please say hello. Peggy has taken a display highlighting some items from our very unique collections and brochures for our upcoming events. There is still time to head out to the celebration for the weekend and the weather should be fine. Click on the Haystack website for a schedule of events.

Our own display cases will continue for the next month to present images, items, and books chronicling the history of Haystack. Please visit us to see them.

The brochures for our all day research seminar on October 18 and October 25 are being mailed today. You can also print a brochure from our website. If you missed the program in June, here's your opportunity to spend the day with us.

Hear our own Executive Director, Peggy Bendroth, speak on "Children, Family Values and the Congregational Way" October 12 in Hartford, CT. Details will soon be available on our website and in brochures mailed this week. If you wish to receive a brochure, contact Beth Spaulding, bspaulding@14beacon.org

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I present to you the new face of the Congregational Library. The staff has been working very hard to make these adjustments. You will still be able to find us through 14.beacon.org, which will then redirect you to the new domain, congregationallibrary.org. I would suggest that our regular visitors refresh their browsers, otherwise you will continue to see the old purple design. Many thanks to web designer Jim Woodman for doing such a beautiful job.

If there are any questions about this or any other aspect of the site, please direct them to info@congregationallibrary.org.

Today we added the 30,000th record to our online catalog. Click on Online Catalog on our website. We are very excited to have reached this number in a little over a year since we started our catalog automation. We've been fortunate to have our staff who have worked on records daily as well as a part time cataloger and several student interns. Our archivist has cataloged all our manuscript collections and has included links to Finding Aids where electronic copies are available. She continues to add photos, sketches, post cards, and other pictorial items from our image collection. Many sermon and pamphlet records can be accessed. Most of the materials about Boston churches, Congregational and other, is now cataloged.

Here are a couple of new books just added to the collection: The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards and A Looking-Glass for Ladies: American Protestant Women and the Orient in the Nineteenth Century. We've linked them to descriptions on Barnes and Noble for you. If you'd like to borrow one of these or another title found in our online catalog, call us at 617-523-0470 or email us: circ@14beacon.org.

Happy Reading!

If you have a chance to see a copy, the Library is featured in the New England Archivists newsletter with a picture on the front cover of the Reading Room from 1898 and an article by Jess and Claudette on page 24. The article describes our catalog automation project.

The archive recently acquired a new small collection from Peter D. Hanson of Vermont. Thank you to Peter for donating a fascinating set of letters that focus on the murder of a missionary, Justin W Parsons, stationed in Turkey in the 1870s until his untimely end in the summer of 1880. This collection was originally Isaac Jennings pastor at Old Bennington, Vermont.

The collection includes 13 letters, the earliest of which is from the lamented Justin Parsons. The letters continue on, sent to Jennings or his wife, Sophia. There are 3 missives from the Department of State, a few published documents from the American Board, and a newspaper story covering the circumstances.

To find out more, please visit us and study the sordid details.

Our mailing for the Research 101 has reached our audience and within the past few days, we have gotten close to selling out all our spots. I expect by Monday we will have a full docket. Peggy, Claudette, and I planning for having a second one within the next month or two if we have as strong a demand as this week has indicated.

If you were interested in participating in this program, send your registration today: first come, first served.

---Jessica

We've just added two new books that you may find interesting. The first is Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-century Woman (Caroline Healey Dall), edited by Helen R. Deese. According to the dust jacket, Caroline Healey Dall kept a diary for seventy-five years. She was a Transcendentalist, early feminist, writer, reformer, and minister's wife. She insured that her papers would be preserved by arranging to donate them to the Massachusetts Historical Society. See the review on Amazon.com.

The second book we'd like to mention is The Mighty and the Almighty : Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs, Madeleine Albright. From the dust jacket, she "...offers a thoughtful and often surprising look at the role of religion in shaping America's approach to the world." See the review on Amazon.com.

We have just added several other titles so check them out by stopping by or searching in our online catalog.

If you are in the Concord, NH area on Thursday night, don't miss David W. Stowe's lecture "Psalms and Hymns in the Lives of American Congregationalists". See the CCHS website for details. The lecture is free and begins at 7:30. David is the author of How Sweet the Sound : Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans. See Barnes & Noble's book description for more details.

Special Educational Program offered on June 14, 2006.

We are offering a special research seminar to church historians, archivists, or any interested lay people who would enjoy a day of research into their congregation's past. We will also provide resources for planning anniversary celebrations and commemorative services.

The library and archive contain many wonderful resources. We have local church records, town histories, conference records, and denominational yearbooks dating back to the 1850s. Our collection also includes a wide variety of 18th and 19th century hymnals and sermons.

Your day at the Congregational library will include hands on instruction in searching and using our collections, a guided tour of the facilities, and an afternoon of guide research. Lunch will be provided. Registration fee (lunch included) is $20.00.

Please contact Jessica Steytler jsteytler@14beacon.org or 617-523-0470 to have a brochure mailed to you or if you have any questions.

We look forward to seeing you in Boston on June 14.

Jess received a copy of Holy Granite on High Ground : A 300-year history of the Second Congregational Church of Greenwich, Connecticut by Ralph E. Ahlberg. The Congregational Library received photo credit for the copy of the 1682 The Whole Book of Psalms on page 23. This church history book is filled with photos and illustrations chronicling the church from its founding to the present day. It contains a time line and lists of Second Church ministers and church council presidents. From the dust cover: "...the story of this community -- of the parishioners, lay leaders, administrators, volunteers and pastors who for three centuries have kept the Christian flame burning in downtown Greenwich." We're very pleased to add this book to our collection.

Here is Peggy's lecture: An Open Door: Old South Church. If you missed the series, all the lectures including Peggy's two and Beth's are posted here with slides and podcast. Peggy was able to research material here for her latest lecture because we hold the historic records of Old South. Indeed, we have records from many churches in our archives and library. Check out our website and link to our catalog to explore our collections.

This year marks the Bicentennial of the 1806 Haystack Prayer Meeting in Williamstown, Massachusetts, an event which has long been celebrated as the birth of American foreign missions. Down through the years, the story of that prayer meeting has often been told, but not always accurately. For example, it has sometimes been said that at that meeting, the five Williams College students all dedicated themselves to be foreign missionaries. My research indicates that that statement is incorrect in two ways.

1. The agreement the students reached at that haystack was to send the gospel overseas to Asia's non-Christians. While Samuel Mills Jr. had already dedicated himself to be a foreign missionary, that doesn’t seem to have been the case with the other four students at that meeting. However, growing out of that 1806 prayer meeting and subsequent ones, Mills and other Williams students formed the Brethren in 1808, all of whose members were required to be committed to taking the gospel overseas themselves personally. That group has sometimes been called the "First Foreign Missionary Society in America." In 1810 the Brethren was transferred to Andover Theological Seminary and subsequently the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was formed.

2. At the Haystack Prayer Meeting, one of the five students, Harvey Loomis, disagreed with the other four. Loomis thought it was premature to send the gospel overseas to Asia, as he feared those missionaries would be murdered. So, he neither supported the idea nor joined the other four students at the haystack in their prayers for foreign missions.

Do you have questions to ask or thoughts to share about the Haystack Prayer Meeting? This blog can be a good forum for that.

-Rev. Dr. Doug Showalter

Dear Congregational Christian Historical Society Friends:

Winter is slowly rolling away and it is almost time for spring meeting. This year we will host Prof. David Stowe, a long-time friend of CCHS and author of a wonderful book on music and religion, How Sweet the Song: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans, published by Harvard University Press in 2004. Dr. Stowe is Professor of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures and director of American Studies at Michigan State University. He will be speaking to us about the history of Congregational hymnody. It’s sure to be an engaging and informative time for all—we may even sing!

The event is planned for Thursday, May 11, 2006 and will be held at the New Hampshire Conference of the United Church of Christ in Concord. The schedule for the evening and directions to the conference center are enclosed. A very inexpensive $15.00 registration fee will cover the cost of dinner, during which we will present our annual Guptill and Fagley awards, and the lecture. The deadline for registrations is Friday, May 5, 2006.

Would you please also take this opportunity to support CCHS with a donation? A good many of you have already sent in annual gifts, and we are very grateful for these. But we still depend on the generosity of our members to keep the work going and to put on a meeting that we can all be proud of. Even if you are not able to come to the meeting, we'd appreciate your support. With a gift of $25 or more we would be happy to send a copy of Dr. Stowe's presentation.

We're very glad for all of our members, and look forward to seeing you in May. We're hoping for beautiful weather, a stimulating lecture, a great turnout, and time to renew old acquaintances and make new ones. We'll look forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely,
Margaret Bendroth
CCHS Archivist/Secretary

Please send all registrations to CCHS at 14 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108. Thanks so much! Additionally, there is a basic review of this spring's program at the CCHS website.

The mailing for the Annual Meeting of the Congregational Christian Historical Society went out today. We hope that you will join us on May 11, 2006 in Concord, NH for the business meeting, dinner, Guptill and Fagley Awards and to hear Professor David W. Stowe's lecture, "Psalms and Hymns in the Lives of American Congregationalists".

Registration and donation forms are enclosed in the mailing. Information will also be posted on the CCHS website.

Peggy's lecture at Old South Church from March 19th is available as a podcast. There is more information about Old South and its current on-going Lenten series at their website under Looking Ahead.

The Winter 2006 Bulletin was mailed out today. This issue includes articles by Joyce Hollyday, "On the Heels of Freedom", and Brenda Billips Square, "Amistad Collections Safe Following Hurricane Katrina", updates about the Library, news for CCHS, and the list of new books added to the collection. We hope you enjoy it. The Bulletin will also be made available on our website soon.

Recently a patron sent us articles about and the obituary of Miss Clara Estelle Breed, the daughter of a Congregational minister from Iowa who as a librarian in San Diego made a difference in the lives of Japanese-American children in internment camps during World War II. A new book, Dear Miss Breed by Joanne Oppennheim, tells the story of Miss Breed and her correspondence with the children in the camps. Tetsuzo Hirasaki who was one of these children said, "She lived up to her creed. She lived the true Christian way of life." She was a remarkable librarian and unsung Christian hero.