150 Years Young
August 14th, 2005,The Upper Midwest is a young region of a young country, at least as far as recorded history of the western variety is concerned. This summer has seen the celebration of a couple of sesquicentennials in my current hometown of Northfield. It’s the 150th anniversary of both the town itself and the church that my family belongs to, Northfield United Methodist. Thus, it was roughly six generations ago that people of European descent began to form the institutions that would help them thrive on the frontier of the United States.
On Sunday, July 24, our church celebrated its sesquicentennial. Pastor Clay Oglesbee led a meaningful worship service at the Eleanor Salisbury farm about three miles south of town, the site in 1855 of the first Methodist service in Rice County, which evolved into our current congregation. The 1855 service was held in Edmund Larkin’s home, which according to one account was a “log house on the edge of the big woods.” (Those woods, I believe, were part of the forest of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. Laura was born in Pepin, Wisconsin, a town on the Mississippi River, not too far east of here. A remnant of the Big Woods still exists in the form of Nerstrand-Big Woods State Park, just a few miles from Northfield.)
For the anniversary the church distributed a color brochure that relates more history. In it I read that the Methodists went on to build their first church building in 1859, the only one in Northfield at the time. It was located on a site that today is around 310 East 6th Street, between College and Union Streets. A later account says that first church was “the plainest of the plain,” “homely” and “unpretentious.” The brochure also contains a list of all the pastors who have served the congregation, and its names communicate something of the British ethnicity of Methodism–names such as Scofield, McKinley, Kirkpatrick, Day, Tucker, Stogdill, Richardson, Cowgill. Only a few German names–Weiss, Klaus, Horst–break up this pattern; they begin to appear in the 1920’s.
The special service on July 24 was a meaningful one for me, as Pastor Clay invited us to sense a connection with the early pioneers. It was a hot day, but there on the old Larkin farm, the wind was cool. To the east I could see a beautiful vista of gently rolling hills. Pastor Clay pointed to a grizzled oak tree in that direction. Under the tree, he told us, is a stone that is said to be the grave marker for the first white child buried in the county.
I did feel a connection to the past there during that service. I grieved for the unknown child buried nearby. I looked around at the windswept congregation and was grateful to be there, alive and part of the next step in history.