Paul Minor

Delving Into Yester~Year

Local historian and writer Paul Miner takes items from The Republican’s Yester-Year column to develop an interesting, informative and often humorous article.

To the Editor: Quebec hosted a massive Sunday tent revival in September 1896, according to The

Republican, with 900 under the Middle Township tent and 500 more gathered outside. The biggest area revival was likely the Billy Graham Crusade at the State Fairgrounds Coliseum Oct. 6-Nov. 1, 1959, when 318,127 souls attended.

The revivals I recall from my childhood were “Angry God” themed, leaving some squirming like spiders over flames, wrapping up with a convert call. A brimstone revivalist brought in at church camp told us kids that hell was women burning to horrific deaths in a WWII napalm factory fire.

Scared me and other wicked young adolescents. Perhaps we really were Sodom and Gomorrah types.

I’ve always wondered how preachers gauged the time was right for revivals. New church needed, greater tithes desired, more discernible sin?

Correspondent Rex in “Reno Ripples” reported Coatesville’s Reverend Daniel Webster Risher conducted “quite a revival of religion” in February 1882. There was now “a strong probability that a substantial brick church” would be built.

The reverend gave a speech on “Punctuality” in 1883 for the Hendricks County Sunday School Union meeting in North Salem. Two years earlier, he debated the question, “Whiskey or no whiskey, that is the question.” I think he was Coatesville postmaster as well.

Thirteen converts were baptized into the Plainfield Christian Church on one day alone during a March 1883 revival, “and much good it is said is being done.”

Numerous Dover Dale citizens attended the Friends revival in February 1885. Attendance exceeded church capacity. Dover was Liberty Township District School 3, and was around County Roads 350 S and 200 W. The area, Dear Editor tells me, was known as Dover Dale, and the school, reputed to turn out scholars, was known as “the Harvard of Hendricks County Schools.”

The paper reported in late 1881 about Danes in Leadville, Colorado, who belonged to “a religious body called Skagea.” The group centuries earlier practiced human sacrifice “and still hold to it in theory.” During an anniversary event, their leader cut himself, “shedding a bowlful of sacrificial blood.” What happened at their revivals? Stilesville, known for dynamiting drug stores, launched a temperance revival late in 1881, but the Union’s Clayton correspondent called the leader “a deadbeat and crank.” In his defense, the Stilesville correspondent agreed he had “evidently drunk enough to appreciate its ruinous tendency.”

A fashion revival of crinoline in England had Paris “aghast” at the re-apparition by “barbarian medievalists” in March 1882. Remember, Dear Editor, that local woman whose hoop skirt was crushed in a crowd to the point where it resembled a canoe? Gad!

A protracted revival left an anonymous minister in declining health in mid-1882. Despite a vacation, he seemed to be “sinking into a state of general weakness and prostration.”

Then a friend gave him a bottle of Dr. Guysott’s Yellow Dock and Sarsaparilla. He was cured! Ingredients treated pain and swelling in the nasal passages. Guysott’s was a laxative; it fought bacterial, intestinal and fungal infections; arthritis, hemorrhoids and rashes; sexually transmitted diseases; and more. An empty Guysott’s bottle recently sold for $49 on eBay. I caught a fall 1883 glimpse of Pittsboro’s Christian church where a revival the winter before added 25 members. The church was painted white, with green shutters. The sidewalk was a narrow plank. A brick walk lined with young maples led to the meeting house.

The interior was “tastily finished” in gold wallpaper with a wide dark foliage border. The pulpit was furnished with heavy purple velvet. Ash-colored chairs seated the congregation numbering around 125. Minister Wallace Cox Tharp traveled there “for public worship” once a month from Kentucky. There was a Sunday School, with weekly prayer meetings in winter.

Sugar Grove (Guilford Township, northwest corner of CR 700 E and 600 S) correspondent Dick reported in February 1884 about a highly successful revival meeting in Beech Grove, “with the exception of one beastly, pugilistic encounter” during the service.

Most on hand “labored with the ministers,” which I don’t understand, “and a better and more agreeable understanding was effected between the brethren and their tormentors.” A truce between good and evil? A preacher’s pointed exhortation inflamed an unrepentant impenitent?

Paul Miner Lizton