Avenues of Faith: Shaping the Urban Religious Culture of Richmond, Virginia, 1900-1929
520
Avenues of Faith: Shaping the Urban Religious Culture of Richmond, Virginia, 1900-1929
520eBook
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Overview
By examining six mainline white denominations—Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Disciples of Christ, and Lutherans—Samuel C. Shepherd Jr. emphasizes the extent to which the city fostered religious diversity, even as “blind spots” remained regarding Catholics, African Americans, Mormons, and Jews. Shepherd explores such topics as evangelism, interdenominational cooperation, the temperance campaign, the Sunday school movement, the international peace initiatives, and the expanding role of lay people of both sexes. He also notes the community’s widespread rejection of fundamentalism, a religious phenomenon almost automatically associated with the South, and shows how it nurtured social reform to combat a host of urban problems associated with public health, education, housing, women’s suffrage, prohibition, children, and prisons.
In lucid prose and with excellent use of primary sources, Shepherd delivers a fresh portrait of Richmond Protestants who embraced change and transformed their community, making it an active, progressive religious center of the New South.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817313586 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2009 |
| Series: | Religion and American Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 520 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Samuel C. Shepherd Jr. is professor of history at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Read an Excerpt
Avenues of Faith
Shaping the Urban Religious Culture of Richmond, Virginia, 1900â"1929
By Samuel C. Shepherd Jr.
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2001 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5847-1
CHAPTER 1
The Urban Challenge
Dotting the landscape of modern Richmond, Virginia, venerable churches stand as monuments to the city's past. Less conspicuous than the numerous Civil War statues, these gentle edifices make an equally emphatic claim on the city's heritage and reflect a significant, continuing stream of community and regional culture. Yet only two Richmond churches have consistently gained historical attention. On Church Hill, in the heart of old Richmond, St. John's Episcopal Church is famous for its Revolutionary War era meetings. Near the grounds of Virginia's Capitol, St. Paul's Episcopal Church is renowned as the religious home to Confederate leaders, including Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. St. John's and St. Paul's have sustained an important presence in the community in the twentieth century. Elsewhere downtown on a Sunday morning, a person may still worship in the historic buildings of Leigh Street Baptist, Second Presbyterian, and Centenary Methodist. Atop Oregon Hill farther west, Pine Street Baptist and stunningly beautiful St. Andrew's Episcopal Church stand as testimonies to vibrant working-class congregations. From Monroe Park west through the popular early-twentieth-century residential neighborhood now known as "the Fan," the contemporary faithful continue to worship in sanctuaries built in an earlier era. At such churches as First English Evangelical Lutheran, St. James's Episcopal, Hanover Avenue Christian Church, and First Baptist, Sunday services occur with a backdrop of history. To the north, along spacious streets, once-suburban Ginter Park houses Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Disciples of Christ congregations, which emerged in the century's first decades, as well as Union Theological Seminary/Presbyterian School of Christian Education. On Richmond's northern periphery stands Emmanuel Episcopal, once a secluded rural church tied to the city as the final stop on the streetcar line and connected by its influential parishioners, the Bryan family. Across the James River in Southside Richmond, music still ascends from the area's oldest Methodist congregation, Central Methodist. In the same vicinity, once primarily an industrial community called Manchester, Bainbridge Street Baptist remains as a link to the early twentieth century.
These active congregations provide the most direct ties to the city's religious heritage, but a circuit of Richmond offers many more opportunities to touch the town's past by visiting its churches. The former structures of Monumental Episcopal, Third Presbyterian Church, and Trinity Methodist whisper reminders of an earlier downtown prominence. And such churches as Trinity, Seventh Street Christian, All Saints Episcopal, First Presbyterian, Grove Avenue Baptist, and Second Baptist have transported their past identities to new sites. Even churches which have merged or have changed their names remember their antecedents. For example, Reveille Methodist traces its roots to an earlier downtown Union Station Methodist Church, and River Road Methodist recalls its origins in Broad Street Methodist Church of a bygone era. The buildings of the University of Richmond carry the names of its Baptist founders.
At first glance the old names and the old structures might serve as mere reminders of a seemingly simpler, distant time with its own set of delights and defects. Richmond religious leaders of the early twentieth century would have shuddered at such a verdict. They strove to adapt religious ideas and institutions to the changing environment of their urban South as well as to make their religion accessible and relevant to the inhabitants of a growing city. It is the central argument of this book that they were impressively successful in their efforts.
Today a sprawling East Coast automotive corridor threatens to submerge Richmond into a cultural landscape increasingly indistinguishable from Boston to Miami. Modern travelers arrive in Richmond after swift journeys over intricate networks of interstate highways or after rapid jet airline flights. Before penetrating to the heart of Richmond, drivers wind their way through thickets of burgeoning suburbs, with their familiar appearance and their even more familiar fast-food chains, convenience stores, and shopping malls.
By contrast, early-twentieth-century Richmond existed as an urban enclave in a rural state. After a lengthy railroad ride, some travelers entered the city at the new downtown Main Street Station. That location placed them near factories sprinkled along the nearby James River and between Church Hill to the east and Capitol Hill to the west, two residential centers steadily surrendering space to office buildings and retail stores. Country kinfolk drove their horses and wagons to the city. Local residents could reach most destinations on foot. Streetcars provided transportation to working-class suburbs like Fulton to the east, to middle-class residential areas on the West End along Franklin Street or Monument Avenue, and to some factories and amusement parks to the north and west along the city's incorporated boundaries. Wealthier citizens relied on horse-drawn carriages to carry them to evening parties. But by the 1920s, many Richmonders purchased automobiles as an expanding city dispersed more of its population and as people traveled greater distances for working, shopping, and entertainment. By then cars and buses provided an increasingly popular means of access to the state capital, and boosters proudly reported that the duration of an automobile trip from Washington, D.C., to Richmond had been reduced to little more than six hours. Recalling his youth in Charleston, South Carolina, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, literary scholar Louis Rubin declared that "a trip to Richmond" "was an event to be anticipated long in advance of departure." For him, like rural lads, Richmond was a place of "enormous sophistication" and "metropolitan splendors."
The city did feature a culture decidedly different from that of the nearby countryside. Most visitors from elsewhere in Virginia would have noted a collection of characteristics setting Richmond's urban environment apart from their home places. The foremost difference was the most obvious one: masses of people resided in Richmond. Unlike rural counties with their small and scattered populations, Richmond contained almost 183,000 citizens within its approximately twenty-four square miles in 1930. Richmond was the most populated jurisdiction in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and it ranked as one of the most congested cities in the United States in the early twentieth century. Richmonders, therefore, often participated in collective experiences. Individual factories and stores employed hundreds or even thousands of workers. With many apartment leases terminating on 31 August, an estimated 15,000 Richmonders changed locations simultaneously on "moving day," 1 September. To honor Confederate veterans, dough boys, or members of labor unions, parades summoned thousands of marchers and even more spectators. Local amusement parks, sports events, and the capacious movie palaces of the 1920s drew huge crowds. Groups of male mashers periodically annoyed women at streetcar stops, boy gangs engaged in rock battles, and policemen corralled clusters of suspicious characters in dragnets. Pious people also assembled in groups. With more than fourteen hundred members, Pine Street Baptist Church formed one of the largest congregations in the South in the first decade of the twentieth century. And a person did not always gain a respite from the city at worship services. During a 1911 heat wave, Fritz Sitterdig was summoned from his church to open his ice plant because a crowd of five hundred stood "clamoring for ice." Times of suffering were also times of mass experiences. Vast throngs gazed at downtown fires, and hundreds perished in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. Whether in work, play, joy, or sorrow, Richmonders had many human companions as they dwelled in a crowded urban environment.
Richmond further differed from the countryside by harboring a variety of people, pleasures, institutions, and ideas. If Richmond's ethnic population was small compared to other major American cities, it was large compared to Virginia's rural counties. With a lengthy local heritage, members of the city's German-American community maintained a German-American Club, rose to prominence as business and political leaders, contributed to the city's musical life with the singing group Gesang-Verein Virginia, and worshiped — at times in German — in Lutheran, Catholic, and Jewish congregations. The city's Irish contingent remained large enough to guarantee festive St. Patrick's Days, and wealthy businessman Maj. James Dooley furnished a striking symbol of success with his extravagant Victorian mansion, "Maymont." When Richmond's Italian population climbed to almost three thousand, the Italian government assigned a consul to the city. Active in local politics, the Italian-Americans ensured the erection of a monument to Christopher Columbus, unveiled in 1927. Holding a near monopoly on shoeshine stands, Greeks disconcerted patrons when they closed their businesses to observe Easter according to the Orthodox Church calendar. A stroll on a Richmond street could lead past a Chinese laundry or to Paul Yurachek's shop on East Main Street, where this naturalized Slovakian sold his wire goods and lamp shades. Yurachek was not lonely. According to one estimate, more than 750 Czechoslovakians lived in the Richmond area, and Venable Street Baptist Church hosted a "Czecho-Slovak National Convention" in 1921. In soliciting financial support, a prominent private children's nursery proclaimed itself to be a "thoroughly cosmopolitan" institution where "Poles, Germans, Italians, French, English, Russian, and American babies can be seen every day lying side by side."
The city's heterogeneity extended to its religious institutions. To be sure, evangelical Protestant churches so dominated the community that they collectively created an overarching religious culture. Southern Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Disciples of Christ, and Lutherans shared many religious ideas and often collaborated in religious activities. Still, the 1926 U.S. Census of Religious Bodies reported more than ten thousand Roman Catholics and approximately eight thousand Jews in Richmond. A single, large Greek Orthodox Church and a single, small Unitarian church occupied important places in Richmond. Quakers, Seventh Day Adventists, Christian Scientists, Mormons, Christadelphians, the Church of the Brethren, and several holiness churches provided religious options. The religious diversity touched individual lives. Young Louise Price regularly attended Episcopal services throughout the city but accompanied friends to churches of other denominations. Recording her observations in a diary, she marveled about attending a double wedding conducted in German at a "very pretty" Lutheran church. On the other hand, she seemed disconcerted by a High Mass at the new Roman Catholic cathedral and labeled the service "funny doings."
The city fostered a variety of worldviews, including ideas that challenged religious beliefs. As a lecturer at the Medical College of Virginia, city coroner William Taylor repeatedly offered his personal counterpoint to religious ideas. Annually discounting the existence of the soul, he denounced the Bible as the "enigmatical statements of a book written in a semi-civilized age, at uncertain periods, by unascertainable authors in tongues unintelligible to the vast majority of living men." He added that its "interpretation by the few who can claim to understand it ... is often in the most vital parts, irrevocably discordant and contradictory." Anyone searching for unconventional ideas or scientific knowledge could count on the faculty of the city's colleges and medical schools and could turn to the city's daily press for up-to-date information. Seeking variety in pleasures, a visitor had choices of entertainment ranging from polite restaurants to rowdy saloons, from billiard parlors to baseball games, from vaudeville or movies to operas or symphony concerts. The urban environment of Richmond was an arena of diversity.
Streams of overhead wires attached to poles flowed throughout the city, calling attention to the fact that Richmond, like other urban areas, was a powerhouse of machinery and technology. The city was laced with miles of electric streetcar lines. Other innovations which were at first primarily tools of businesses soon found their way into households. In 1900 Richmond had only 2,000 telephones in service, but by the mid-1920s, residents had grown so accustomed to using their telephones that they made more than 250,000 telephone calls daily. Whereas less than 5 percent of Virginia farmhouses had gas or electricity, most Richmond houses used electricity. Electricity also powered thousands of city streetlights and local factories. Though most famous for its tobacco plants, Richmond was an industrial city containing iron, locomotive, stove, flour, chemical, paper, and furniture factories. Filled with machinery, some individual industries boasted of their technological prowess. One stationery firm ballyhooed its ability to print 12,000 envelopes an hour and its "unique" automatic ruler, which ruled paper on both sides, in four colors, and "crosswise at one operation." With mechanization a local bakery produced 30,000 loaves of bread daily. For thrills, people rode a roller coaster at a local amusement park. The technology of the late 1920s drew Richmond closer to the outside world. The city opened an airport and became one of the first communities in the country to have a Dow-Jones ticker. Richmond also became the home of two radio stations, including WRVA, which soon joined the National Broadcasting Corporation. Technology did not always yield attractive results. When horns and signaling devices became required equipment on cars, one commentator deplored the results. "Every variety of siren, moan, screech, howl, and scream that mechanical ingenuity can contrive and human inconsiderateness can produce," he complained, could be "heard all over the city at all hours of the day and night." Indeed, in the city the signs of technology were omnipresent.
In contrast to the rural South's poverty, twentieth-century Richmond prospered. Richmond ranked among the nation's leading cities in per capita wealth and reported per capita real estate and property values that were twice the average for the state. The city's selection as the site for a Federal Reserve District Bank in 1914 strengthened its already substantial constellation of banking firms. The chamber of commerce boasted that local banks held 140,000 savings accounts. In 1924 almost one-fourth of all Virginia income tax returns paid into the federal treasury came from metropolitan Richmond. Chicago's Dartnell Corporation estimated the metropolitan area's buying power to be more than twice the average for the entire state. And Richmond citizens could spend their money to enjoy the goods offered by the many local retail firms. A shopper could purchase merchandise at downtown stores offering their specialties: clothing, stationery, furniture, musical instruments, jewelry, confections, cigars, coffee, trunks, shoes, groceries, china, bicycles, and carriages. By the 1920s the city's two major department stores, Thalhimers and Miller & Rhoads, became favored shopping spots, with Miller & Rhoads arranging 361,980 square feet of floor space to display its wide variety of wares. In explaining the significance of department stores for cities, Alan Trachtenberg refers to them as "lavishly designed palaces of consumption," and Gunther Barth argues that in many ways they "reflected the culture of the modern city." Even Richmond's poorest residents played Victrolas and visited movie houses. The city's many hospitals supplied medical care, and Richmond's ratio of doctors and dentists to the population was one of the best in the South. The community's wealth was, of course, not evenly distributed. Elegant West End mansions stood in contrast to rickety hovels along Bragg Street, Shockoe Valley, or Locust Alley. Still, unlike Virginia's rural areas, Richmond's wealth was substantial, visible, and sufficiently accessible to offer a high standard of living for city residents.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Avenues of Faith by Samuel C. Shepherd Jr.. Copyright © 2001 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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