PLEASANT HILL CHURCHES
From the Dorchester
Pleasant Hill Centennial History Book
1981
According to Russell
Freidell in his 1912-13 Saline County Sunday School Annual on file at
the Saline County Museum, "Sabbath Day in 1873 in the villages of
Saline County was market day, homesteaders came to town, there was
horse racing, the open saloon, gambling, a wide open, rude hilarious
day was the Sabbath." No doubt this rowdy picture changed as the
frontier was tamed and churches were organized to take the unruly
citizenry in hand. Pleasant Hill had five churches: Methodist,
Episcopal, St. Michael Roman Catholic, Church of the United Brethren
in Christ, Congregational and Church of Christ.
At the time the first
census was taken there were still no organized churches in all of
Saline County. Pioneer circuit riders and resident priests or
ministers from the east visited frontier neighborhoods before regular
churches were established.
METHODIST
By 1870 the county had
two churches, both of them Methodist, and one of them was in Pleasant
Hill. On July 6 1870 trustees of the Methodist Episcopal Church paid
William H. Lane $100 for lots five, six, seven and eight, block four,
original town, "to be used for a place of divine worship and
parsonage." These original quarters in the west part of town
apparently did not suit the Methodist parishioners long, for three
years later, on May of 1873, they paid to Alva Duvall's second
addition, located in the northeast part of town near the mill. And
according to a newspaper announcement services were being held in the
"new chapel" in February of 1876.
After the county seat
was moved out of Pleasant Hill in 1878, the local Methodist membership
dwindled, and the Dorchester congregation and their minister, a Mr.
Armstrong, decided it would be nice to have the recently built church
moved to Dorchester. Pastor Armstrong was also a lawyer, and with
legal backing of some sort the Dorchester congregation began to
dismantle the building and had the roof, floor and one wall off and
partly loaded into a wagon when a group from Pleasant Hill had an
injunction imposed against them. Pleasant Hill began to reassemble
their building, but the District Court at Falls City dissolved the
injunction and Dorchester proceeded to take the building home with
them where it became a part of the new Dorchester Methodist Church in
1880.
In the late 1990's the
old church was removed to a farmstead as a new church has been built
in Dorchester. The stained glass windows are now a beautiful part of
the new church.
The first site of the
Pleasant Hill Methodist Episcopal Church and parsonage was sold in
1883 to Annie R. Lane and today is lost in a "bean field".
The second parcel of land bought by the Methodist in Pleasant Hill,
where their "new chapel" was built, unbuilt, rebuilt, and
unbuilt again, was sold in 1884 to E. F. Root.
Apparently there were
not enough members of the congregation to rebuild and the congregation
appears to have disappeared. Good Templars, who were also using the
Methodist Church building, shortly found another spot in town to meet.
CONGREGATIONAL
CHURCH:
Pleasant Hill first
appears on the membership list of the Congregational Church
Association of Nebraska in 1874. Attendance at the church was twenty
five to forty members and the congregation shared their minister, B.F.
Page of Dorchester, with the Congregationalists of Dorchester and
Friendville (later became known as the town of Friend).
In 1875, the Rev. Page
moved to Friendville where he remained until his death November 14
1878. After Page moved to Friendville, the Pleasant Hill church lost
ground. They submitted no report to the Nebraska Congregational Church
Association for 1875 or after, and by 1878, the minutes of the
Association's annual meeting indicated the Pleasant Hill Congregation
had disbanded. It is unlikely that they ever built a building of its
own as less than a third of all the Congregational congregations in
the entire state had a building of its own. It is possible that some
of the parishioners moved their association to the Pleasant Hill
Church of Christ which organized the same year that the
Congregationalists disbanded. The doctrine of the two denominations is
related.
CHURCH OF CHRIST
The Church of Christ in
Pleasant Hill was organized in 1878 with a group of about twenty
members, following the weeks of meetings conducted there by Pastor W.
Sumpter.
Five of the twenty
members were newly baptized, seven reclaimed, and the remainder of the
number was made up of residents who had their membership with the
Dorchester congregation, according to Sumpter in the November 15 1878,
Christian Standard. "We hope this is the beginning of a good work
at this place," wrote Sumpter. "Brother Joseph Lowe is
stirring up the saloon by his temperance lectures at this place."
The history of the
Church of Christ in Pleasant Hill coincides with the history of the
Mount Ida Lodge 180 of the Independent Order of Good Templars (IOGT).
On November 30 1881, IOGT trustees, together with the Church of Christ
trustees, purchased from James K and Rebecca Lane and Eliza Brigaw the
former DeSoto House Hotel building, on part of lot eight block two
Hardin Duvall's addition, for $250. An 1881 Dorchester Star reported
that part of the old DeSoto House Hotel would be moved near the mill
for a residence and for the south part would be repaired for church
and Good Templar purposes.
On one early town map
the building at this location is referred to as Temperance Hall, and
on another, apparently an earlier map, the building is called the
Campbellite Church. The name Campbellite Church is explained by the
fact that the Christian Church in the United States originated in the
early 1800's from several independent movements, one of which was led
by Alexander Campbell. The Christian Church and the Church of Christ
(not to be confused with United Church of Christ) are both
denominations of the Disciples of Christ.
Neither the Church of
Christ nor the Good Templars were using the Temperance Hall by 1914
when J.C. Messler of Portland Oregon, sole trustee of the Church of
Christ, sold the property to James K. Lane.
ST MICHAEL ROMAN
CATHOLIC CHURCH
On September 22 1873
Alva Duvall and the Saline County Courthouse Company sold lots one,
two, three and four, block three, Alva Duvall's second addition, to a
committee of the St. Michael's Roma Catholic Church for $100. The
Catholic Church in Pleasant Hill existed as a mission of the Catholic
Church from 1874 to 1877 according to the Catholic Directory published
for those years and was attended by a Priest from Crete once a month.
The following notice was published in the March 4 1876 issue of the
Pleasant Hill News: "Notice is hereby given to all persons owing
subscriptions to the Roman Catholic Church in Pleasant Hill, that the
same must be settled by note or case before March 15 1876, or costs
will be made.
St. Michael's in the
northeast part of town and right across the road east of the
Methodist's "new chapel" location, would appear to be the
church located just south of the mill on the painting of Pleasant Hill
done by Jack Tobias.
The Pleasant Hill
Catholic Church was no longer a mission or any parish after 1877 and
the church building, which was destroyed in a wind storm about 1880
was not replaced because "the population of the town had
dwindled," wrote Sister Loretta Gosen, historian for the Lincoln
Diocese, in an October 17 1880 article in the Southern Nebraska
Register. In 1880 Father Francis Pold, pastor at Crete, informed
Bishop Bonacum of the Lincoln Diocese, that the Lincoln Diocese still
owned four lots in Pleasant Hill where the church had been located.
The land transfer on this property become vague at this point, but
that is not the end of the story of the St. Michaels Church.
In about 1915, Chancy
Moneypenny bought a farm two and a half miles south and a quarter mile
west of Pleasant Hill and used the lumber from the Catholic Church,
which had blown down in Pleasant Hill to build a barn. One of the
church door handles adorns an old outhouse built for the Moneypenny's
in the 1930's by the WPA workers. It is not clear if the church
existed in a dilapidated condition until 1915 or if the building was
dismantled and the lumber stored for those 35 years.
CHURCH of the United
Brethren in Christ
The denomination, which
survived the longest in Pleasant Hill, was the Church of the United
Brethren in Christ, also referred to as the United Brethren or UB
Church. On Sept. 18 1873 United Brethren trustees purchased lots one
and two, block five, Hardin Duvall's third addition from James K and
Rebecca Lane for $50, we assume for building a church. According to
the minutes of the Nebraska Annual Conference of the United Brethren
Church for 1873, the first meeting of the United Brethren congregation
at Pleasant Hill convened at ten in the mornings on October 30, 1873
at the Saline County Courthouse, Bishop J. J. Glossbrenner presided.
(At this time Wilber was not the county seat of Saline County)
On June 25 1883, ten
years after church trustees bought their property, they sold it to
Ezra S. Abbott for $10. There followed a three year lapse and on May 6
1886, the church trustees purchased lots seven and eight, block one,
Hardin Duvall's second addition, for $50. It is not known if they
built a church at the first location they owned, but a church was
definitely built at this new location.
Sept 22 1897 church
members met at a local business place to determine if the congregation
wished to build a dwelling house in Pleasant Hill to be used as a
parsonage. Lots one and two, block five, Hardin Duvall's third
addition, were purchased from Helen and George Hastings for $25 on
Oct. 13 1897. Anyone following these transactions on the Pleasant Hill
map will see that the property the church purchased for a parsonage is
the same two lots they originally owned from 1873-1883.
Apparently, the
parsonage wasn't such a good idea. With in seven years it was being
rented out to Charles Newburn for $8 per month, and in 1921 the
property was sold.
United Brethren Sunday
school enrollment in May of 1913 included 43 children and adults, with
an average attendance of twenty. After 1915 the Pleasant Hill Church
disappeared from any listings in the United Brethren of Christ
Conference minutes, although there was not mention of a merger with
another congregation or disposition of the church altogether. After
1915 the church may have been an outpost preaching place rather than
an organized church.
*On a personal
note: William H. Rose (my great great grandfather) from his obituary
of March 1941. "When a young man he became a Christian and united
with the United Brethren Church. So earnest was his desire to fulfill
all the obligations of the Christian faith, that he did not wait for
milder weather, but with the others received the sacrament of holy
baptism in winter, the ice of the mill pond at Pleasant Hill having
been broken to permit this ceremony.
