| Warren County
Local History by Dallas Bogan |
| Contributor: |
Dallas Bogan on 29 September 2004 |
Source: |
The following is taken from Dallas Bogan's book, "The Pioneer Writings of Josiah Morrow." |
| Return to Index to see a list of other articles by Dallas Bogan |
The Shaker society at Union Village has long owned
five thousand acres of the most fertile land in Warren county and is more than
one hundred years old. The society which was once large and prosperous is now
reduced to a small number and seems destined to total extinction.
The first Shaker sermon in Warren county, and I believe the first west of the
Alleghenies, was preached in the Turtlecreek log church four miles west of Lebanon
on Sunday, March 24, 1805. The first Shaker society in the world was established
in New Lebanon, N.Y., a place about twenty-five miles southeast of Albany, by
the followers of Ann Lee, who with nine others, had emigrated
from England in 1774. Their numbers were few until 1787 when a great religious
revival in the churches at New Lebanon led many into the new sect. Other societies
were formed from time to time, and at the beginning of 1805 there were thirteen
Shaker communities, all in the eastern states.
The greatest and most remarkable increase in the converts to Shakerism was in
Ohio and Kentucky in 1805. The first, the largest and the most important of
the western societies was organized at the Turtlecreek church.
The Turtlecreek Presbyterian church was formed about 1797 and soon became the
largest church of any denomination in Warren county. Rev. James Kemper,
the pioneer Presbyterian preacher of the Miami Valley, was its pastor for a
time and he was succeeded by Rev. Richard McNemar, who was
a leading spirit in the remarkable religious movement known as the Kentucky
revival, and nowhere on either side of the Ohio does there seem to have been
greater excitement or more extraordinary physical manifestations in the revival
than at Turtlecreek.
In September, 1803, the Turtlecreek pastor was condemned as a heretic by the
Presbyterian Synod. Nearly all the members of his congregation agreed with the
pastor, and on Sunday, April 29, 1804, the members of the church voted with
uplifted hands unanimously to separate from the Presbyterian body. Thus was
organized the first of the New Light or Christian churches in Warren county.
This Christian denomination was not the one now called Christian of Disciples
which was of later origin. In a little over one year the pastor and a large
proportion of his congregation became Shakers.
Who were the first missionaries of the Shaker faith, meeting with such wonderful
success in the new states of Ohio and Kentucky? And how did it happen that they
preached their first sermons and obtained their first converts at the Turtlecreek
church? Richard McNemar's History of Kentucky Revival, now
a rare book and the Writings of Other Shakers, both in manuscript and print
enable us to answer these questions.
The Shakers in the eastern states had heard many accounts of the progress of
the great revival on both sides of the Ohio and had read in the public papers
of the varied and recurrent transcripts of great multitudes and attendant convulsive
and bodily movements from which they probably had derived their name. They determined
to send their missionaries to the scenes of the great Kentucky revival.
They set out on their long journey from New Lebanon, N.Y., about three o'clock
in the morning on New Year's day, 1805. They were taken in a sleigh for the
first sixty miles, the remainder of the journey was on foot. They had one horse
on which was carried their baggage. They were accustomed to making long journeys
on foot. One of the men, Issachar Bates, relates in his autobiography
that in the ten years succeeding 1801 he traveled as a Shaker missionary about
38,000 miles mostly on foot, and was instrumental in converting about 1,100
persons.
In their journey they passed through Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.
When they arrived in Kentucky they visited the places where the most extraordinary
scenes of the great revival had been witnessed. They crossed the entire state
of Kentucky and visited Tennessee and then traveled northward. They saw and
conversed with the preachers who had been leaders in the revival and among others
with Rev. Matthew Houston at Paint Lick and Rev. Barton
W. Stone at Cane Ridge, both of whom had passed out of the Presbyterian
church and were now New Lights. On March 19, they crossed the Ohio and visited
the revivalist preacher, Rev. John Thompson, pastor of the
Springdale church in Hamilton county, Ohio. On March 22, 1805, they arrived
at Turtlecreek after journeying 1,233 miles since the first day of January.
How many traveling preachers and evangelists of our day would be willing to
make a journey on foot without receiving a dollar for their labor?
The Shaker missionaries were described as grave and unassuming men, intelligent
and prepossessing in appearance. Their dress was plain and neat and perhaps
of the old Quaker style. They wore white fur hats with brims five and a half
inches wide and the crowns five inches high. Their coats were grey, waistcoats
blue and overalls brown. A.H.
Dunlevy, who when a boy saw them first at Turtlecreek church, remembered
them as strangers with broad-brimmed hats worn on their heads in the church.
It was Friday when they arrived at Turtlecreek and they first went to the house
of Malcolm Worley, a man of large property and good education,
but who had become so wild in the revival meetings that many men doubted his
sanity. He had been the year previous authorized to preach on exhort in the
New Light churches. The next morning the strangers went to the house of the
pastor of the church who says this was the first means by which he learned that
a people called Shakers existed upon earth. He further says he judged them to
be men of honest principles, singular piety and deep understanding of the things
of God, though some of their conversation he could not well understand.
They desired to speak in the church on the next day, which was Sunday, and permission
was granted. After the sermon by the pastor two of the missionaries addressed
the congregation and this was, I think, the first public preaching in a church
of Shaker doctrines in the west. The great revival had well paved the way for
the new doctrines. The first convert was Malcolm Worley, who
embraced the new faith on Tuesday after the sermon. The second convert was Ann
Middleton, a Negro woman who had been a slave. After a few other conversions
the pastor of the church and his wife were formally received into the new church
on April 24th. Within a year the greater portion of the members of the Turtlecreek
church were Shakers and remained steadfast in the faith unto the last.
The first regular meeting of the new society was held at the house of David
Hill on May 23, when the missionaries introduced dancing as a part
of the Divine worship, one of them striking up a step song and the other two
beginning the dance. The new society had at the start one ordained preacher,
two licensed exhorters, two ordained ruling elders, two physicians and about
thirty other members. They soon began to hold public meetings in the log church
where "they preached and sang and danced and shouted until the opposing
party withdrew and left them in peaceful possession."
The Shaker missionaries with their converts at Turtlecreek became active propagandists
and new societies were rapidly formed out of the congregations that had been
carried out of the Presbyterian body by the revival. New societies were begun
at Eagle Creek in Brown county in June, 1805, and at different places in Kentucky
in the same year. The society at Beaver Creek, southeast of Dayton, was begun
in the spring of 1806 and long continued its existence.
Four of the Presbyterian preachers who had been active in the Kentucky revival
joined the Shakers in the following order: Rev. Richard McNemar,
April 24, 1805; Rev. John Dunlavy, July 29, 1805; Rev.
Matthew Houston, February, 1806; and Rev. John Rankin,
October 28, 1807. All four died in the Shaker faith.
Dunlavy was pastor of the Eagle Creek congregation in what
is now Brown County, Ohio. The Shaker community formed chiefly out of his congregation
numbered in 1807 twenty or thirty families. No village was established here
but the members lived in scattered houses and met on Sunday for worship. They
were all removed from Brown county to other communities about 1810. Dunlavy
was long a preacher in the Shaker community at Pleasant Hill, Ky. He died in
1826. Houston and Rankin were pastor of churches
in Kentucky, and Shaker societies were formed from their congregations. Matthew
Houston died at Union Village in 1848 in the 84th year of his age.
John Rankin died at the South Union community in Kentucky in
1850.
Malcolm Worley, the first convert in the western community
was never a Pres-byterian minister, but was a licensed preacher in the New Light
church. He died in 1844 aged 82 years. His children did not follow him into
the Shaker faith and they brought suit to recover from the Shakers the land
he had deeded to them, on the ground that he was not of sound mind when the
deeds were executed. If the suit had been decided against the Shakers they would
have lost the land on which stood their principal buildings, but after long
delay the case was decided in the Supreme Court in favor of the society. Though
this suit was gained by the Shakers it cost them $1,200.
The society at Union Village has always been regarded as the principal and parent
community in the west. Its progress was rapid. The records of the society give
the number of members in 1812 as 370, and in 1839 as about 500. This last number
seems to have been the maximum membership, and in the next six years there was
a serious diminution.
I conclude this brief history with the statement of Rev. James Kemper,
who in the Presbyterian church was the chief opponent of Richard McNemar
and his doctrines and methods. Mr. Kemper had been McNemar's
predecessor at Turtlecreek, and he wrote as follows:
"The people of Dick's Creek and Turtlecreek invited me to them. Those on
Dick's Creek were Pennsylvanians and those on Turtlecreek were from New Jersey.
The former of these had been well instructed in the doctrine of religion, while
the latter had not been. I purchased a farm in that neighborhood and moved to
it. But after being there one year, Richard McNemar, a deposed
member of our presbytery, came and soon ran away with my Jersey people and so
deranged all my plans that after the first year I moved back to Walnut Hills
to the grief of Pennsylvania friends and McNemar and his friends
soon became Shakers."
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This page created 29 September 2004 and last updated
28 September, 2008
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