CHAPTER XLIV
New Northern Associations
When A. B. Freeman came to Chicago in 1833 there was not a Baptist church in all northern Illinois. The most northern was an anti-mission church in Knox county. But in the fall of 1833 two churches, Hadley in Will county and Chicago First in Cook county, sprang into being. The year following three churches were added: Plainfield, Bristol and Dupage. In 1835, St. Charles and Tonica. In that year the Northern Association was organized. In 1836 churches were organized at Batavia and Belvidere, and Dupage was removed to Warrenville. Belvidere was the first Baptist church in the northern tier of counties. In 1837 Baptist foundations were laid at Rock lsland and Joliet, and in 1838 at Elgin, Dundee, Dixon and Rockford. The church at Rockford was organized December 22 in the house of our old acquaintance at Upper Alton, first treasurer of the State Convention, and one of the first trustees of Shurtleff College, Dr. George Haskell. Eight of the constituent members of the church were from Upper Alton. One of them was Caleb Blood, who soon afterwards entered the ministry. Two others were Ransom Knapp and wife, whose glowing accounts of the Rock river country brought out his brother, Eld. Jacob Knapp and family from New York in 1840. Eld. Knapp purchased two sections of land four miles from Rockford, and his general home was there until his death. He was one of the greatest evangelists of modern times. He was born in Otsego county, New York, December 7, 1799, was baptized in 1819, and in 1821 walked to Hamilton as a student. During his vacations he preached almost daily. He graduated in 1824, and was a successful pastor for nine years. From 1833 he gave himself wholly to the work of an evangelist. It is estimated that he preached sixteen thousand sermons, baptized five thousand persons, and that of the one hundred thousand converted under his labors two hundred entered the ministry.
In the fall of 1838, soon after the organization of the church at Belvidere, Abijah Hayden and wife, of Round Prairie, Boone county, fifteen miles from Belvidere, made the trip by ox team on Sunday morning, and delivered their church letters. The pastor, S. S. Whitman, on their invitation preached in the neighborhood, and the result was the
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organization of the Round Prairie Baptist church in 1839, and the ordination of James Veness of Rockton as their pastor. All grew out of the willingness of Mr. and Mrs. Hayden to go fifteen miles to meeting with an ox team. Pastor Whitman was from Vermont, and was for eight years, 1827-1835, professor of Hebrew at Hamilton. His health failed and he came west in 1836, and was pastor at Belvidere for ten years. He died at Madison, Wis., in 1852 and was buried at Belvidere. One of the members of the Belvidere church was William Mead, who lived at the upper end of the Big Bottom on Rock river, three miles from Roscoe. He secured L. W. Lawrence of Belvidere to preach in his cabin, and it resulted in the organization of the Roscoe Baptist church, in 1839. Three were baptized by Eld. William Stilwell; the first baptisms in Rock river.
William Stillwell was from Madison county, New York. His wife was a granddaughter of John Leland. He came to Illinois in 1839, and labored chiefly in Winnebago county until his death in 1850. His funeral sermon was preached by Jacob Knapp. He was of frail constitution, but a good and useful man. In the summer of 1840 he organized the Pecatonica church, and these five -- Belvidere, Rockford, Round Prairie and Pecatonica -- with Sugar Creek church, Stephenson county, organized the Rock River Association. During the seven years following no annual session passed without receiving new churches; the average during that time was one church every five months.
The Rock Island church was organized in 1837; Titus Gillett, pastor. He died in 1844. In 1840 the Davenport church was organized, just across the Mississippi river, and in 1842 the Davenport Association was formed at Dubuque, because the Dubuque church had the only Baptist meeting house in that part. of the state.
The year following churches were formed at Cordova and Orion, and these with Rock Island and Galena in 1844 formed themselves into the Rock Island Association. The pastor at Rock Island was Ezra Fisher, a Massachusetts man and a graduate of Newton. In 1845 as a missionary of the Home Mission Society to Oregon he crossed the plains and the mountains with an ox team, and the following year organized in Washington county, Oregon, the first Baptist church on the Pacific coast. He died in 1874.
In 1841 a number of Predestinarian Baptist churches in the northern part of the state organized the Northwestern Association. It has never been large, and is now practically extinct. In the same year fifteen
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churches from the Fox River and Illinois River Associations, met with the Harding church in Freedom township, Lasalle county, and organized the Ottawa Association. The older of these churches were Princeton, organized in 1836; Lamoille in 1838; Lasalle in 1840; Ottawa in 1842; all these from the Illinois River Association. Lamoille, known as Greenfield, was gathered by Heriry Headley, who was also the first pastor at Princeton. Of the Ottawa church the first pastor was Charles Harding, who died in 1843. In 1848 their pastor was John Higby, then newly arrived from Massachusetts. His whole ministry was spent in northern Illinois. His son, J. H. Higby, was also a Baptist minister, and he gave a daughter, Sarah Higby, to the forergrn field. He died in 1882.
One of the subsequent churches of the Association was the Norwegian Baptist church of Mission township, Lasalle county; Hans Velder, pastor. It was the first Scandinavian Baptist church in the United States. It was afterwards merged in the Leland church, which is now extinct.
The chain of providential causes connected with this little church is connected also with the Swedish Baptists, and the present German Baptists. In 1807 a Norwegian ship was captured by the British and the crew carried to London as prisoners of war. There Lars Larson became a Quaker, and when he returned in 1816 he organized a Friends' Society in Norway. They were persecuted by the state church, and in 1821 Kleng Peerson and a companion were sent by the Society to the United States to look out a new home. In 1825 a sloop load of Quaker emigrants came over and settled in Orleans county, New York. In 1836-38 several companies of Lutherans followed; but most of these were drawn farther west by Kleng Peerson, and were finally located on a beautiful and fertile prairie in Lasalle county, Illinois. Kleng Peerson declared that he was guided in his selection of the locality by a "vision" which came to him while he lay on a hill to rest. Perhaps he was led in that direction by the fame of the Indian Mission, in memory of which the township was afterwards named. It was founded by Jesse Walker, a Methodist missionary, among the Pottawatomie Indians in 1826; half way between the white settlements at Chicago and Peoria. A section of land was given him by the Indians, on which he opened a farm, built cabins, and.established a school; but in 1829 the government bought but the Indian claim and the mission ceased. The premises
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were afterwards occupied by a French half breed who ran the horse mill for the benefit of the early settlers.
The Norwegian immigrants founded the village of Norway, and built a Lutheran church, both of which still exist. The Baptist church followed in 1847, on the northwest side of the settlement.
In 1844 the Salem Association met with the Carthage church, in the very heart of the anti-Mormon excitement which culminated in the killing of the Smiths in 1845, and the departure of the Mormons in 1846. In 1848 the deserted temple at Nauvoo was burned by an incendiary. But the strange fortunes of the little Mississippi river town of commerce, which blossomed into Nauvoo, were not over, for in 1849 the French Icarian Community was established there. The leader, Mons. Cabet, left France and made his home here with his people until his death in 1856. =============== [Edward P. Brand, Illinois Baptists -- A History, 1930, pp. 147-150. -- jrd]
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