 |
| Tapscott farms (bounded in blue) with villages, schools, churches and cemeteries. |
By 1855, the Clark County, Illinois, Tapscotts were living in Anderson
township between the hamlets of Allright to the south and Auburn to the north.
Until 1892, the community just off Fox Road that would become Allright consisted of just a church (later, becoming a Congregational church) and a store, In that year a post office was
established in the home of Henry Kile so that locals could avoid journeying to Auburn or Marshall to get their mail. Obtaining postal services required that residents select a name for the nameless hamlet, which they did and Henry Kile traveled to the
Marshall courthouse to report the name. According to Carroll
Kannmacher, an Allright resident and historian, “He got all nervous, stuttered and stammered and said ‘all
right.’ The officials said, okay, you’ll be Allright from now on.” Eventually, the village had three general stores, but the post office, used by the Tapscotts, lasted only a
few years, closing in 1908. The town limped along for another half century, the church shutting its doors in 1956. Today nothing remains of Allright.
The village of Auburn was settled
in 1833 by one Jonathon Rathburn, who built a log cabin along the Great
National Pike. In 1836, the village was platted. One block was set aside for
public buildings and another for a school (two lots) and cemetery (eight lots).
The town soon contained a hotel (opened by Samuel Williams, from Kentucky), the
“Old Buck” Tavern, two groceries, and two blacksmiths. The stores sold as much
liquor as the tavern.
The name of the town was changed
to “Lodi” and a post office was established there in 1842. In 1857 the name was
changed to “Clark Centre” and in 1893 to “Clark Center.” Some claim that the
name “Clark Centre” was chosen in hopes that the town would be selected as the
county seat after a decision was made to abandon Darwin as the seat of
government, but Darwin had lost out many years earlier, in 1839. The Clark
Center post office was discontinued in 1907.
Baptist, Methodist Protestant,
and Methodist Episcopal circuit riders (who often walked rather than rode)
covered the area, holding services in private homes or whatever quarters they
could find. They ran revivals and camp meetings, usually filling the “mourners
benches” with penitents. They visited the sick and dying. And they often rode
or walked from town to town in rain and snow and mud. These early “fire and
brimstone” preachers were poorly paid but were filled with the spirit, bringing
religion into, what were then, rough frontier towns.
In the late 1700s, the authority
of the bishops in the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) began to be challenged. Some
of the membership wanted local and lay representation at Methodist Conferences
and a voice in the running of the church. A convention of those hoping to reform
the church was held in Baltimore in 1824, and in 1827 a minister and several
members were expelled from the church for agitating for reform. In the absence
of this expulsion, a complete break would have been unlikely. In 1830, however,
those expelled were joined by others in establishing the Methodist Protestant
Church (MPC), identical to the Methodist Episcopal Church in all ways except
governance. The first session of the Illinois Conference of the MPC was held in
Alton, Illinois, on 25 Oct 1836.
Auburn Church, the home church
and burial place of many Clark County Tapscotts, was a Methodist Protestant
Church. In 1842, the Reverend Witherspoon organized the Auburn MPC, which was
made part of the Mill Creek Circuit. This Circuit covered all of Clark County
and extended south into Crawford County and north into Edgar County. In 1850,
the smaller Mission Circuit was carved out to extend from Darwin in the
southeast to Grand View in the northwest.
The
first quarterly conference for the Mission Circuit was held at Auburn 15 Feb 1845 with Rev. E. C.
Peacock presiding. Rev. Richard Wright, the Grandfather of
Edna (Wright) Tapscott (wife of John Wesley Tapscott), was the district
superintendent. An uncle of Edna, Rev. Henry Patrick Lowry, was a local preacher at
Auburn around 1887.
In the early years, there was no
church building at Auburn. Meetings were held in homes. In 1860, a new log
school house was erected about two miles northwest of Auburn and was used as
the church building until the church itself was constructed. In 1883, the
trustees purchased two lots held by the school trustees and built the church on
those lots. The following is an account of the construction:
It was finally decided to erect a
frame building. Much talk followed, but little action, ‘til one day Ben Lowry
took his crosscut saw and ax and went down to Howard McNary’s. Howard asked him
what he was going to do. He replied, “Oh, I’m going to cut logs for the lumber
for the new church.” Whereupon, Howard called his boys and told them to get
their saws and axes and go too. Then the men came to the hill just north of our
present home and cut the trees from which the timbers and the lumber was made
for the church.
With donated labor, a rough 30-ft
x 40-ft building was erected in 1886 at a cost of $1000, but it was not
completed until the following year. The building was erected under pastors
William Burkett and Daniel McCormick, and was dedicated on 5 Jun 1887 by Rev.
Richard Wright.
Rev. Wright was the first
president of the South Conference of the MPC. This conference existed until
1922, when it was united with the North Illinois Conference to form the
Illinois Conference. In 1939, the Methodist Protestant, Methodist Episcopal,
and the Southern Methodist churches united (reunited?) to form the Methodist
Church. In 1941, Auburn was placed on the Marshall Circuit and the Mill Creek
Circuit was abandoned. Unlike Allright, the village of Auburn (today, Clark Center) and Auburn Cemetery still remain, but Auburn Church was abandoned and, in 2011, demolished.
No comments:
Post a Comment
To directly contact the author, email retapscott@comcast.net