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Meanwhile the Congregational churches in neighboring towns, with
populations similar to Deering’s, were flourishing. Antrim’s church had
204 members, Greenfield had 195 and Hancock had 266.
Francistown, with
fewer people than Deering, managed to attract 500 members. One reason
for the decline of the Deering Congregational Church was the parallel
rise of the Free Salvation Society in East Deering that merged into the
Methodist Church.
These members were able to finance the construction of
a new church building in 1830, built by the same architects who had
planned the Congregational Church. Although we do not have access to the
Methodist Church records, it is apparent from oral histories that the
East Deering Church attracted enough members to keep open into the
1920s.
From
1860 to 1900, the Deering Community Church suffered continual decline.
Part of this trend can be explained by industrial development. In 1830
Deering and Hillsborough were about the same size. However, with no
source of waterpower, Deering lost so many people that by 1900 it was
home to less than 400 people. In the meantime Hillsborough’s population
had climbed to over 2,000.
Membership drops
to just 24
After
Rev. Holman left Deering in 1874, the Congregational Church would not
call another full-time minister for 65 years. When Holman left the
membership had dwindled to 24 members, nineteen women and five men.
Luckily, one of those women was Esther Ellsworth. She served as clerk,
kept the church records and tried her best to infuse some life in the
dying institution.
The Church managed a few summer services and a few
funerals. Student ministers from Andover-Newton, pastors from
neighboring churches and ministers from the East Deering Church supplied
most of the preaching.
During this period the church made only one major
decision: In 1891 it decided “To celebrate the Communion of the Lord’s
Supper with water instead of wine.” That same year 15 men gathered to
shore up the deteriorating building including constructing a new
steeple.
By 1895,
most of the original settlers of Deering had gone west or moved to
Hillsborough, and the Church had only three members. As the new century
opened, Deering, like many farming communities in upper New England, was
a moribund town. As failing farmers fled to richer fields or to the
burgeoning factories along the rivers, Deering houses fell into
disrepair as their paints faded and floors rotted.
When, in 1902,
Governor Rollins called for all towns to celebrate Old Home Days, the
few remaining residents of Deering had only nostalgia to lighten their
hearts. Even the builder of the first farmhouse in town was forced to
close his doors after 136 years of tilling his land, and he moved down
the hill to work as a hired hand on the Loveren farm.
Into the vacuum left in Deering by the departure of old
Yankee settlers flowed a new influx of settlers determined to fulfill
their dreams of owning their own farms.
This time the new settlers were
not old English or Scottish-Irish stock but part of the new wave of Ellis
Island immigrants from Europe. Little did they realize that their
predecessors had left Deering because they had failed as farmers. What
these refugees from the industrial cities saw were open fields, endless
woods, opportunities for self-employment and a wholesome place to raise
their large families.
These new settlers, such
as Peter Wood from Scotland, Ernest Johnson from Sweden, Harold Titcomb
from England by way of Canada, John Evans from Lithuania, and Julius
Gruenier from Germany, were willing to exchange hard money they had
earned in wages for largely subsistence farming that they believed gave
their lives meaning.
Moreover, these new settlers to rural Deering
longed for the sense of community they had abandoned in Europe. A
handful of current church members like Wallace Wood, Joyce Peace, Tom Copadis,
Jeanne Bartlett, Aino Bigwood, Hazel Vogelien and Don Johnson
owe their presence here to some of these adventurous immigrants who fled
the factories in order to build new lives in a strange place. |
The
transplanted Europeans soon found new friends among the surviving
Yankees in Deering and most had large families that slowly increased
Deering’s population from 288 in 1920 to nearly 400 a decade later. As
their children attended public schools and joined the church, they
became loyal Americans, many of whom would later fight in World War II
and the Korean War.
Probably
most citizens of Deering after the 1920s did not think of themselves as
poor, although objectively they were.
They thought of themselves as
successful and invested much effort in building a tightly-knit community
and looked forward to their children advancing beyond their own meager
educations. However, just as this second wave of Deering settlers were
invigorating Deering, they were joined by a third wave of settlers who
were as strange to them as they were to the newcomers.
"Summer People"
The
local farmers in the later 1920s called the new settlers “summer people”
because they poured into town in June and had mostly left by Labor Day.
The summer people tended to call themselves, “the summer colony,” and
most of them built cabins around Deering Lake (known by locals as the
Deering Reservoir), or snatched up deserted farms for bargain prices.
Many like the Beavens, Abernethys, Polings, Pettys and Yeaples were
ministers. Others were administrators and officials in denominational
work. Many were well-known religious leaders with national and
international reputations.
The
impetus behind this summer migration of theological luminaries was
Eleanor Campbell, a millionaire social reformer who was also a medical
doctor and divorced, placing her in a small minority of women of the
time. Dr. Campbell, as she was known among the Deering locals, had used
her medical training to uplifting Italian immigrants in New York’s
Greenwich Village, where she had established a clinic that gave free
medical and dental treatment, and she actively visited families in their
humble homes in an effort to improve their parenting.
The
pastor of the justly famous Judson Memorial Church, Dr. A. Ray Petty,
had already decided in 1925 to buy a deserted farm near Fulton Pond and
he, in turn, convinced Dr. Campbell to follow suit. She purchased a
farm across the road from him. Later Dr. Petty swapped his farm for 17
acres on Deering Lake where he proceeded to build the first of many
cabins. The same year Dr. Campbell bought four more farms, totalling
around 700 acres. She soon persuaded many of her friends to join her and
the summer colony soon owned much of the south eastern shore of the
Deering Lake.
Dr.
Campbell did not come to Deering just to relax. She and her friends
plunged into Deering uplift with zeal. She moved quickly to build
several new community-based organizations including a health center near
the Town Common. She launched the Community Club, which remained the
major organization in town until the 1950s. She also introduced birth
control and opened a vacation Bible school that served hundreds of
children from surrounding towns.
Certainly Dr. Campbell’s motives were altruistic and
pure, yet for many of the local Deering residents, especially the proud
new European immigrants, the new culture she introduced was a lethal
threat to their sense of their personal worth and to their belief that
they were building their own American Dream.
When Dr. Campbell compared
Deering children to the Italian and Greek kids crowded in the New York
slums, many were insulted. Later when the leader of the Deering
Community Center, which she started, wrote an article in the Boston
Globe describing the Deering kids of the 1930s as “poor, pallid,
bean-fed children who lived in tar paper shacks,” even the youngsters
were offended. As one member of our church now says, “Before the summer
people came, we didn’t realize that we were poor.”
One of the most dramatic changes the summer people
caused in Deering was the revitalization of the moribund Congregational
Church. At first Dr. Campbell and her summer community thought about
reviving the Methodist Church as it was the more vital one. However,
they decided to invest their considerable energies into the
Congregational Church and they proceeded to enlist many locals in this
effort. |
A motion
in 1927 that allowed the summer people to join as Associate Members
meant they could join the Deering church while retaining full membership
in their home place of worship. At the same meeting Drs. Campbell and
Poling were appointed to head a committee to carry out the much-needed
repairs to the church building. The next week’s Hillsborough
Messenger announced that, “The Old Congregational Church at Deering
that had practically ceased to function and the membership of which had
dropped to three persons, has been brought back to life and put upon a
firm basis.” The paper went on to explain that the renovation was largely
due to “the efforts of a distinguished summer colony…”
The
restoration and reinvigoration of Deering’s old church brought together
the Yankees, the new immigrant families, and the summer people, a
seemingly strange mixture. However, the effort awoke the old church.
Although the Church was open mostly in the summer and relied on student
ministers, gradually the townspeople assumed more of an active part in
maintaining the building and filling offices.
At the
July 26, 1931, service and another the following month, the largest
numbers of new members were accepted. With the influence of the summer
colony, the Church enjoyed some of the best preaching in the country.
Besides the resident Abernathys, Beavens and Yeaples, distinguished
preachers included James Mulienberg, Roger Shinn, Truman Douglas and
Howard Spragg.
Deering
Community Center
Dr.
Campbell also launched the Deering Community Center on Route 149. Young
people from all over the East came to enjoy a week’s camping there, and
local youngsters could attend vacation Bible school. Later, when Dr.
Campbell turned the Center over to the United Church of Christ, the
summer minister’s school attracted some of the best scholars in the
nation as teachers. The Center also produced plays, musical programs and
other cultural events for the townspeople. Beginning in the early 1940s,
the director of the Community Center was usually an ordained minister
who also served as the pastor of the Congregational Church. The summer
colony not only revitalized our church, but financially sustained it
down to Carlton Sherwood’s leadership in the construction of Sherwood
Hall in the 1960s.
With the
strong leadership and financial support of the summer colony, our church
entered a paradoxical phase of its history. In the years up to the
1950s, most churches were more active in the winter and slowed down in
summer when many farmers were preoccupied with haying and tending their
crops. However, in Deering, church attendance was very low in winter,
sinking to only two or three families in the 1940s, while the summers
saw Sunday services packed with occasional services that attracted as
many as two hundred worshippers.
During
the first half-century of the Deering Church, no two people were more
responsible for keeping the slender thread of faith alive in Deering
than Almeda and Lottie Holmes. The Holmes sisters were daughters of the
old south, but moved to Massachusetts when they were both young
children.
As a
child Almeda was devout, given to prayer, and she knew she would follow
a religious life. As a young woman in Boston, Almeda got the Call while
reading in the newspaper about a rural town in New Hampshire that had no
Sunday School. Almeda convinced her sister Lottie to support her
missionary efforts in Deering where she spent the rest of her life
caring for the sick and needy, helping to build community and investing
her effort and small savings in establishing a Sunday School for
generations of Deering youngsters.
Since there were no church services in the winter, Miss
Almeda carried the “Good News” by snowshoe to the homes where children
lived. She brought the children books, Bibles and her intense love of
God. Almeda and Lottie not only brought the Good News to this
struggling town, but were special witnesses to God’s love and grace.
They tended the sick, cooked food for the needy, lent money to many,
took neighbors to the doctor pulled along by their beloved horse
Snookums. They were first in line at all voluntary efforts. They were
pillars of the Community Club, Grange and Guild. From 1920 to 1958, no
one in the Congregation would dare nominate anyone but Almeda as the
Sunday School Chair. |
