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By
Bob Hibbs
The
Old Brick Church in Iowa City has a colorful history which blends a bell,
Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, Iowa City founder Chauncey Swan, first local
settler Ely Myers, and a mad preacher who became laughing stock of the
community and the subject of derisive song.
The
tale is spiced by such natural catastrophes as loss of the congregation’s
first building to fire, and from its second building the loss of a 153-foot
steeple to an 1877 windstorm which provided the chopped-off fortress-like
appearance that some now adore.
Old
Brick was home to the First Presbyterian Church congregation from 1865 until
1975 when a new building was completed on Iowa City’s eastern edge. The 1865
edifice was given to a citizens group formed specifically to preserve it. The
group paid only for the 1973 valuation of the lot – $140,000, according to
church records.
Presbyterian
efforts to build began in 1843 and finally culminated in a dome-topped
building in 1850 to which the first preacher would return to retrieve a bell
he considered he was due. The building’s seven-year gestation period proved
longer than the building lasted since it was razed by fire in 1856.
A
second gestation was longer, stretching from 1856 cornerstone ceremonies until
completion of the edifice in 1865. Cataclysmic
events intervened including twin disasters of national financial panic and
loss of the Iowa capital to Des Moines during 1857, and the 1861-65 Civil War.
After
the congregation was formed Sept. 12, 1840, Chauncey and Dolly Swan, who ran
Swan Hotel on the site now serving UI’s Gilmore Hall, contributed the site
at Clinton and Market streets where Old Brick stands today.
The
first preacher was Michael Hummer who served mostly non-resident from 1841 to
1848. The church’s corporate
bishop, Illinois Presbytery, sent Hummer east to raise money for a proposed
seminary.
He
refused a Presbytery request for a financial accounting and was expelled after
a stormy trial during which “he got furious, storming angry, and left the
room in a rage, declaring the Presbytery to be ‘a den of ecclesiastical
thieves.’” A contemporary described him as “the smartest preacher, if he
was not the greatest saint.”
Soon,
he was planning a new “spirit-rapping” church in Keokuk “for which that
fine bell at Iowa City would be a crowning jewel.” During his eastern
solicitations, he had accepted the bell for Iowa City, but by November 1848,
he was claiming it as unpaid salary.
With
a parishioner from Keokuk he came to get it, but a crowd removed his ladder,
trapping him in the dome-capped belfry. It set Hummer “raving and scolding
and gesticulating like a madman.”
Ely
Myers and others sank the bell near the mouth of Rapid Creek for safe keeping.
Some 15 months later, it was carried off by a group headed to the California
gold fields and sold to Mormons at Salt Lake.
Responding
to inquiry, Mormon leader Brigham Young wrote Nov. 3, 1868, that the bell was
available for the price of shipping. But, local parishioners had deducted the
bell’s assumed value from an intervening settlement with Hummer, so the
matter was dropped. Hummer was considered insane.
As
for the wind-altered appearance of Old Brick, in his 1975 book on local
architecture titled “American Classic” UI history professor Laurence
Lafore writes:
“While
it is not a major work of art it must be judged an imposing and beautiful
example of the attempt to achieve, by using Romanesque details, the
characteristic Romanesque atmosphere of slightly gloomy, fortress-like
solidity in a simple and practical church building.”
Does
one sense damning by faint praise?
Next
Saturday:
St. Mary’s Church stories.
Bob
Hibbs collects local postcards and researches history related to them.
He may be reached at 338-3175 or at hibbs@mchsi.com
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