The Prairie Home Church

The Prairie Home Church was the heart of the Prairie Home community when I was a boy. The grade schools--East Center, West Center and Cherry Grove--were, of course, important, as was the Prairie Home Literary Society, to a lesser degree. But that simple old wooden church was a center in the lives of everyone--even those who seldom, or never, attended Sunday services. Our family almost never missed a Sunday. Mother and Dad were both elders in the church. Dad taught the young people’s class for all the years I can remember. I served as superintendent of the Sunday School during my junior and senior high school years. My parents, grandparents, great grandparents and my baby brother are buried in the cemetery.

A bit of history: The church was organized in 1860. My great grandfather’s sister, Eliza Baird Thompson, and her husband Gardner Thompson, were charter members--they had moved from central Pennsylvania to Prairie Home in 1859. The church met in the Friendship school building (which was then located about a mile and a half southeast of Prairie Home) until the church building was started in 1869 and dedicated in 1870. Three of Eliza’s brothers and their families joined the church as they arrived from Pennsylvania in the next few years, including Robinson Baird who gave the land for the church and cemetery and John Baird, my great-grandfather, who moved to Illinois in 1866.

In the early years the Prairie Home Church regularly had a minister and there was a parsonage in Prairie Home. However, the parsonage burned in 1930 and with the depression the congregation was not able to afford a full-time minister, so there was only occasional full church service after that. However, there was Sunday School every week while we were growing up and a visiting preacher gave a full service every few weeks. Guy Cox would come early and ring the church bell about and hour before Sunday School was to start at 9:30. And in the winter he would build a fire in the furnace so that the church would be warm when everyone arrived.

The basic philosophy of the Prairie Home Church was pretty straightforward: “We all try to lead good Christian lives and do what is right, but sometimes we slip a little bit and we all need to try harder.” This pure, simple message was good for those times (and, I think, for all times). Once a visiting preacher, somebody’s cousin from Tennessee as I recall, got rather worked up and was shouting about hellfire and brimstone--but it didn’t go over very well in Prairie Home. We were all good people and didn’t need that kind of talk.

Our favorite hymns for Sunday School were the old-fashioned, simple ones like: In the Garden, Sweet Hour of Prayer, What a Friend, The Old Rugged Cross, Love Lifted Me --and especially the “Hymns of Joy,” such as: In My Heart There Rings a Melody, Bringing In the Sheaves, Let a Little Sunshine In and Brighten the Corner. On those joyful hymns we’d really make the rafters ring.

Back in the depression days the standard donation for a child in a Sunday School class was a penny. In fact, it was not unusual to hear a parent checking with a careless child, “Do you have your penny?”--or to hear a little boy say, “Mom, I lost my penny!” And a typical adult donation would be a quarter or fifty cents--once in a while a dollar. Once when some church repairs were needed Guy Cox asked who could join him in a five dollar pledge. Dad responded, but no other hands were raised.

The Ladies Aid Society was a big help in raising money to support the church. The ladies had all-day meetings twice a month to make quilts for sale. The star quilt one year was the Name Quilt where some 500 people paid 50¢ each to have their names stitched onto the quilt, which was then auctioned off. (Dad bought it and it’s still in the family.) Another year they sold Birthday Calendars--each 25¢ contributor got his/her name printed on the calendars at the appropriate date. I still have my copy.

But the money-raising events the whole community looked forward to were the Oyster Suppers, Ice Cream Socials and other such feasts the Ladies Aid put on three or four times a year. Everybody came. Looking back, it seems remarkable that oyster suppers were so popular out in the “prairieland” back in the 1930s. It was such a rare treat and the oyster stew was delicious--made with ultra-fresh cream and milk and with a yellow glaze of fresh-churned butter all over the top!! Nobody counted calories in those days so we just loved the oyster stew and the buffet of all kinds of special goodies that were offered along the table. Each cook tried to outdo the others. One of Mother’s specialties was sliced bananas rolled in crushed peanuts. Wow! That was something we never got at home!

Another event that the whole community attended was the annual Children’s Day program. For two weeks we kids practiced our parts--Bible skits, Bible verses, short poems, etc. We walked through the fields the mile to church for practice, along with the Burrows children who almost never went to church except for Children’s Day. Our programs were always well received, but I don’t have a funny incident to report, such as happened at my wife Audrey’s Children’s Day program. Six-year-old Audrey and her five-year-old sister Nancy were each given a Bible verse, but Nancy liked Audrey’s verse better and tried in vain to get Audrey to switch with her. When the big program came Audrey recited her assigned verse, but Nancy got mad and (onstage) hit her sister on the head with her little purse.

When I was superintendent of the Sunday School I worked up a plan to build attendance: the Reds vs. the Blues. I picked Red and Blue captains and they chose up sides among the regular members. Then each side tried to outdo the other in bringing new families to church. If the Blues brought the Bunning family in, it was a point for the Blues for each Bunning every Sunday that the family attended. We had cutout pictures of a red car and a blue car strung on a string track and we figured and posted the points every Sunday. Everybody had a lot of fun and we boosted Sunday School attendance by about two-thirds that summer--but in the fall it slipped back down to only about 20% above what it had been before the contest.

Among my fond memories of the Prairie Home Church in the 1930s are these: (1) Driving to church in an open sleigh--I recall three or four times after a big snowstorm Dad would hitch up a team to the sleigh and we would have a “storybook” ride to church with sleigh bells ringing. What a glorious experience! (2) Every five years we would celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the church. There was always a full house on those Sundays as old-timers from far and wide came back to visit. Dad always gave a short history of the church as part of the special anniversary program. (3) One summer while I was in high school we had a student preacher, Richard Tucker, who had lived all his life in Brooklyn and had never seen a farm or a cow or a pig until he arrived in central Illinois. He was gullible about farm jokes, but good natured. He and I became friends and learned a lot from each other.

After World War II the number of families in the Prairie Home community dropped significantly as bigger farm machinery made it practical for farmers to handle much larger farms. The Prairie Home Church struggled to survive, but was decommissioned about 1970. The building served as a township center for several years, but was torn down in the late 1990s. Penn Township now maintains the cemetery and did a fine job of mounting the old church bell above a memorial stone that shows a picture of the church and gives a brief history.

A brief note on how moral standards have changed over time…….When Mother was in the first grade she got a new slate for her birthday, which fell on a Sunday that year. She really wanted to try out her new slate, but that wasn’t considered proper on Sunday. Finally she asked, “Mother, do you think it would be all right if I just used my slate to draw a picture of our church?”…….About a hundred years ago a young woman rode to our church on horseback. As she was dismounting she caught the hem of her dress on the horn of the saddle, exposing her petticoat and underwear. A couple of boys saw her and laughed. She was so terribly embarrassed that she immediately got back on her horse, rode home, drank poison and died………When I was growing up I never, ever saw any farmer working in his fields on Sunday. Never, not once! Whenever the subject of Sunday work came up, someone would always tell the story about a local farmer who years before had felt the desperate need to plow on Sunday because a wet spring season had put him far behind in getting his crops in. He got along fine in the morning, but while he was washing up for his noon meal he dropped dead of a heart attack. The implication, of course, was that he had been punished for working in the fields on the Sabbath.