Eastside pews and pulpits: As settlers arrived, so did circuit-riding preachers

Settlers on the Eastside got religion early.

Circuit-riding preachers appeared almost as soon as the first pioneers, and prayer meetings were a regular occurrence in local schoolhouses and log-cabin homes long before the first churches appeared.

By 1879, three local churches were well-established. The first two were built in 1873 and 1874 in the coal-mining town of Newcastle. One was St. Cyprian Catholic Church. The other was more unusual: the 150-seat, nondenominational Sunday School Church, organized and built by the miners who were reputed to be a rough-and-tumble bunch.

The third church, originally located across from today's Marsh Park in Kirkland, grew out of unexpected company at Caroline and Sam French's home in 1879. Samuel Greene and a Rev. Harrison arrived as the French family, including adult son Harry, was sitting down to dinner one evening. Harrison and Greene were on a mission trip from Seattle and wanted to start a Sunday School east of Lake Washington.

Harry French volunteered his cabin for the weekly services and later donated the land for the First Church of Christ at Pleasant Bay (the former name of Yarrow Bay).

Well-established Eastern church congregations typically supported new or mission churches in the West, and the fledgling Kirkland church was twice-blessed. The Central Congregational Church of Providence, R.I., donated $100 to the new church — enough to purchase pews and a pulpit. (The weekly collection at the Frenches' Sunday school was $2 to $3.)

It also received a bell from Sarah Jane Houghton of Boston, who had it made and shipped to Seattle because there was no foundry on the West Coast that made bells. Later, when the U.S. Postal Service wanted to change the name of Pleasant Bay, Caroline French suggested the community be called Houghton, in honor of the Boston benefactor.

Although the church has changed names, moved and been rebuilt, the bell remains an important part of Kirkland Congregational Church, now located near today's City Hall.

Building new churches

Because settlements were spread out and travel was difficult, other Eastside churches weren't far behind the original three.

By 1892, 40 to 50 people of diverse Christian denominations were gathering each Sunday afternoon in Bellevue for the Union Sunday School. Two dozen of those people organized First Congregational Church in 1896, building on the corner of today's Northeast Eighth Street and 108th Avenue Northeast. The wood for what was called The Little White Church was shipped from Seattle. Volunteers shingled the roof but refused to do the belfry because it was too high.

Finally, a young man, 17-year-old Holly Ivey, climbed up with hammer in hand and did the job.

One of the original Bothell settlers, Columbus Greenleaf, opened his home to the Norwegian Lutherans and other prayer groups for services in 1870. The prayer groups eventually formed Bothell's First Lutheran Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, both organized in the late 1880s.

Keeping the churches operating was a challenge. There was a national financial recession in the early 1890s, and the minutes from a board meeting of Bothell's First Lutheran from 1893 contained these terse lines: "Times hard. Real struggle." In 1894, the board rented the building to other churches for $1 per meeting to bring in needed cash.

Although the church was on more solid financial footing by 1914, the ground wasn't as secure. That year, Second Street in front of the church was graded, and suddenly passing traffic made the building shiver and shake. A retaining wall was erected around the church, but by 1921 the building was obviously in trouble and both the church and parsonage were moved back several feet.

The stuff of legends

Interesting tales about early churches and pastors abound:

• One circuit preacher, for example, made a deal with Issaquah's baseball team in 1894. If they would attend his church services on Sunday mornings, he would go to their baseball games on Sunday afternoons.

• Issaquah's original Methodist church, built in 1890, sat on cinder blocks. Hogs moved into the space under the church and disrupted evening services with noises and smells.

The enterprising minister hammered boards in place to block their entry. Then people complained about the location of the church, saying it would be better if it were moved a few feet. A wind storm blew the church off the blocks, moving it exactly to the location people had wanted, but smashed all the windows and toppled the chimney in the process.

• The Rev. Rosine Edwards was the Eastside's first female pastor, presiding from 1899 to 1900 at Tolt Congregational Church. When she finished church services in town, she walked three miles to Healy Logging Camp in Stillwater to conduct afternoon services.

• Another roving preacher was the Rev. A.J. McNamee, who in 1885 spent three weeks riding his circuit. He started in Seattle, stopped at Meydenbauer Bay, then at the Northup family home in Houghton, held services in the ballroom above George Tibbetts' store in Squak (Issaquah), and then went to Fall City and Tolt.

Churches were clearly important to the small, developing communities.

"Churches connoted family, stability and community," said University of Washington history professor John Findlay. According to Findlay, church-related activities provided the only respectable social outlet for women isolated on homesteads.

Sunday schools for adults and children often predated churches because women could organize them with just a few people. Churches, on the other hand, required a dozen or more families and their cash donations to operate.

Women's church groups, often called Ladies Aid Societies, were more than mere coffee klatches. At First Lutheran in Bothell, one ladies group raised enough money to build the first parish hall in 1931 and another added a kitchen in 1935.

In North Bend the Ladies Aid Society made and sold pillow cases and aprons and held suppers and box socials, making enough money to build a room for the Sunday school, revarnish the church seats and woodwork and pay for a plank sidewalk that ran from the business district to the church.

Most early churches on the Eastside were mainstream Christian. At least one was segregated. A photograph from the 1890s shows the congregation of a black church in Kennydale.

Although there were Chinese workers in both Issaquah and Newcastle in the late 1880s, there are no records of their religious practices. The Mormons were established in Seattle in 1902, and in 1937 two Kirkland women persuaded Mormon leaders to start a local Sunday School. In 1969, the first Jewish services were held on Mercer Island. The Islamic Center of the Eastside in Bellevue opened in 1996, and a Buddhist temple opened in Redmond in 1985.

Spiritual roots, however, have run deep on the Eastside for centuries. Local Native American tribes, including the Snoqualmie, revered a natural world they believed was filled with spirits. Many Snoqualmie tribal members joined the Shaker Church, but prior to that local tribes used community longhouses for religious ceremonies.

"Churches always were a sign of stability and a gathering place for isolated settlers," said Trudy Eichelsdoerfer of Bothell, who wrote the history of Bothell's First Lutheran Church. "Even today they're considered a cornerstone of our local communities."

Sources: "Our Foundering Fathers," by Arline Ely; "Coals to Newcastle" by Richard McDonald and Lucile McDonald; Issaquah Historical Society; Renton Historical Society; the Eastside Heritage Society's Marymoor Museum; The Seattle Times; archives from First Lutheran Church of Bothell, First Congregational Church of Bellevue and the Congregational Church of Kirkland.