Chapter 14

Rev. I. N. Taylor - Limberlost Church

In October 1838, the American Home Missionary Society and Presbytery of Chillicothe, Ohio sent him to St. Mary's, Ohio, as a Missionary to the new settlements in that region. Early in the summer of 1840 he received a vague verbal message to the effect that somebody, thirty or forty miles west of St. Mary's, wanted to see him. He wrote to this unknown person a sealed letter, directing it "To any Presbyterian west or southwest of St. Mary's, within forty miles, greeting," and confided it "to any hunter going to the Wabash." He took it himself ten miles, to the extremity of squatter sovereignty habitation. West of that, to the Wabash, was an untouched wilderness of the most dismal character, yet that letter, thus committed to the wild, reached its providential destination, and was steadily answered by Mr. Matthew P. Montgomery, who lived on the farm now owned by Peter Walter, of Wabash Township, urging him to come there, and telling him of a small community of Christian people in his neighborhood. Soon afterward, Mr. Taylor made his first visit to Indiana. From what is since Celina of New Corydon, there was then scarcely a sign of human existence, and the first farm south of the Wabash was that of Mr. David Adams, where he found the whole neighborhood assembled raising a double log barn. Of that event Mr. Taylor says: "The patriarch of the occasion, as he ever was till he died, was Father Reuben Montgomery. After a few salutations he led us on down the creek some three miles to the house of is son-in-law, Ira Towle, where, on Saturday night, our first religious meeting was held. The day following was a memorable Sabbath to those sheep in the wilderness - memorable for reviving the sacred memories of the Sabbath, the sanctuaries of the past, and for kindling the hopes of a better future, when this wilderness might rejoice and blossom as the rose."

Six weeks afterward, Mr. Taylor returned, preached for several days at Ira Towle's, sometimes in the barn, and organized a Presbyterian Church, of thirteen members, of whom Jacob Bosworth, (though living twelve miles distant), Harry Reed and M. P. Montgomery were elected elders.

In the afternoon, on the Sabbath, there was a meeting for the relation of personal Christian experience. Most of the male members of that gathering have gone to their eternal home. No one can paint so true a picture of these men as Mr. Taylor, who writes thus: "Father Montgomery, brought into the Kingdom in advanced life, impressed me that common sense was his great excellence. His story of his conversion showed that the truth and spirit of Christ had seized upon this ruling power in his conversion, and had ever since made this trait the chief medium of keeping him from error and preserving his piety. A memorable morsel in his prayer on that occasion illustrated how child-like sympathy may rule in company with a masterly will. It was this: 'O, Lord, thou knowest there is a great work to be done here in Jay County, and we have none to look to but thee.' He was a famous farmer. Many houses and barns in Jay will long be the remembrances of his industry, though men, with noisier tool covered with board and nail his firmly jointed workmanship. And so, I think, his strong-minded counsels, though covered by noisier advocates of moral and religious reform, will remain a part of the hidden framework of new society in Jay County.

"Ira Towle's hesitating yet honest manner made me say of him, to myself: There is a man that minds his own affairs and keeps his own secrets, and wishes all others to do the same. I found him so. Never obtrusive, he was always in his place, doing, not proposing or discussing, his full share towards all the interests of society. In keeping with all else, he, dying without any immediate heirs, bequeathed most of his property to the cause of Home Missions, amounting to over two thousand dollars.

"Harry Reed's account was unstudied and highly emotional. Some odd, blunt expression about God's handling him mighty rough, would make us smile, and the next minute we would find ourselves weeping with him that wept, while he was telling of the almighty love of Jesus. With him religion was an inwrought principle and law of life that would always prevail over the transient errors of sudden impulse or hasty speech. I confided to him, more than any man in those days, all my cares. His industry, integrity, zeal and tender sensibility made him a valuable exponent of those elementary lessons of piety and charity, which it was my care to instill into the heart of society in those early days. He was, emphatically, a worker in the moral as in the natural wilderness, and in both his works do follow him.

"M. P. Montgomery, a man of superior intellect and of views and aspirations wide and high, with both natural and acquired gifts of speech, gave us, in addition to his Christian evidences, the lively impression that he was, all over, from the sole of his foot up, for more than six feet, to the crown of his masterly head, a Presbyterian. It was to be expected that such a man would hail with joy the hopeful beginning of better times. He deprecated the prevailing type of religion in the country, as contemptuous of solid knowledge, dignified forms, and practical correctness. He was chiefly instrumental I getting, at so early a date, the first meetinghouse, the block house, Limberlost Chapel. Soon after the organization of the church, he attended, as elder, a meeting of the Presbytery, at New Carlisle, Ohio. It was the era of the great Washingtonian Temperance Reform. One night there was a grand meeting. Several eminent speakers were present, among them the famous D. Hall, of overwhelming brass bugle eloquence. Mr. Montgomery having learned that very much Christian professors of that region were opposed to the Reform, delivered such a scathing Philippi as entitled him to the lionship of the evening. He employed the bitter language of John the Baptist and of Christ respecting the Jews suffering vile characters to enter the Kingdom of God before them, neither entering themselves nor suffering those that would to enter. He explained, expanded and applied the terms hypocrites, generation of vipers, etc., with resistless force. Dr. Hall was so pleased that he invited him home with him to Dayton, and sent him back to Jay with forty dollars for the completion of the little chapel.

"His stay in the county was only for a few years. Indeed his stay on earth was not long, for, having removed to the vicinity of Fort Wayne, he had scarcely fixed his family comfortably on a new farm, when he was called to another sphere."

In 1841 Ira Towel gave the land for a church site and cemetery. Logs were hewed on four sides and a house erected that year - the first church building in the county.

The first temperance meeting in that part of the county was held in it, and, at one of these, Judge J. M. Haynes made the first public speech. The people, who so long worshiped within its walls, abandoned it in 1862, occupying their new house at Westchester.

Though forsaken the rustic church is not forgotten.

The memory of its dear old walls is linked with the cherished remembrance of the many loved ones who sleep near it. As the first altar consecrated to God in the new county, its appearance is rescued from oblivion for the eyes of future generations. The church organization is now Congregational.

Mr. Taylor accompanied Dr. Bosworth to Portland, where the doctor announced him, on account of his youth, as a "Presbyterian boy preacher." A large audience assembled at Portland, in the old Courthouse, "a log building, long, low and dismal," and there he preached his first sermon in that part of the county, taking for his text that first divine call after apostate man - "Adam, where art thou?" Several sermons followed, engaging the unwonted attention of the people for several days and nights.

The statements and reasoning of Dr. Bosworth's "boy preacher" was the same he had insisted on among his neighbors since they had pitched their tents together in the wilderness. But he had longed to have these truths fastened on men's minds and consciences in a professional way, and his delight on this occasion was great.

For about two years after his first entrance, Mr. Taylor made frequent visits in jay, and, gradually, a desire sprang up within him to labor for the mental and moral welfare of the county. This was more natural, because, by reason of certain predispositions, he had cherished from boyhood the desire to help lay the foundations of society in a new country. During these visits his acquaintance was enlarged at New Corydon, Camden and in the Hawkins neighborhood, and his desire grew into a fixed intention to spend the vigor and strength of his life in this destitute and difficult, but promising field for intellectual and religious labor.

He moved into the county in February 1843, and first occupied a cabin belonging to William H. Montgomery, two miles east of Westchester. In addition to preaching to the flock he had gathered there, he preached in the Hawkins cabin for Father Philip Ensminger, then, as he still is, (though now in his ninetieth year), the meek and venerable white-haired patriarch of that neighborhood. Mr. Taylor's veneration for "first things" and interest in pioneer experience was greatly gratified at Mrs. Hawkins'. The vigorous blood and daring nerve of "Old Kentuck" animated her frame as she would recount the thrilling scenes of their first year among the savage beasts and savage men that then walked curiously and stealthily around her rude earnest of a coming civilization.

Then, on the Wabash, Mr. Taylor would preach for the neighbors in the cabin of Robert Webster, where some of the most solemn and affecting scenes of his ministry were enacted. Here he was aided by the self-denying Missionary Pogue, who, then a student at Lane Seminary, Ohio, spent a three months' vacation in Jay County, and afterward went to the Sandwich Islands, without a wife, because Miss Elizabeth Webster, the intelligent and Christian housekeeper in that cabin, had gone to her grave and her home in heaven.

In 1845 Mr. Taylor, desiring to attend theological lectures at Lane Seminary, moved to Cincinnati. That movement he always regretted; returned in two years and settled in Portland very early in the spring of 1847. For two years he was Agent of the American Sunday School Union, and he accomplished a great work in organizing schools and awakening in the minds of the people an interest in that most useful and effective branch of Christian labor. While living in Portland he engaged in an unprofitable mercantile enterprise with Calvin D. Searl. Late in 1850 he became Principal of the Jay County Seminary, which position he held for two years. During these years, looking forward to the founding of a school, he selected the knoll on the Salimonie by the spring as a suitable spot, and purchased the land of John Smith. The remainder of Mr. Taylor's life in Jay is inseparably connected with Liber College, and will appear in the following chapter.