Walkerton Communities: The German Thread and the Brethren Thread

The two threads: German names, Brethren faith

COM-2 DUG · CHAPMAN (1880), READ WHOLE

Lincoln Township's ethnic and sectarian weave stands in Chapman's sketchbook in the plainest possible form: the German thread is a roll of names, and the Brethren thread is a church the names belonged to. The German thread first. The settlement generation's surnames, as the sketches give them: Cripe — Rinehart Cripe, who bought some thousand acres of the township in 1836, and his sons John, Tobias, and William; Rupel — Jacob, from Preble County, Ohio, of the Pennsylvania-German migration stream, and his son A. B. Rupel, the harness-maker; Fulmer — Christian, the township's first settler of 1835; Tischer, partner in Schwartz & Tischer's planing mill, and John Schwartz himself; Prell and Wolf at the township's edge (Leonard Wolf, dead about 1870, whose widow and children — T. J. Wolf the clothier, Maggie B. Wolf the milliner — are Walkerton tradespeople of 1880). These families named no place (the stories-told addendum runs that test to its negative), built the planing mill and the harness shop, and formed — with the county's older German settlements — the township's German-American community: present in the record as families and trades, not as an institution with a hall or a Verein in any source reached. The Brethren thread is the same people at prayer. The German Baptist Brethren — the denomination that became the Church of the Brethren in 1908 — run through the sketches as a lived affiliation: a Mrs. Cripe of the township was "a member of the German Baptist Church for 18 years" at her death on July 23, 1880, in Chapman's plain record; and the thread's head is the Urey family — the Rev. Samuel Clayton Urey, farmer and lay minister of the Brethren in Walkerton, whose profile stands whole in the people addendum — a Brethren elder's household producing, in the next generation, the town's world name. The two threads are one thread at the root: the Brethren were a German Baptist people, and in Lincoln Township the denomination and the diaspora arrived in the same wagons. What the record does not show is a Brethren meetinghouse in the town's church census — Chapman counts three churches in 1880 (Methodist, Baptist, Catholic) and Howard five organizations in 1907, the Brethren in neither list — so the thread prints as a community with named members and a named minister and no building of its own in the counts reached: a congregation, perhaps, meeting in houses and schoolhouses as Brethren of that era did, or a membership worshipping at a township-edge meetinghouse outside both censuses' frames. The residue stands with its settlers: the 1875 atlas's Lincoln directory and the Brethren's own district records would fix the meetinghouse question, and they are named here for the next runner.

Principal sources: Chapman (1880), Lincoln Township chapter and biographical sketches, pp. 733–750 (the names, the Cripe membership line, the church censuses); Howard (1907), pp. 317–318 (the 1907 census); the Urey record carried in the people addendum of this wave.