In 1821, Bishop
William McKendree (Methodism’s Senior Bishop at the time) appointed 30 year old
Rev. William Capers of South Carolina Georgia Alabama Fort Mitchell , Alabama Georgia Georgia New Orleans South Carolina Federal Road
After
successful negotiations with the chiefs of the Creek Nation, in 1822 Rev.
Capers opened the Asbury Manual Labor School and Mission one mile north of Fort
Mitchell near the Indian village of Coweta (one mile west of the Chattahoochee
River and nine miles south of Columbus, Georgia) to teach Creek children
reading, writing, and other “civilized” skills.
When it opened there were twelve pupils under the direction of Rev.
Isaac Smith.
Soon
there were three teachers, several buildings, and a farm of about 25 acres. Rev.
Capers served the school and mission until 1824, to be followed by a succession
of missionaries. It is believed the school was the first formal educational
effort of any kind in the Chattahoochee
River Valley
Today,
the location of this school is recognized as a United Methodist Heritage
Landmark. An historical marker has been
erected near the site and is listed as a destination point in A
Traveler’s Guide to the Heritage Landmarks of the United Methodist Church (at www.gcah.org/research/travelers-guide)
It
is to this school and this first missionary to the Creeks that we can give
credit for the seeds of Christianity in general and Methodism in particular being
placed in the heart of one of its young pupils, i.e., Samuel Checote, who was
sent by his parents in 1828, at the age of nine, to board at the school.
Two
years later, on February 3,
1830 , the South Carolina Conference formally discontinued the Asbury Manual
Labor School Mission February 12, 1825 , (and only three years after the school
was established) the National Council of the Great Creek Nation had signed a
Removal Treaty by which it relinquished all Alabama Georgia Indian Territory .
Adding to this atrocity were
the deplorable conditions of the Indians. Contact with white intruders exacerbated the
pervasive use of alcohol among Indians and their destitute condition led to the
theft of the cattle, poultry, and corn that belonged to the School and Mission Alabama Georgia Chattahoochee
River Alabama
So in 1829 before the Asbury school and mission
in Alabama faded into obsolescence and closed, ten year old Checote and his
parents moved from their home near Ft. Mitchell to Indian Territory and settled
just west of Okmulgee, IT.
In 1847, three years after the General
Conference meeting in New York City that created the Indian Mission Conference
(IMC ), the third Annual Conference
of the IMC met in November 1847,
in Doaksville, IT, and made plans for re-establishing Asbury Manual Labor
School and Mission in the Creek Nation, IT.
Rev. William Capers, now a Bishop, and the one who had organized the
school with the same name in Alabama which Checote had attended, appointed the
Rev. Thomas B. Ruble, missionary among the Pottawattomies, to select a site and
supervise the construction of the new school buildings. Ruble secured the help of Colonel Logan, the
U.S. Indian Agent for the Creek Nation, and Colonel Rutherford, superintendent
of the Western Territory.
A site was chosen the following year for the school on an 80-acre
farm at North Fork Town, on the Texas Road where the Creek Trail of Tears ended
and 10 Miles northeast of what is now Eufaula, Oklahoma. About 30 acres was fenced. Included on the property was a stable,
chicken house, a few fruit trees and a 20 square foot house with porch and
kitchen,. From the $1,000 alloted by the
Board of Mission, Ruble purchased the site and improvements from a widow for
$300 (about $10,000.00 in today’s money).
The cornerstone was laid July 19,
1848, for what is believed to be the largest mission school built in Indian
Territory. The first classes, however,
were held in the log house starting in August, with the Reverend W. S. Cobb as
teacher. The classes continued in the
log house until the new buildings were ready to use in 1850. A stone and brick building 110 feet long, 34
feet wide and three stories high was built with materials shipped by boat from
Louisville, via the Arkansas River, then overland to the site by ox-drawn
wagons. The design of this building proved
to be a model for a few mission schools built in later years. The bottom floor housed the staff and
missionaries, the second floor was reserved for classrooms, and the top floor
was divided into girls’ and boys’ dormitories.
The U.S. Government paid $5,000 ($150,000.00)
to build the school from the funds promised to the Creeks under a treaty in
1845 whereby they were to be compensated for their native lands. The balance of the total cost of $9,169 ($284,000.00)
was paid by the Board of Missions of the
Methodist Episcopal Church, South. The
building contained 21 rooms, large halls, and would accommodate 100 students
along with the faculty. In 1848, before the school was even complete, the
annual report to the IMC records
that there were 30 Creek boarding students, one local preacher, 24 white
teachers and staff and a small balance of $6.75 on hand.
The school continued to be financially
sustained from the Creek’s annuity, making it an official “Indian Mission
School”. The Creeks supplied textbooks
and financial support for the students.
Early schooling experiences
were checkered with frustrations of erratic attendance, unsupportive parents,
and inexperienced teachers. Sometimes it
was a struggle to keep students and missionaries on task. In 1851 the Superintendent informed the
commissioner of Indian affairs, that half the students had the measles and the
Baptists had opened a school in the area, both of which were robbing the Asbury
School of its pupils. Then on top of
that a great wind storm caused a great deal of damage to the large school
building alarming students, their parents, and the staff. The missionary then chose to abandon his post
and take his family to safety.
Yearly reports to the IMC
Annual Conference as well as the U.S. Government reflect the details of
managing the endeavor up to the outbreak of the Civil War. Rev. Thomas Bertholf, Superintendent at the beginning of the war, took his
wife and went south to the mouth of Washita River (near present day Kingston)
until the hostilities ended, but still remained Superintendent of the Asbury
school.
The Civil War and
Reconstruction was devastating to the Indian tribes in IT. Inter-tribal rivalries continued to fester. Marauding soldiers from both sides of the
conflict overran Indian lands. Cattle
were driven off, buildings were burned, many Indian settlements were destroyed,
the people scattered, and mission work disrupted. The Indian Mission Conference (IMC ) struggled to take up its work again. At the
Asbury School, the smaller buildings had been burned and the large building was
severely damaged and in disrepair. Rev.
Bertholf returned in 1866 from his place of refuge and was given the task of
rebuilding and reopened the Mission and School.
Samuel Checote, now a Methodist minister in the IMC ,
helped Bertholf secure an appropriation of $6,000 (almost $100,000 in 2015
dollars) from the U.S. government for the task.
However, Reb. Bertholf did not live long enough to accomplish his
assignment. He died June 18, 1867, and was buried on the school grounds.
Rev. John Harrell,
Checote’s mentor, was then appointed superintendent of the Mission to serve for
the remainder of the Conference year. Next,
Rev. Thomas B. Ruble, who was assigned in1848 to complete the project. But the restoration work had barely begun,
when the very next year the main building of the school was destroyed by
fire. Rev. Harrell then returned to the
school as Superintendent, to complete the Conference year, and using his
considerable influence with the Creeks and government officials, had new
buildings built once again and the school reopened in 1870.
The Indian Mission Annual
Conference was held at the school in 1874.
Rev. Harrell, appointed again as Superintendent in 1876, like Rev.
Bertholf, died while serving the mission.
While preaching in Vinita, he collapsed in the pulpit, Dec. 8, 1876. Five years later, in 1881, the School burned again
and burned again for the final time in 1887, never to reopen (reportedly boys
burned down the school in both instances). Some students were sent home, and the
missionaries and remaining students went to live in the nearby home of Judge
Stidham until the end of the term. That
was the end of the Asbury Manual Labor School and Mission in old North Fork
Town, IT (now an Oklahoma ghost town). Neither
the church nor the Creeks could agree to having it rebuilt since jointly
financing Mission Schools by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the
Indian tribes was drawing to a close.
This account certainly
reflects the concerted effort on the part of the government, church, and Creeks
to keep this school in operation for as long as possible. Not only was it vital
to the work of Methodism among the Creeks but it also played a significant role
in the education of many, many Creek children who went on to be leaders,
educators, and outstanding citizens in their tribe. One such individual was Creek Chief, Peter R.
Ewing, an outstanding Baptist minister, educator, and Bacone College alumus who
ran away from home when he was 10 years old so he could attend the Asbury
School.
It is told that Peter
Ewing, born Peter Chuffee, whose last name translated from Creek into
English is “Rabbit”, was teased
mercilessly by the children at the school by calling him “Peter Rabbit”. He was discouraged to the point of quitting
school, when Rev. Young Ewing, the last Superintendent to preside over the
school, took special notice of Peter and the teasing he was enduring. He took Peter under his wing and told him he
could be his boy and he’d give him his last name. So ever after that Peter Chuffee/Rabbit was
Peter R. Ewing.
After the school burned
for the final time, the Creeks were without a school for a few years. So in 1892, the Creeks built their own school
to fill the void left by the abandoned Asbury School. This school eventually became Eufaula’s High
School. Today Creeks operate their own
boarding school called Eufaula Dormitory, located on the outskirts of Eufaula, which
they view as the Asbury School’s logical successor.
Asbury School and Mission
holds a special significance as well for Muskogee Methodism. The very existence of the school and its high
regard in Indian Territory is the reason Rev. Theodore Frelinghuysen Brewer was
sent in August 1878 by the Arkansas Conference to be a teacher and eventually
principal of the school. In the scant notes of his life left in his own
handwriting, he says that he was appointed principally to do educational work. However, in October of that year, at the third Annual
Conference of the Indian Mission Conference, held in Muscogee, IT, he also
became the founding pastor of the “Rock
Church village of Muscogee
But the Asbury school also
has a relationship to the town of Eufaula and the First United Methodist Church
of Eufaula, that deserves notice (Rev. Brewer established the Eufaula church in
1879, the year following the beginning of the “Rock Church” in Muscogee.)
When the present day Lake
Eufaula was being built, the Eufaula church decided to take charge of the
reinterment of several of the school’s workers who were buried in its burial
ground located about ½ mile west of the School site near the old Jefferson
Highway. Two Superintendents of the School, Rev. Thomas Bertholf, and Rev. John
Harrell, were buried on those school grounds (as were their wives, some of
their children, and others who died while working there).
Beginning in 1961, First
Methodist Church in Eufaula worked with the Corps of Engineers and Eufaula’s
City Council to relocate the graves of the missionaries to an addition to Eufaula’s
Greenwood Cemetery before the old school site and cemetery disappeared under
the waters of the new lake. A block of cemetery lots was purchased by a group
of Eufaula citizens and donated to a committee from the church working on the
relocation. Had the church not
prevailed, the Corps would have relocated their graves along with hundreds more
from other cemeteries effected by the proposed impoundment area of the lake, to
a location the Corps carved out on the western shore of the lake adjacent to an
old burial ground near the ghost town of Fishertown. Approximately 20 or so graves of infants,
children, and young women from the Asbury Cemetery however were moved to the Fishertown location by the Corps.
Thus only eleven
individuals from the Asbury Cemetery were reinterred in the new addition to
Eufaula’s Greenwood Cemetery. The
location of these graves was then marked by a memorial stone structure from the
original hand-hewn stones of the school the Eufaula Methodists were able to
save before the clearing of the land for the lake (the Eufaula newspaper
reported in 1941 that the commissary building was still standing). It took about three years and countless hours
of volunteer labor; the cooperation of the Corps of Engineers, citizens of
Eufaula, its City Council, the official board of the church; and thousands of
dollars in donations to complete the project.
It is said that the memorial cost more than twice the $10,000 original
cost of the School in 1848. The stone
monument was designed by the church’s pastor, Rev. Cecil L. Bolding, and marked
with aluminum lettering and a bronze tablet furnished by the Oklahoma Methodist
Historical Society. It was dedicated May 30, 1964, only months after the dam
was ready for the lake to fill to its capacity.
At the Oklahoma Annual Conference in June that same year, the Asbury
Memorial was designated a Methodist shrine.
As far as it is known this is the first place of Methodist historical
importance so designated (its predecessor of the same name in Ft. Mitchell,
Alabama, was not designated as a shrine until after 1984).
The following graves and
headstones/monuments were moved to Greenwood Cemetery:
Born:
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Died:
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Bertholf, Marcus
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Bertholf, Thomas, Rev.*
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Harrell, Elisa
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Harrell, John
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Lindsey, Edward Allen
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----
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Pifer, Caroline
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Pifer, Eufaula
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Ruble, James M
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11 May 1859
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Scott, Altha
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24 May 1878
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Waggoner, Payfont L
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16 May 1856
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Wilkey, M. J.
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*Rev. Bertholf’s wife’s burial place is
uncertain. She may have been in an
unmarked grave and lies instead under Lake Eufaula. Her cenotaph is on her nephew’s
monument (Charlie H. Bertholf), in the Combs, McCurtain County
Countless
articles in the Indian Journal
(Eufaula’s newspaper) reference the old school, even going so far as to credit
the Methodists and their Mission
School
* * * * * * *
North Fork Town: http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v029/v029p079.pdf
Information on Fishertown: http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v031/v031p247.pdf |
| Linda Morgan Clark |
