Information Sheet

 

 

R         Wobus, Paul A., 1893-1982.

8                      Papers, 1918-1989.

                                    52 folders and 89 notebooks.

 

 

 

The Rev. Paul A. Wobus was born in St. Charles, Missouri, on 14 February 1893.  His fa­ther, Reinhard Wobus, was pastor of the Evangelical Church there.  Paul Wobus died on 11 De­cember 1982 in Concordia, Missouri.

 

Paul Wobus attended Eden Seminary in St. Louis and became a pastor in the Evan­gelical Synod of North America (became Evangelical and Reformed Church in 1934, and the United Church of Christ in 1957).  In 1922 Wobus was named pastor of St. John Evangelical Church in Manchester, Missouri, an appointment he held until 1969.  In 1918 he married Olga Kruse, and they had four children: Wilbert (who died in 1984), Dorothy (who died at birth), Paul Jr. (who also became a clergyman), and Ethel (who married Richard Bloesch and lives in Iowa City, Iowa).

 

In 1921 Wobus, who earned a degree in Rural Sociology at the University of Mis­souri-Columbia, wrote an article about the state of religion in the Ozarks, whereupon the Evangelical Synod began to underwrite his rural missionary work in the region.  A proponent of nondenomi­na­tional “community churches,” Wobus made several hundred trips from his home base in Man­chester into the Missouri Ozarks during a period of over thirty years.  He became particularly ac­tive in Reynolds, Dent, and Shannon counties.   His most notable undertaking was the founding in 1929 of the Shannondale Community Church-Center in northern Shannon County.  He also served as missionary to the Mount Zion Community Church at Akers in Dent County for twenty-four years.

 

This collection of papers includes Wobus’s uncompleted and unpublished memoirs, photo­graphs (largely of rural schools, taken in the 1940s), correspondence (1918-1929), mate­rials con­cerning Mount Zion Community Church and the Ozark Community Council, histori­cal notes con­cerning Wobus’s avocational interest in the mills and railroads (especially the Kansas City, Clinton & Spring­field Railway) in the region, miscellaneous clippings and other printed mate­rial, narrative accounts of many of his trips into the Ozarks (1926-1973), and 89 of the small notebooks in which he kept records of his mileage, routes, schedules, expenses, and places and persons visited (1938-1972).

 

The correspondence files provide information about the plan and purpose of Wobus’s mis­sion­ary work, while the narratives give detailed accounts of his activities and experiences.  Re­search­ers should consult the Shelf List for descriptions of individual folders.  Most of the materi­als are from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

 

 

                                                              
Shelf List for this collection
Index cards for this collection
Photograph List for this colleciton
List of Trip Notes for this collection
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