Information
Sheet
R St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church
(Cole Camp, Mo.).
122 Records,
1882-1939.
Seven volumes and one folder.
MICROFILM
These are minutes of congregational
meetings, church registers, and records of the Ladies Aid Society of St. Paul’s
Evangelical Lutheran Church in Cole Camp, Benton County, Missouri. Nearly all of the texts are in German.
The earliest records in the collection
are the minutes of congregational meetings, beginning on 2 July 1882. Appropriately, the first minutes concern
planning for the construction of a church building. There are no minutes for 1883, and a note inserted into the first
minutes for 1884 explains that the secretary was too involved with
construction to keep records. Except
for this gap, the minutes of meetings are complete from 1882 through 1933. They detail regular church business,
finances, and the establishment of a school.
The minutes also record the controversy
over language that split the congregation in 1925. The minutes in Volume One end with a bilingual record of a
meeting in which the members voted to divide: English-speaking and
German-speaking. The same pastor would
serve both groups, but otherwise they would remain separate. The sixty-member congregation voted three to
one in favor of the proposition. The
pastor requested his dismissal at the same meeting, saying that the squabbling
over language had constantly irritated him.
The pastor was issued his dismissal, and the congregation agreed to
“bury the hatchet,” but there is no indication whether the parishioners remained
divided after 1925.
The remainder of the collection includes
registers of church members, and the records of the Ladies Aid Society. The society was a charitable organization
that looked after needy members of the parish, and also raised funds for
mission work in New Guinea and for the American Red Cross during World War
One.
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