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The Granville Historical Society Oral History Project 2001 - 2002
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26) Churches
Baptist Missionaries and the Fannie Doane Home(George Williamson) In the early part of the twentieth century, the American Baptist Churches of the USA had several homes for missionary children and the Fannie Doane Home was one of them. These homes operated like an orphanage would operate, but they were for children of missionaries who went to places where children weren’t safe or where they couldn’t get a decent education or decent health care, basically the third world. So in many ways it was a dark time and a tragic history and something that many of us basically don’t approve of -- just the idea that any parents would leave their children for any reason at all, and certainly the notion that the church would support such a thing. But that was the times and that’s what they did. And they created an institution here that turns out to have been really first rate – the Fannie Doane Home for Missionary Children (1909-1949). A Ph. D. dissertation that was done by an alumna of the home concluded that this was a successful institution under what you would think of in the worst possible circumstances. So her study was how in the world did they pull it off? And there were a lot of factors involved in that. One was the leadership of the home. One was the kind of families these kids came from, even though they were willing to abandon their children, they were genuinely good people, they did love their children and they did have significant interactions with them in some ways. And the children admired their parents by and large.
The Influence of the Baptist Missionary Children(George Williamson) The parents would have furloughs every seven years and they would move to Granville and live here with their kids. So every seven years somebody would come here from Burma or Zaire or some place, God knows where, and live in Granville for a year. And the rest of the time their kids would be here, telling stories that they would get in the mail every week from Mom and Dad from this exotic place. So this went on for forty years. That meant that the children of the families of Granville grew up with them, went to school with them. And practically all of these missionary kids, went to Denison, so many went to college with them as well. And literally all of them went to this church. And their families went to this church too when they were here on furlough. There is a group of plaques that we just put up in our sanctuary of all those international missionaries who have been a members of this church over its nearly two hundred years of history. That is absolutely incredible!
Remembering Some Baptist Missionary Kids(Fred Palmer) The Fannie Doane home used to be on West Broadway where the Sugarloaf Condominiums are today. Baptist missionaries would leave their children there for years to go to school. My aunt worked there as a cook. The only meal she didn’t fix was Sunday night so she got off every Sunday afternoon. (As a kid I thought, boy, she really had a good job because my dad had to milk the cows every night.) Every Sunday my dad would pick my aunt up and take her to Newark where my grandmother lived. She would spend the night with my grandmother and get the 4:30 bus back in the morning from Newark to Granville and cook breakfast for the 30 or 40 people that lived at the Fannie Doane Home. I knew several kids who lived there. Wesley Seagrave was a year ahead of me in school and his dad was a Baptist missionary and surgeon in Burma. There were a lot of stories that circulated about him during World War II for the heroic things he’d done. There was an interesting story about another Fanny Doane boy in my class who left school after his junior year when he was taken into the Marine Corps. His folks were in Tokyo when World War II broke out, and he was stationed on one of the islands in the Pacific. There he ran in to a cabin boy in the Japanese army that had worked for his parents. While he was talking to him, another soldier ran by and bayoneted this Japanese boy and killed him.
Founding of St. Edward’s Catholic Church(Maxine Montgomery) I was one of the charter members of St. Edward’s Catholic Church. In the beginning we met in just a house in town – I think it was 1947 when we started. And as a kid, probably the most delightful thing about having a church in town -- even though it didn’t look like a church, because it was a house – was the fact that if our dad wasn’t available, we didn’t have to ride the bus to Newark to St. Francis to go to Mass. We all had our first communions there in Newark though. But you knew that you were one of very few Catholic families in town. It was “Oh, you go to the Catholic Church?” kind of thing. We would have these big picnics and outings. And my mother and the other church women just worked their tails off in the kitchen and baked for several days before the events happened. Now I was a young child but I believe they would serve beer and alcoholic beverages there, which was probably kind of suspicious for some people. But they worked really, really hard to raise money for the church so we could build where we are now on Newark-Granville Road – of course with the help of the Bishop and the Diocese as well. The church was built in 1954. And after meeting in half a house, the new building just seemed so huge! But it made you feel really proud that we had your own church and that we were growing. Raymond and I were married there in 1960.
First Baptist Church and Habitat for Humanity(George Williamson) The Habitat for Humanity program became a big part of our church family life from the mid 1980s on. Four men in our church went down to Americus, Georgia, to learn about the program and came back all excited. They told our church about it and that we should build a house . . . and most people were thinking that well, that’s fine, but we can’t even pay for our building here, how we going build a house? But the men just started the project and before you knew it, everybody was involved, whether they’d planned to be involved or approved of it or not. It was sooo exciting, and Habitat is, by definition, ecumenical. Part of its purpose is to get different denominations to work together side by side, with a partner family who is living in substandard housing and they are the ones who’re going to own the house. But they have to build it too, so they understand the house. They become proud of it. They know how it works. They learn building skills so that they can maintain it. And then they become very good homeowners. They buy the house from Habitat at no interest and, of course, the cost is low because all the labor is free, plus some of the materials were either free or given at much-reduced prices. That’s all part of the program.
Now most of the people who work on the house don’t know anything about construction so you’re learning as you go. But it’s just a wonderful thing. Our first project was two houses in Newark and we were the main church but we got other churches involved too. It took about a year and it was hard work and it was sometimes discouraging, but, Licking County Habitat was on its way. The organization had its offices here in the church. And over the years we participated in the building of about twelve or thirteen other projects with more and more other churches getting involved. So percentage-wise our involvement was less and less. Then three years ago our church decided that it was time for us to build one by ourselves, so we did. And it turned out to be right next door to another Habitat house – two Habitat houses going up side by side. One of them was being built by forty churches and one of them was being built by one church. |
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