The Not-So-Gay 90's - Interlude Three: All in a Day's Work (part 1)

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 25

As everybody knows, Great Whatever Grandpappy (the affectionate term I use for any male ancestor when talking to my nieces about the family history; I know, it's silly - especially because as far as I know, not a single branch of our family has ever used the term "Pappy" - but it saves me having to count out all of the "greats") Erasmus Miller Owen was a Baptist preacher during the 1890's.

But what, exactly, did that entail?  Was it pretty much the same as being a Baptist preacher today?

Well, we know that he was preaching, and if the same churches existed during that time as did twenty or so years later, probably every Sunday and probably in a different place: Wolf Valley, May proper, possibly also at the churches in Amity, Hopewell, and Pleasant Valley.  Those Baptist churches were all within ten miles of his home, and were served by preachers from May during the early 1900's:

Remember this?  In 1918, two preachers from May served all seven churches in the area.  But what area was this exactly?

How about we take a look at some maps?

This one shows the whole of Brown County, with a blue box showing the area in which those churches (except for Shiloh - it was well into Comanche County to the east) were located:

1911 Rand McNally Map of Texas
(Detail - Brown County)

Wow.  That seems like a pretty big area to cover, doesn't it?  Especially in the horse and dirt road days.

Now, this map shows the approximate location of each of the churches mentioned above:

Brown County, Texas
1961 Highway Map
Detail - Historical May Area Churches

I know, the map is huge (but the words are still so small!).  I had to include this entire portion, though, to show all of the churches in the May area and also to include the town of Owens at the bottom so that you could refer to the full map of Brown County and understand that this is just the northeast portion.  

Do you remember how I wrote a post several months ago in which I shared my discovery that during the 1890's Erasmus was living in the community of Wolf Valley north of the town of May?  Do you remember how much trouble I had to go through to figure out where that was?  Do you see how this map from 1961 has Wolf Valley written on it?  It's too bad I was looking at the 1940 highway map back then instead of this one, huh?  Of course, if I had looked at this one first, I never would have found the newspaper article confirming that Erasmus was the "parson" in Wolf Valley.  Also, I never would have found the very helpful article with the map showing all of the locations of the historical schools in the May consolidated district . . . . 

Do you remember how in my March 20th post I said, and I quote:

I could try looking up those other churches, but really, I don't think I have the time!

It turns out that it only took about two hours.  But boy did those two hours take a lot of perseverance!  I had to look up historical churches (pretty much a total bust) and maps, and newspaper articles and cemetery listings to finally figure it all out.  The real problems were the Hog Valley and Hopewell churches.  I couldn't find any references to either church.  A 1914 article in the Brownwood Bulletin said that the Hopewell, Lost Creek, and Hog Valley schools were being consolidated, which let me know that the Hopewell and Hog Valley churches were probably relatively close to one another.  Then, I found a cemetery page put up by the Pecan Valley Genealogical Association that showed that Hog Valley cemetery later came to be known as Blake cemetery.  They had a link for a map, and it showed that the cemetery was near the town of Williams.  Then, I remembered that, back in the day, many of the early churches met in the first schoolhouses of a town.  So I looked back at the 1977 newspaper article about the historical schools of the May School District.  That article said that the locations on their map were approximate, and pretty much everything I marked on my map up above matches except that the Hopewell school was estimated to have been a bit to the northeast.  That was just an estimate, though, so maybe the 1961 map was more accurate.

But guess what?  While looking back at my earlier posts just now, I noticed something really weird on the 1940 Brown County Highway Map:

Brown County, Texas
1940 Highway Map (detail)

Why does this show Blake north of Wolf Valley?  You can see that there is a church a little bit west of the word "Blake," but there are also churches shown way over on the left-hand side of the map where everything else says that the Blake school and cemetery were.  Super strange.  (I did a quick Google search for the Blake community in Brown County and only found sites saying that it was near the historical town of Williams, which is over on the left-hand side of this map detail.)

Anyway, if you look back up at the color-coded map, you will see red circles showing the locations of the churches, with their names in blue boxes.  There are two green stars on the map - those are the locations where Erasmus and his family lived.  The one near the top of the map is where he lived during the 1890's.

Now, after I made this nifty map - and edited it three times! - I was doing a search on the Portal to Texas History website for churches in the Pecan Valley Baptist Association (which I already knew was the name of the association in Brown County during the time Erasmus was living there), and I came across a result that I should have found ages and ages ago but didn't.  And do you know why?  Because I was just looking for primary sources.  You know, sources created at the time Erasmus was living or later but by people who had been living in the area at the same time as Erasmus.  This source was an unpublished dissertation from 1940:

I guess I gave up before I got that far through the search results. (Doh!)  Anyway, the dissertation is in book form, even though it was never officially published, I guess because it was a part of the private library of the president of Howard Payne College.  It was uploaded to the website in October of 2021, which turns out to be five years after I started writing this blog, which means it is a good thing I didn't start by researching the Owens and just goes to show that, in this day and age, you have to do your keyword searches again periodically because you never know what gems may have been added since the first time you looked.

I say gems, because that is what this "book" turned out to be!

I didn't think we could ever be sure exactly which churches Erasmus actually pastored (which is why I just put all of the potential locations on my map), but the dissertation offers us some valuable insight.

It turns out that Mr. Todd had access to the original association meeting minutes, and he used them to write his history.  E. M. Owen is mentioned no less than fifteen times, and those pages give a very different picture of what was actually going on over there in northeastern Brown County. 

Let's take a look, shall we?

The first reference to Erasmus is found on page 39:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
by William A. Todd
page 39

If you recall, Erasmus had been ordained as a Baptist minister in February of 1882.  He purchased land in Brown County, near the present townsite of May, in February of 1883.  This paragraph reports that, by August of 1883, Erasmus had founded the church in May and was its pastor.  That means that he had organized the May church sometime after the previous annual meeting of the association in August of 1882.

He appears next on page 42.  However, this page number did not turn up in the search results when I did a keyword search for "Owen."  It only shows up when you search for "Owens."  There's a lesson here: if your ancestor has a name that is often spelled in more than one way, make sure you search for both.  

Okay.  Page 42 is interesting:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
by William A. Todd
 page 42

This page is referring to the year 1884, and Erasmus was no longer pastor of the church at May.  Well that was a surprise!  (The new pastor, John May - not the man for whom the town was named - had been a frontier pastor in Brown County since about 1875, and had founded the Hog Creek church about six miles west of May - the cemetery is on the color-coded map above but I didn't mark a church there.)  Instead, Erasmus is said to have lived and/or served in a place called Clio.  Let's talk about that for a bit.

On my color-coded map, Clio is shown as Owens.  (There is an Owens labeled at the bottom of my map detail, due south of May, but also one a few miles to the northwest, but I think that one is just marking a triangulation station - not sure what that is, but it was on the map key. I didn't color-code a church in either location on my map.)  

I've read that the name of Clio was changed to Owens in 1910 when the railroad came through and a man named E. Owens (no relation as far as I can tell) donated land for a townsite, which means that there wasn't really a "town" before that - just a postal district stretching who knows how far - I guess northward until it bumped into the May district?  (The Clio post office was established in 1877, and the May post office in 1881.)  Take a look at some of these old post office maps:

On my 1961 map showing the locations of churches, the town of Owens is basically due south of May.  The 1940 map - if we were to look at the whole thing - showed the same.  The 1920's map, however, showed it a bit further west and the 1911 map showed it a bit further east.  Maybe this is because the route of the main road changed over time, or because some of these maps are postal maps and some are actually transportation maps.  Maybe the postal maps mark the location of the town center/post office while the transportation maps mark the train depot?  Well, now that I think of it, the trains usually ran right through the center of these early towns that sprang up along with the railroad.  Maybe the guys making the maps just didn't care if they were a bit off!

The earlier maps show Clio; the 1907 map shows it practically due south of May, which is what the 1904 map shows as well.  Hmmm.  Perhaps the Clio post office was located further east than the town of Owens that replaced it.  That's the theory I'm going to go with, because look at the last map - a postal map from 1889, which is right smack in the middle of the time period during which Erasmus lived in Brown County.  Clio is definitely to the southeast of May in that one.  According to Google, today the unincorporated community of Owens is nine miles south of the town of May.

(Page 129 of the dissertation says that a church in Clio, constituted in 1903, was "located eleven miles north or northeast of Brownwood", which pretty much sums up what the various maps are showing us!)

Well, we got a little off track here.  This discussion was perfectly relevant to my upcoming posts covering the 1880's, but not so much for the 1890's that we are doing right now.  So let's move on and we'll revisit Clio again later.

The dissertation did not say what, exactly, Erasmus was doing in Clio, but I think it is a pretty safe bet that it involved the work of God.  In 1884, there were approximately 17 churches in Brown County (some are now in other counties due to the creation of new counties and changes in county lines), five of which were pastor-less.  Perhaps Erasmus would periodically preach at some of those, since he apparently did not have a church of his own at that time.  Or, perhaps he was busy winning converts and organizing another church in the Clio area. 

Page 47 has the next reference to E. M. Owen:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
by William A. Todd
page 47

So, within three years or so, Erasmus had founded the Wolf Valley Baptist Church, which was actually named New Hope (no. 2), and he was serving as its pastor.  That means that our guess (from weeks and weeks ago) was correct that his move to Wolf Valley in 1888 was likely due to wanting to live closer to his new church.  I think we can be pretty confident of this, because this page tells us that the year of 1887 was a year of great drought (a few pages back, 1886 is also recorded as a year of extreme drought), so you would think that Erasmus would want land with a reliable source of water.  As we will see when we backtrack to look at the 1880's, the land he lived on before actually had a much better water source than the new land that he moved to.

Unfortunately, Wolf Valley was nowhere near Clio, so we don't know what happened with that.  If you recall, waaaaaay back in my post from last November I put up a chart showing that the American Baptist Yearbooks actually listed Erasmus as an ordained minister in Clio from 1883 to 1886, even though the association minutes tell us that he was the pastor in May during 1884.  I think the association minutes are probably the more reliable source, so perhaps this is another case of talking about living in certain postal codes instead of towns.

On page 55, we see this bit of information about Erasmus:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
page 55

This took place in 1889, and we have already covered this in a previous post.  The Pecan Valley Baptist Association founded Howard Payne College, so their meeting minutes are a great way to learn exactly how it all went down.  The previous pages of this dissertation make it clear that the first board of trustees was elected as a temporary board at a special session in June, to serve only until the annual associational meeting in September, at which time the permanent board was elected.  So, Erasmus was first named as a replacement for one of the initial, temporary board members who had moved to a different association, and then he was elected to the first permanent board of the college.  (I actually found the memoir of the longest serving president of Howard Payne college in the same collection as this dissertation, and it has some references to Erasmus in relation to the college - we'll look at those next time.)

We next find Erasmus on page 59, in an entry that is a little bit confusing:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
page 59

Huh.  Wasn't the church at May, founded by E. M. Owen, already admitted to the association way back in 1883?  The dissertation never does explain this.  And what is really weird is that the modern building of the Baptist church in May has the date 1885 on the front.  See?  It sounds like whoever came up with this date was taking their best guess.  (At least it is close!)

On page 61, we see E. M. Owen starting yet another church:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
page 61

We know that Erasmus was still pastoring the church in Wolf Valley at this time because that 1894 newspaper article told us so, but it looks like he was indeed sharing his time between more than one congregation.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons he chose to no longer serve on the board of Howard Payne College after 1891.  I think it probably played a role, because his Pleasant Grove church was not very close at all to Wolf Valley, as you will see when I show you an updated (!) map after we look through this whole dissertation.

Page 63, which summarizes the minutes of the 1894 session of the association, has this to say about Erasmus:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
page 63

This tells us two important things:  First, that unlike in 1884 when Erasmus was just named as an ordained minister in Brown County, during 1894 he was actually pastoring a church.  Of course, we already knew this, but it also tells us that out of the twenty-nine churches in the association, only the two largest were full-time churches.  That meant that the church paid the pastor to preach all four Sundays of the month.  Most of the churches, having a small number of members, could only pay their pastors for one, two, or three services, so those churches were considered 1/4 time, half time, or 3/4 time churches.  Back on pages 43-44 of the dissertation it tells us that the pay for a pastor in a newly organized church about ten years earlier was $9/month for a church of less than thirty members, $5/month for a church of nineteen members, and $6.75/month for a church of eight members.  This is what the church members pledged to provide, so the actual pay may have varied from month to month.  Missionaries of the association, however, were paid a whopping $40/month, or $75 for six months of 'special' work.  It's no wonder that pastors had to serve multiple churches and have farms and take any other opportunity (we'll touch briefly on this in the next post) to earn some extra money!

So, it looks like Erasmus may have been serving two different churches on a part-time basis during 1894.  

Then, on page 65 it says:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
page 65

Once again, we see a church that had been founded by Erasmus being received into the association for a second time.  This sounds like the church had just maybe changed their name and so was readmitted into the association.  (Maybe?  I'm not quite sure!)  You'll notice that Erasmus' son Edgar is mentioned on this page; he is mentioned in this history many times because he served as a missionary pastor for the association.

On a side note, the bottom of the page went on to name another missionary who was serving in Clio during this year, so perhaps Erasmus had been unable to actually organize a church when he was there, but ministered to the needs of the few Baptists in the area nevertheless.

The next time Erasmus is found in the association records is way down the road in 1915, after he had spent several years in Oregon and returned home to Texas:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
page 83

Of course, Erasmus reported on his Confederate pension application that he had been born in 1832, so in 1915 he was only actually 83 years old, but still, that's pretty old!  This snippet is notable not so much because he visited his old home and led devotional services at a ripe old age, but because it tells us that he had been at one point a missionary of the association.  Aaaahhhhhh.  Perhaps that is what he had been doing while he was reported to have been in Clio.  

And then, on the next page we see this:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
page 84

And it continues on the following page:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
page 85

In August of 1916, exactly nine months (and even possibly to the very day) before his death, Erasmus was honored by the association for his work as a pioneer preacher and missionary of the association.  

In case any of you weren't aware, San Saba County, where Erasmus lived when he became a Baptist preacher shortly before moving to Brown County, borders Brown County on its southern edge.  For some time in their earlier years, many of the churches in both counties were members of and/or served by the same Baptist association.  I've wondered if Erasmus was sent out as a missionary after being ordained, or whether he just decided on his own to serve on the frontier and was later picked up as a missionary after moving to Brown County.  

This is the second reference in the dissertation to his having served as an associational missionary, yet page 112 of the dissertation does not include his name in the list of missionaries employed by the association:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
page 112

Notice how this says they are listed by the date the association employed them; I saw somewhere on another page that one of the associational missionaries actually was paid 1/4 time by the church he was pastoring, with his income supplemented by the Texas Baptist General Convention.  Perhaps the same arrangement was made for Erasmus, and that is why the author of this work did not find his name in the minutes and thus did not include it in this listing.  (The list actually continues on the following page in a rather bizarre order; Erasmus' son Edgar is listed several times during the 1890's, but still no mention of Erasmus himself.)

The next section of the dissertation of interest to us today contains brief biographies of those men deemed to be important to the early work of the association.  Pages 118 and 119 cover Erasmus' life work: 

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
pages 118-119

So, I am guessing that the writer of this 1940 dissertation got much of this information from Edgar Owen, who lived in Brown County until his death in 1946, or one of his children (which explains the medical college reference).  Once again, it names Erasmus as a preacher/pastor and missionary.  This also mentions an additional church that Erasmus helped found - Bethel.  There is an alphabetical summary of the early churches and their founding in the next section:

If you read through them all, you see that Erasmus is indeed cited as the founder of the four churches mentioned above:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
page 131

May was the first church he founded, way back in August of 1882, shortly after arriving in Brown County. (So now we have a date for its founding, and not just its admittance into the association.  And that date is neither 1891, 1883 nor 1885!  Also, I'm sure that Erasmus didn't just waltz into town and found a church the very next day, which tells us that he either made a trip up from his home in San Saba County - a distance of 83 miles! - once a month or so, or that he moved to Brown County some time before the church was constituted and several months before purchasing land there.)

The next church he founded was the one in Wolf Valley, actually called New Hope (no. 2), in 1887.  I love the way this tells us that it had sixteen members when it was constituted and grew to fifty within two to three years.  In his 1960 memoir, Thomas H. Taylor, the long-time president of Howard Payne College and resident of Wolf Valley during Erasmus' tenure there said of Erasmus,

Rev. E. M. Owen was a very able and well-known Baptist preacher.  

I guess that's why his church grew so rapidly then, huh?

After the Wolf Valley church was up and running, Erasmus organized the Pleasant Grove church:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown county Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
pages 132

This entry actually continues onto the next page, talking a bit about a split that occurred later; that didn't take place until 1905, though, so it isn't particularly relevant to what we are discussing.  What is relevant, though, is that apparently Erasmus "held a meeting"  which from what I've read is referring to a revival.  It sounds like fourteen people were baptized as a result, and then they formed a new church with Erasmus as their pastor.  (Interestingly, page 14 of this dissertation says that the Pleasant Valley church received twenty-two, not fifteen, new members as a result of Erasmus' meeting, so I'm not sure what that is about!)

The final church founded by Erasmus in Brown County was Bethel:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
page 128 

The history of this church is a little bit convoluted.  This tells us that Erasmus held a revival during the summer of 1898 and the Bethel church was formed.  It adopted the articles of faith of the Turkey Peak church.  There is no alphabetical listing in the dissertation for the Turkey Peak church, only the Turkey Creek church, which was way way far away from the Turkey Peak church and in no way related.  If, however, you do a keyword search for this church, the dissertation gives you an entry on page 62 that says that the Turkey Peak church was organized by W. H. Teague (whom the entry on page 128 tells us might have been involved in the revival preached by Erasmus that led to the formation of the Bethel church), and that it joined the association in 1894.  Then, there is the comment that says that there had been a church at Antioch which disbanded, and some of its members joined with the Turkey Peak members and together they formed the Bethel church . . . which is weird because that doesn't sound like the formation of the Bethel church had anything at all to do with Erasmus' revival.

If we look back one page, though, we see this:

A History of Pecan Valley and Brown County Baptist Associations
By William A. Todd
page 127

Well, this pretty much says that some of the Antioch members joined the Turkey Peak members to constitute the Bethel church, which just sounds like a change of name to me, but whatever.  I don't know if the association minutes that this dissertation is based on are unclear about exactly what role Erasmus played in the founding of the church or if the author of the dissertation was unclear explaining it all,  but maybe his preaching caused members of the two churches plus some new converts to form a brand new church or something.  (If you look at the map below, you'll find Antioch church about three miles as the crow flies to the northwest of Bethel church.)

So that's it.  During the eighteen years that Erasmus lived in Brown County, he was instrumental in the founding of four churches.  But what about the time he apparently spent preaching in Clio?  The dissertation tells us that a church wasn't constituted there until 1903, and then only lasted for two or three years.  I guess we should chalk up the lack of a church in the area during the 1880s and 1890s to the fact that there just weren't enough people interested in being Baptists, and not to any lack of effort or failure on Erasmus' part!

I actually had a lot more to say about these churches and his duties as a pastor and missionary - this post is titled "All in a Day's Work" after all - but putting this together took a lot longer than I thought it would!  So how about we cover the rest next time?  I'll leave you with an updated map of the churches that Erasmus either founded and/or pastored, with Clio thrown in for good measure since we know he spent time there ministering to the people in some capacity as well.  (The map is ridiculously large, and the labels ridiculously small, because Bethel church was so far down that I had to crop out a portion almost twice the size of the previous version.  Oh well!)                             

Brown County, Texas
1961 Highway Map
Showing Locations of Churches Founded by
Reverend Erasmus Miller Owen

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese