Sesquicentennial History, part 3

Growing Stability, 1845-1873

The Reverend Luther Clapp, a young graduate of Williams College and Andover Theological Seminary, came to the Wauwatosa Area in 1845 in the service of the American Home Missionary Society. He preached his first Wauwatosa sermon on July 20, 1845 in the unfinished barn of William Fisher, and served the Wauwatosa Congregation as a supply minister until 1848 when he accepted the official call to its pulpit.

The arrival of the man nineteenth-century Wauwatosans called "Father Clapp" as the Church's minister must be reckoned as one of the most important events in the history of the young congregation. Clapp brought an unusual growth and stability to the young congregation. When financial difficulties forced many frontier Congregational churches to depend for years on the American Home Missionary Society for pastoral salaries and other needs, this Church grew rapidly into a fiscally independent body under Mr. Clapp's leadership. Times were not always prosperous, of course: the Congregation paid Mr. Clapp $600 for the year in 1856 and "what we can" in 1858. Nevertheless, the first every member canvas occurred on February 5, 1848 and revenues rose to the point that the Church could undertake its first benevolence with a donation of $100 to Beloit College in 1851.

As membership grew during the the Clapp pastorate, it became possible to finance and build a permanent sanctuary for the Church and to end its itinerant use of school buildings and other meeting places. The congregation purchased a plot of land covered in a blackberry patch for $50 from Charles Hart in 1853 and began the construction of its first sanctuary on the present site of the Church. Members donated timbers for a structure that was built and furnished at a cost of $3,347.80 when it was dedicated on October 27, 1853. A bell had to be added later, in 1855. The completion of the Church building permitted the congregation to have its own Sunday School and to end weekly participation in a joint Sunday School endeavor with Methodists and Baptists. Nevertheless, a warm relationship continued with the Baptists who founded Wauwatosa's second oldest church (founded October 11, 1845; now Underwood Memorial Baptist Church) and were led from 1849-1887 by Mr. Clapp's good friend, the Reverend E. D. Underwood. Well into the 1860s Congregationalists and Baptists joined for bimonthly Sunday School concerts. The Church held Sunday School in this period between morning and afternoon services, and often as many as 120 adults and children attended.

Mr. Clapp's influence both within and outside the Church was great. He was particularly interested in young people; he began prayer meetings out of which grew the congregation's first youth groups, and he initiated a preparatory school in his parlor that was the community's first high school. Mr. Clapp also chaired the Milwaukee Home Missionary Committee from 1850 to 1879 and in that capacity preached widely outside of Wauwatosa and held numerous revivals. During the pastorate of this energetic man the Wauwatosa congregation grew substantially (See Appendix for Membership).

Those nineteenth-century Church members involved themselves in a number of causes. The choir was a central part of the Church's life from the first. Oliver Damon was the first master of a choir that initially sang a capella and then to the accompaniment of a melodeon. Oddly, the choir originally sat in the rear balcony of the 1853 Church, and the congregation turned around to face the choir during hymns.

The first women's group, the Maternal Association, emerged in 1843 as an organization of mothers and children of this Church and the Baptist and Methodist Churches. It provided monthly opportunities for Bible reading and fellowship. Its service activities included an annual "donation party" or covered dish supper, the Annual Meeting dinner (held until 1917 on New Year's Day!) and fundraising projects for the Church and missions. The Maternal Association ended as a group in 1864 and several women's groups emerged in its place within the Church. The Ladies Aid and the Women's Missionary Society provided fellowship for women and fundraising for the Church and its benevolence from 1869 until the founding of the Woman's League in 1907.

Women particularly supported the cause of temperance, an important cause of nineteenth-century Congregationalists. Indeed, many church members involved themselves in the temperance organizations of the day, the Good Templars, the Sons of Temperance, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union founded in 1874.

Perhaps the greatest national issue of the Clapp pastorate, however, was that of slavery. Anti-slavery sentiment was strong in Congregationalism; some of the nation's leading abolitionists, like Henry Ward Beecher, were Congregational clerics. In the Wauwatosa church, as its original covenant attested, anti-slavery sentiment also was strong. Mr. Clapp's son recalled in the Church's seventy-fifth anniversary history that Wauwatosa Congregationalists established a local stop on the Underground Railroad, joining with others in Beloit, Milton, Milwaukee, Pewaukee, and Waukesha. When the Civil War broke out, 27 members of the Church served with in the Union army, the congregation's women devoted themselves to assisting the war effort, and the Church was the site of patriot meetings that included as speakers the abolitionist Edward D. Holton, the Watertown Republican leader Carl Schurz, and Wisconsin Senator James R. Doolittle.

When the Civil War ended in 1865, no one in Wauwatosa could have anticipated the accelerating number of changes that would overtake First Congregational Church in the next five decades. By the time of the Church's seventy-fifth anniversary in 1917, First Congregational Church would find itself a much different congregation in a much changed world.

Next Page: No Longer a Frontier Church 1873-1921

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