Book Description

Excerpt from A Time for Remembrance: History of 125 Years of First Evangelical United Brethren Church, Naperville, Illinois Among these early immigrants came several Evangelical families in 1886, followed a year later by a number of others from Warren County, Pennsylvania. These were the first German-speaking people in this part of the country. Like many of the other pioneers, they must have been intrigued with the beauty of the Northeast Illinois prairie and the potentialities for making a good living. One early pioneer in a letter declared that this was the best country he had ever seen for a rich man or a poor one, a lazy or industrious one. Some of these early settlers couldn't understand why this fertile prairie land had been neglected for so many years, when they remembered that Marquette and J oliet had discovered these grass plains and wide rivers as long ago as 167 3 nearly 160 years earlier! Little blue stem, big blue stem, and Indian grass, from three to nine feet high, rolled on for mile after mile. As much of the timber land already had been preempted before 1837, these German families settled on the prairies, not knowing at that time they had the best of the bargain. In 1837 a group of fifteen Evangelicals organized and met in the homes of the members or in a school-house built earlier on Scott's Hill (now corner of Franklin and Washington). Strong feelings of neighborliness and hospitality existed among the various religious groups of the time - Congregationalists, Evangelicals, and Methodists. All were served at first by itinerant preachers or missionaries. Ser mons were often more effective than elegant. One man, in defending one of these preachers for slaughtering the King's English, re marked, Thank God, he slaughtered sin also! The story is told of one of these preachers who had the thirdly part of his sermon blown away by the wind, and his ideas were so confused thereby that he abruptly came to a full stop. If people wouldn't come to church, the exhorter followed them home from the stores or mills and earnestly tried to bring about their salvation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.