Pioneers Who Brought Christianity to Puget Sound

Washington State’s Christian churches boast colorful characters, virtuoso architecture, and idiosyncratic political and social issues.

Spanish curiosity, impelled by a desire to discover treasure and spread the Roman Catholic faith, may have been the beginning.  Later, English sea captains — Meares, Cook, Gray and Vancouver — opened Puget Sound to new ideas and relationships.  Historian Edmund S. Meany wrote that the first evidence of Christianity in our region was in 1841, when a Native boarded Charles Wilke’s ship and indicated that he had received teaching in the Catholic faith from a roving missionary.

Seattle founder David S. “Doc” Maynard, as Justice of the Peace, may have performed the first religious ceremony for the tiny settlement: the marriage of David Denny and Louisa Boren.

Members of the Denny party noted that the local Natives spoke their own language, known as Duwamish, and also the Chinook trade jargon.  The jargon included words from English, Native, and French origins.  Many words were preceded by the French definite article “le.”   This was probably because French fur traders, through the good offices of the 6′ 4″ Dr. John McLoughlin, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, had often been accompanied by Catholic priests.  The priests were essentially quasi-employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company.  They said mass for the mostly French-speaking employees of the Bay, started schools, and converted Natives.

Protestants were also active. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions at Boston had been dispatching adherents to the wilderness for years.  And before that, explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, during their 1804-1806 trek to the Columbia River country, had apparently left the impression with many Natives that the secret of the White Man’s power lay in their religious faith and “the book,” the Bible.

Grizzled Henry Yesler opened his cookhouse to the unexpected arrival (by canoe) of Father Modeste Demers in 1852.  A rough and tumble gathering gave Demers a warm welcome and politely listened to his sermon on “charity.”  The priest left the area soon after, despite a generous from Seattleites of food and supplies.  Later, some claimed that Father Demers had converted great Chief Sealth, after whom Seattle is named.

Reverend David E. Blaine and his wife Catherine were Methodist-Episcopal missionaries.  Some accounts describe the Blaines as “Eastern Effetes,” offended by the hell-bent work and play of pioneer Seattle.  Besides establishing in 1855 the first church in Seattle, known as the “White Church,” they invested in Yesler’s Mill and other ventures with Arthur Denny.

Perhaps the best-known early Seattle minister was Reverend Daniel Bagley.  He, his wife, the Dexter Hortons, and the Asa Mercers had been friends in Illinois.  A gangly young attorney named Abe Lincoln frequently visited the Mercer’s Illinois home.  Somewhat of a missionary-engineer, Bagley is reputed to have built three churches a year in Washington and Oregon during an eight-year period.  After a brief stay in Salem, Oregon, Bagley arrived in Seattle in 1859, took over David Blaine’s White Church, and found himself immersed in the effort to build a territorial university.

The solid figure of Father Francis X. Prefontaine appeared on the waterfront in October 1867.  He held the first Catholic mass in a tiny chapel at Yesler Way and Third Avenue, attended by a congregation of two women.

Christian life in the late 19th Century bloomed with strawberry festivals, oyster suppers, Christmas tree entertainments, charity drives, and concerts.  Those early events often took place in Yesler’s cookhouse, lovingly called “Yesler’s Tunnel.”  Within the first decade of the 20th century over 100 churches were established in Seattle.

September 22, 1901, the burgeoning Seattle welcomed Georgia-born Reverend Mark A. Matthews, who preached his maiden sermon in the First Presbyterian Church.  When the lean, stern-eyed Matthews came to Seattle his church had a debt of $24,000 and 400 members.  By 1909, in a new church he built with large stain-glass windows and (oddly) a running track on the roof, he had paid off the debt and was serving over 5,000 members — touted as the largest Presbyterian church enrollment in the nation.

Ever wonder why today’s Sunday mornings are not filled with the city-wide tintinnabulation of church bells?  Seattle city fathers in 1907 passed an ordinance prohibiting the ringing of bells.

Stewart Holbrook, in his book, Far Corner,” describes the “Edens of Erewhon,” a collection of Puget Sound cooperative colonies, many with heavy religious ingredients.  They were utopian experiments, a search for heaven on earth, which used Seattle as their supply and transportation base.

It’s notable that the first Washington State figures represented in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, Washington, D.C. were medical missionaries: Marcus Whitman, the Protestant doctor who was killed by Natives, and Mother Joseph, architect of hospitals and a leader of the Catholic Sisters of Providence.