Arlington Heights’ pioneers focused on faith
The early residents of Arlington Heights worked hard establishing their church communities, which over the decades evolved so different faiths worked together for the larger society.
Methodists who lived in log cabins sacrificed when they built their church to buy dressed lumber shipped from Michigan by boat then hauled by ox team from Chicago.
Lutherans had a classroom with 110 students and one teacher.
And Catholics carried hot water a block to scrub the church for the priest who traveled from Des Plaines, pumping his way with a handcar on the train tracks.
Margery Frisbie, whose books about Arlington Heights include histories of St. James Catholic Church and First United Methodist Church, highlighted these efforts of the village’s founders while speaking Thursday at the Mayor’s Twenty-Fifth Annual Community Prayer Breakfast.
Her talk was part of the 125th celebration of the incorporation of the village.
“What I learned from these testaments was how much people wanted churches, how hard they worked to create their churches, and how willing they were to sacrifice financially — none of them was what you’d call wealthy — to build their churches,” she said.
It was German immigrants who sought comfort from the Rev. Carl Noack, pastor of St. Peter Lutheran Church for 40 years at the beginning of the 20th century, said Frisbie. But early Arlington Heights residents in other religions were transplants, too, especially from New England and upstate New York.
The oldest congregations in the village are First United Methodist, founded in 1838; First Presbyterian Church, 1855; and St. Peter, 1860. St. James and St. John’s Evangelical and reformed Church both started in 1902, she said.
Frisbie quoted Pat Craig, author of the chapter on religion in the 1997 book “Chronicle of a Prairie Town,” as saying residents socialized either in taverns or church.
“The saloons were on the south side of town, hence Hell Hole, the churches — until very late in history — on the north side of town, on Piety Hill.”
Lutherans and Catholics especially did not get along in early days, Frisbie said, but despite this an undertaker named Uriel Reese recruited two World War I veterans, Walter Oehler and Art Lauterberg, to take over his business. Denominational differences notwithstanding, they got along well enough that the funeral home still exists.
Reese himself was rather colorful, said Frisbie. On the first Armistice Day to celebrate the end of the war he buried a casket holding an effigy of Kaiser Wilhelm.
In the 1960s Joan Grisell from First Presbyterian Church worked to bring people of different faiths together. And Frisbie thinks the region has come far in the last half century, with ecumenicalism expanding to include Jewish leaders.
At an interfaith Thanksgiving service, Rabbi Stephen Hart of Temple Chai in Long Grove said the celebration was one of his favorites of the year, said Frisbie.
“How blessed it is ...,” she quoted Hart, ”to join together here in this sacred space to affirm faith and blessing and that which truly sustains us in our moments of shared darkness as well as light.”