Christian History Home > Issue 45 > Focus on the Frontier Family
Focus on the Frontier Family
How Methodists strengthened the Christian home—and changed it.
Gregory Schneider is a professor in the department of behavioral science at Pacific Union College in Angwin, California. He is author of The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (Indiana, 1993). | posted 1/01/1995 12:00AM
Sallie Norris Hobart was worried. She and her husband, Calvin, had just moved into a raw frontier neighborhood on the Illinois prairie, and she did not see how her family was going to hold on to their religious life. There were rough and worldly families among their neighbors, and she feared her children, if deprived of religious privileges, might fall in with their drinking, dancing, gambling, and brawling.
Then came Levin Green, a Methodist preacher. He could barely read, and he murdered the King’s English, but, as Sallie’s son Chauncey remembered, “To him, God, eternity, death, the resurrection, the judgment, heaven and hell, were vivid and solemn realities. … He spoke as if these were actually present, being seen and felt by him.”
Green was the first of a series of Methodist preachers who, along with several additional religious families, helped create a flourishing religious community in the Hobarts’ neighborhood. Young Chauncey Hobart felt a close relation to all these people, and ... To view this item, you must be a member of ChristianHistory.net.
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