The Illinois State Historical Society will honor Washington Presbyterian Church at the Illinois Sesquicentennial Church Celebration and Banquet Sunday at Wheaton College.
The banquet is part of the Illinois State Historical Society’s 30th annual Illinois History Symposium and will celebrate churches, synagogues, meeting houses and congregations organized in Illinois 150 or more years ago.
Karl Taylor, a member of the Washington Presbyterian Church since 1967, will attend the banquet in Wheaton with his wife, Nancy, and will accept the award on behalf of the church.
He was instrumental in writing a presentation of the church’s history for its 175-year anniversary Nov. 15.
Founded Nov. 16, 1834, when the nine-year-old town was still called Holland’s Grove, Washington Presbyterian was the third church founded in what is now Washington, after the Methodist
Episcopal church in 1828 and the Christian church in 1832.
Mary Kate Bansley, a senior at the University of Illinois in Springfield, is also an intern with the Illinois State Historical Society helping to prepare for the event.
“This year, the focus of the history symposium is on abolition. The reason behind inviting churches (at least 150 years old) was because they were around during abolition. We want to see the church’s stance and how it affected them,” she said.
Bansley is in charge of researching and writing biographies for each church. She said about 100 Illinois churches will be honored.
“A lot of those congregations broke apart from each other because of tensions. Their members would bring guns to church because they felt they needed to protect their family and property.
Some congregations kicked others out for owning slaves,” she said.
Taylor said Washington Presbyterian did have a lot of issues closely tied to the abolitionist movement.
Tensions during abolition came from the fact that the church was made up of two groups of people, southerners who had founded the church and who were pro-slavery, and a group of people who came from the New England states around 1850 and were abolitionists.
“What we discovered was that our church was involved in a big way with the Underground Railroad and that we had at least a half dozen conductors on the Railroad,” said Taylor.
Carol Dorward, the organist at the church and the collections manager and archivist with the Washington Historical Society, nominated the church to be honored by the Illinois State Historical Society.
The symposium starts at 1 p.m. Sunday, with an optional tour of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. The banquet begins at 6 p.m.
