Religion and the Move to Resorts

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Source book page: https://archive.org/stream/adventuresinwild00inmurr/#page/n23/mode/1up

RELIGION AND THE MOVE TO RESORTS

Feltville always astounds me with its ability to teach me history. In my last post, I used a quote from Cindy S. Aron’s wonderful book, Working at Play, noting how the move to vacations in the nineteenth century reflects the massive cultural and technological changes that went on during that century. In this post, I will try to tease out how some of the religious currents across the century could impact whether an American contemplating a vacation felt good—or bad—about his or her choice.

A SNAPSHOT IN TIME FROM RURAL NEW JERSEY

We’ll start in the 1820s, before Feltville was created, in a place just north of where it would be. One of my favorite primary sources, found during my research on the history of the Deserted Village of Feltville, is the diary of Betsey Mulford Crane, a neighbor to Feltville, which she kept from 1824 to just before her death in 1828.¹ Her entries are brief, and sometimes refer to things commonplace to her time which are only mysteries to us.

Betsey’s daughter Huldah married Levi Willcox, Jr., great-grandson of original settlers Peter and Phebe Willcocks, and her entries often mention Wilcox family members—giving us the closest we have to a snapshot of what was going on in the still very rural area where the Deserted Village is today. Her entries from the early nineteenth century give us a window into rural New Jersey religion and other diversions—precursors, perhaps to recreation, including vacations—as I launch us into how nineteenth century religious developments impeded or impacted the nineteenth century development of resorts.

Betsey gives us a snapshot of religious observances, with a dizzying variety of men preaching in different venues on Sundays. She also often notes the theme for a particular sermon, e.g. “Elam’s text was Isaiah 33, ‘Turn ye, turn ye,’”² and “Mr. Wiggins preached; his text was ‘Felix trembled.’”³

In addition to Sunday services, with sometime attendance at two services per day, Betsey mentions camp meetings, which, as discussed in my last post, were one of the vacation destinations for the pastors in the front-page Newark Evening News article discussed there. She seems to be going back and forth to these meetings from her home at least some of the days:

September 11^th, 1824. I went to Camp Meeting this morning at Wolf Hall (*near Union Village)⁴ came home at night. Rained very hard all the afternoon.

September 12^th, 1824. Cloudy all day, no rain. I went again to Camp Meeting through the mud. It was thought there were 4,000 people. Mr. Rusling preached in the morning; Manning Force in the forenoon too. Mr. Rusling in the afternoon and evening. Debby began to bind shoes for Mr. Ludlow

September 13^th, 1824. Cloudy but no rain. Mr. Wilmer preached in the forenoon and Mr. Weed in the afternoon.

September 14^th, 1824. Clear and warm. Meeting broke up this morning. I came home and all the rest cleared out. Jacob Bonnel’s wife hung herself.⁵

In Civilizing the Machine, Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900, John F. Kasson indicates that oratory was the “queen of the arts”⁶ in the nineteenth century—and this included the oratory furnished by pastors at Sunday services. From Betsey’s entries, it seems clear that she and her family found these services and the sermons to be diversions from everyday life. Interestingly, Betsey sometimes chooses not to attend, with no reason given.

Betsey also mentions some of the things her family is reading—another one of the arts or diversions of the time—including newspapers, which Betsey’s sons carried (perhaps for money) as far away as Madison, two atlases, and the Bible. There are other books which historian Ingeborg Lincoln indicates are Betsey’s “poetry books,” but for which I can find no online reference, Cincinnati Director and two volumes of Pamelia being mentioned.⁷

All the family members are always busy, either working or visiting or hosting visitors or engaging in activities such as frolics, where neighbors joined to accomplish bigger tasks like corn husking while making it a social affair. Other gatherings were infairs, which were parties to celebrate a wedding (often some time after), and vendues, where the property of a deceased person or someone moving out of town was sold off. There was skating and sledding. Betsey’s son Vester seems to have spent some time in New York City, about which she reported the following:

January 14th, 1826. Warm & rainy. I & Harriet went to the Doctor’s, Huldah there. A vendue at Ambrose Parson’s, deceased. I received a letter from Sylvester, he says there is a report in New York that the city will sink the 19^th, that is next Thursday.

January 19^th, 1826. A little cloudy. The Doctor came about noon, I am better. The city did not go down.⁸

CHANGES COME TO NEW JERSEY

But changes were coming to the area and state. Sometime after Betsey’s death, two of the Willcocks/Willcox⁹ family members reflected these changes by leaving the local area. Levi Willcox, Jr. took Betsey’s daughter Huldah off to Indiana,¹⁰ which had become a state in 1819 and whose capital, Indianapolis, the National Road had reached in 1829. Likely they headed off to farm virgin soil on the new frontier. Indiana was one of the frontier states trying to keep slavery out, largely because non-slave owning farmers found the competition of farmers who relied on the unpaid labor of slaves extremely challenging.

During the same period, Samuel Willcox, also a great grandchild of Peter and Phebe Willcocks, left the original family-settled area to become a Justice of the Peace in Newark, New Jersey¹¹. He may be the same Samuel Willcox mentioned in Betsey’s diary as having “sold out his store today, the goods inventoried” on November 16, 1825.¹²

Levi and Samuel reflect the changes happening across New Jersey in the nineteenth century. People were leaving what had once been the frontier (New Jersey being one of the later Eastern colonies settled) for either the new frontier further west, or alternately, for the city and career opportunities there. New Jersey was rapidly losing farmland and becoming more urban, which would fuel the growth of resorts. In time, Feltville, just south of Betsey’s home, would become a small resort for city dwellers.

Newark, where Samuel Willcox resettled, was New Jersey’s largest city with a population of approximately 40,000 residents, and in 1851 was experiencing its peak growth rate, 8.4%.¹³  As noted, farms began to vanish: from 1860 to 1910, the number of farms in Essex County declined from 1082 to 633.¹⁴

Wealthy individuals were already creating suburbs to Newark which would allow them to resist the extreme impacts of rapid city growth, but still allow them, or rather, their men, to work at professional jobs like physician or attorney in Newark. People with the means to live in these suburbs could go home at night to someplace less congested than Newark, places like the fashionable East Orange. I have particularly singled out East Orange because it was the home of Ella King Adams, who would be one of the two individuals who would convert Feltville into a resort called Glenside Park.

Much of the growth of the City of Newark during the nineteenth century came from an influx of immigrants—first, massive numbers of Irish and German immigrants, and later immigrants from other parts of Europe. Ironically, some of those Irish and German immigrants were probably doing a reverse commute,¹⁵ traveling from their homes in crowded neighborhoods of Newark to serve as maids or cooks or drivers or gardeners to people in East Orange and other neighboring suburbs.

Freed from having to work constantly like Betsey and her family members, to make or trade for the things of everyday life, and perhaps having hired one or more servants to help in the home, middle or upper class urban or suburban residents had to find new ways to spend their time. In his book, A History of Recreation: America Learns to Play, Foster Rhea Dulles sums up the challenge:

The country was going through the first phase of its transformation from a simple agricultural community into a highly complex urban society. New means of amusement had to be found to replace those from which increasingly large numbers of persons were cut off by the very circumstance of city life.¹⁶

THOMAS JEFFERSON PREDICTS A UNITARIAN AMERICA

In my last post, I used articles from the Newark Evening news to begin to unravel some of the various cultural and attitude changes at work in the nineteenth century, which allowed people of all classes the leave, or permission, to contemplate making a visit to one of the resorts which were rapidly spreading across the landscape of New Jersey, and other states. As that post suggested, religious leaders played a large role in making it acceptable to go off on a vacation. This post will tease out some of what was going on in religion at the time, and how it impacted the growth of resorts.

Even while Betsey and her family were attending more than one traditional Protestant services of a Sunday, Thomas Jefferson and others of the ‘”founding fathers,” were rejecting many of the ideas of traditional Christianity, tending towards deist or Unitarian views, and using their influence to try to change the views of everyday Americans. Barry Hankins, in his book The Second Great Awakening and the Trancendentalists, describes deism as “a religion based on reason and promoted by figures of the Enlightenment such as Thomas Jefferson. . . . this form of religion downplayed or dismissed traditional Christian ideas having to do with the supernatural . . . For the deist, God was like a watchmaker who created the world, then stepped back and let it run on its own according to the laws of nature.”¹⁷ Deists ‘’tended to emphasize the goodness of human beings and their natural capacity for understanding the world through the use of reason.”¹⁸ This perhaps allowed religion and the developing interest in science to coexist more easily.

This trend naturally led to Unitarianism with similar ideas and traditional Protestant pastors were watching with concern as Congregationalist churches in New England began turning Unitarian. In 1819, prominent Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing traveled from the Boston area to Baltimore to preach at the ordination of a young protégé, Jared Sparks, who was being installed as pastor of the newly formed Unitarian church in that city. Sparks, believing that this would be a historic sermon, had strategically invited ministers of all denominations, including liberal ministers from up and down the Eastern seaboard. Channing did not disappoint with his ninety minute sermon, entitled Unitarian Christianity. He asserted that the Bible was not the direct word of God, but the writings of people to whom God had revealed his words. It was, Channing asserted, up to humans to use their reason to interpret the Bible, as with any other book of human authorship. A clear reading of the Bible, according to Channing, gave no basis for the deity of Christ. Channing found that both God and Jesus Christ had their own separate unities—God was divine, and Christ human, although given power from God to perform miracles and teach others the way to God.

In New Jersey, David Felt was an ardent Unitarian when he created the mill village of Feltville in 1845. Felt was a friend of many of the prominent Unitarian pastors of his time. Deeply religious, he still did not try to convert his non-Unitarian workers, of various Protestant denominations. This is in spite of the fact that he exercised a great deal of control over worker life, including paying them, it appears, in money only usable at his store, which effectively limited their purchases to goods there, most likely not alcohol. He is reported to have established curfews and other controls on behavior. However, instead of trying to impose his chosen religion on his workers, he made the top floor of the store into a church, for which he hired a minister who could serve all Protestant Christian individuals.

Interestingly, just as with Betsey’s experience, there was still much sharing of the pulpit, with other local pastors and even some Unitarians preaching some Sundays. Henry Whitney Bellows, a prominent Unitarian pastor from New York City, preached the installation service for Feltville’s first permanent pastor, Austin Craig.

Thomas Jefferson had predicted that the country would go Unitarian, but that turned out not to be the case. Particularly in New Jersey, Unitarians established few churches¹⁹, but Protestant churches still found themselves facing considerable challenges after the Revolutionary War. In fact, in New Jersey, religious freedom had always been more or less protected (the law did enshrine biases against the practice of certain faiths, such as placing specific prohibitions on devout Catholics holding public office). New Jersey, often called “the Crossroads of the Revolution,” saw the physical demolition of many of its churches by the British during the war, reflecting in part the number of battles and occupations which took place here.²⁰ At the same time, many churches found themselves without enough religious leaders, or enough funds to pay religious leaders, to serve those who wanted to worship.²¹ In his book, Religion in New Jersey: A Brief History, Wallace Jamison indicates that there was also a post-war decline in religious interest among most or all denominations: “Those who called most fervently on the God of battles suddenly ceased calling on any god at all.”²² As one of the only four colonies not practicing the English model of a state religion, (although those colonies with state religions had not necessarily chosen England’s state religion, Anglicanism), New Jersey did not experience the sudden loss of state support for their religion that the Constitution’s clauses protecting religious freedom other states did.

PROTESTANTS RESPOND WITH REVIVALS

Enter, among other responses, the religious revival, the heart and soul of a period of religious thought and activity called The Second Great Awakening, spanning roughly the period from 1800 to the time of a nationwide revival, the Revival of 1858. In his book, The Second Great Awakening and the Trancendentalists, author Barry Hankins indicates that revivals had actually been around in some form for at least three quarters of a century before the word “revival” was coined to describe them in 1800.²³ Hankins says that “revivalism is best defined as a preaching method, primarily within Protestantism, which is geared towards eliciting individual conversions to the Christian faith.”²⁴ Revivals and the individual conversion they evoked went hand in hand with reform movements that Hankins says “helped shape the political and social culture of the new nation” and also ensured that America’s dominant religious currents would be evangelical Protestant, as opposed to deism, Unitarianism, or just as vilified, Catholicism.²⁵

The Second Great Awakening, with this period of religious revivals, moved in fits and starts. Its reform efforts, included the areas of temperance, anti-dueling, and an emphasis on (more or less) obligatory Sunday church attendance (contrast the latter with Betsey’s seeming choice to sometimes skip church). Organizations which either grew from or benefitted from the efforts during the Second Great Awakening were the American Bible Society, which aimed to get a Bible into every home, the American Tract Society, printing inexpensive tracts which could be distributed everywhere, and the American Temperance Society.²⁶ There were also missionary societies, for missionary efforts within the United States, both to frontier communities and to (non-Protestant) urban immigrant communities, and international efforts like the African Colonization Society.²⁷ The latter sought to resettle free black people or former slaves in Africa, under the premise that they couldn’t count on a long-term success in the United States, both because they were of African origin and because white people would not welcome their competition in the labor market (as was, indeed, demonstrated on various occasions, particularly in New York City). The society sought not only the resettlement of black people, but to ensure that they became acceptable Christians in their new locations.

Religious revivalism took various forms, based on the church and people leading them, but as seen in my last post, one kind of religious revival is particularly tied to the development of resorts, the camp meeting, several which Betsey Mulford Crane describes.²⁸ The variant of camp meeting which became a form of resort or vacation destination, as well as a place to revitalize your faith, is associated with people actually staying at the camp meeting, in tents or other structures. At least initially, the location for such meetings might change year to year. The camp meeting as a venue for revival became almost exclusively associated with Methodism after 1804, and in New Jersey, went from temporary locations to spawning a number of permanent sites, Mount Tabor (now a historical site), Ocean Grove, still the site of yearly revivals, Squan (near or in present day Manasquan), and Asbury Park. The latter is significant because its founder named it after Francis Asbury, and whom Hankins calls the “virtual founder of American Methodism.”²⁹

In general, Jamison’s book describes Methodist services in those days as “lively experiences for all who took part.”³⁰ Jamison goes on to note: “One preaching station near Freehold got the name ‘Screaming Hill’ because of the exuberant emotionalism of the worship there.” The name lives on as the name of a farm-based microbrewery for beer there. So much for oratory as one of the popular arts of the time.

Arising naturally from all these revival and reform efforts came a renewed emphasis on the value of work, which Dulles calls one of the moral forces arrayed against recreation, including resorts.³¹ Work was a way of glorifying God. Leisure was of the devil; a notion perhaps underscored by strong sentiments arising out of the perception that some of the new, generally Roman Catholic (“Popish”) immigrants would engage in leisure activities on the Sabbath, rather than simply going to church and engaging in other suitable Sabbath activities. These same immigrants, or at least the men, were seen also as spending too much time drinking in taverns, fueling the temperance movement, and also a notion that if they were spending more time at honorable work, they would not have the idle leisure time to drink. This flew in the face of efforts to make the working week and working day shorter, going from a 12 hour day to a ten hour day.³² Dulles ties efforts by labor leaders to reduce workday hours to a growing sense of civic response, democracy, and humanitarianism, which entered under the guise of treating the worker equally, and giving time for cultivation of the mind and self improvement—not necessarily recreation.³³

Interestingly, Dulles is of the opinion that the country’s material development would have been considerably slowed without this emphasis on the importance of work, but he notes that it “narrowed the horizon of the average American,” and quotes a visitor from Europe who opined:

In no country are the faces of the people furrowed with harder lines of care. . . . In no country that I know of is there so much hard, toilsome, unremitting labor, in none so little of the recreation and enjoyment of life Work and worry eat out the heart of the [American] people, and they die before their time.³⁴

RELIGIOUS LEADERS FIND WAYS TO SANCTION LEISURE

Despite all these and other forces which might be seen as working against allowing Americans to feel vacations were permissible, there were forces at work that made it almost obligatory that religious leaders would begin to sanction vacations. Railroads and other forms of transportation were making it easier to get away, and everyone began to want to do it. And the city, to which the population was increasingly shifting, was a place one needed to get away from for a variety of reasons. Moreover, people had always traveled—although it was more in the realm of the wealthy to do so. Americans had gone off to do a tour of the continent, or, for health purposes, to “take the waters.” Now, the growing middle class, with enough income to allow leisure time, was ready to take vacation—emulating the more wealthy who had always traveled. Religion had to find a way to allow vacations.

One of the most influential examples of a minister extolling getting away is William Henry Harrison Murray. Murray was born in 1840, and began completed seminary and began serving as a minister in 1864. He and his wife loved the outdoors, and Murray wrote, initially for his own pleasure, about his experiences camping out in the Adirondacks. After a friend encouraged him to submit his writings to a publisher, they were published as Adventures in the Wilderness, which became a runaway bestseller.

Murray is credited with being the father of America’s camping craze. Within months of the publication of the book, the Adirondack region saw the influx of 2000-3000 visitors, instead of the previous 200-300 annually. But there are messages in his writings which are critical to the development of resorts of all types, not just camping grounds. First, crucial to his writings about getting away in the Adirondacks was the (relative) ease of camping there, since travel was by boat (he recommended hiring a guide, who would presumably paddle and also portage in impassable spots), rather than requiring the much more demanding “tramping.” Also crucial to his writings is the idea of gaining health through such a trip—not just physical , but also mental healing. For physical healing, he tells the story of a young man at death’s door with some unspecified ailment, unable to walk and requiring carrying by his guide, who came out after a month in the Adirondacks 65 pounds heavier than his previous emaciated state, able to himself carry the boat over portages. In terms of mental health, Murray speaks first of his own profession as clergy, and says:

Yet it is in the ministry that you find the very men who would be the most benefited by this trip. . . . In the wilderness they would find that perfect relaxation which all jaded minds require. In its vast solitude is a total absence of sights and sounds and duties, which keep the clergyman’s brain and heart strung up, the long year through, to an intense, unnatural, and often fatal tension. There, from a thousand sources of invigoration, flow into the exhausted mind and enfeebled body currents of strength and life.³⁵

If every church would make up a purse and pack its worn and weary pastor off to the North Woods for a four weeks’ jaunt, in the hot months of July and August, it would do a very sensible as well as pleasant act. For when the good dominie came back swarth and tough as an Indian, elasticity in his step, fire in his eye, depth and clearness in his reinvigorated voice, wouldn’t there be some preaching! And what texts he would have from which to talk to the little folks in the Sabbath school! How their bright eyes would open and enlarge as he narrated his adventures, and told them how the good Father feeds the fish that swim, and clothes the mink and beaver with their warm and sheeny fur. The preacher sees God in the original there, and often translates him better from his unwritten works than from his written word. He will get more instructive spiritual material from such a trip than from all the “Sabbath-school festivals” and “pastoral tea-parties” with which the poor, smiling creature was ever tormented. It is astonishing how much a loving, spiritually-minded people can bore their minister.³⁶

Murray contrasts the feelings he gets on his vacations in the Adirondacks with his experience in the urban environment of home:

How harshly the steel-shod hoofs smite against the flinty pavement beneath my window, and clash with rude interruptions upon my ear as I sit recalling the tranquil hours I have spent beneath the trees!³⁷

Murray’s proclamations about work seem particularly responsive to the gospel of necessary unremitting work referred to above:

Now I do not plead guilty to the vice of laziness. If necessary, I can work, and work sharply; but I have not special love for labor, in itself considered; and certain kinds of work, I am free to confess, I abhor; and if thei is one kind of work which I detest more than another, it is tramping; and above all, tramping through a lumbered district. . . . And what luxury it is to course along the shores of these secluded lakes, or glide down the winding reaches of these rivers, overhung by the outlying pines, and fringed with water-lilies, mingling their fragrance with the odors of cedar and balsam!³⁸

As noted, within a short time of publication of Murray’s book, Adirondack tourism increased by thousands of people, and concomitantly, Adirondack camps sprang up in profusion, allowing people to visit in even more luxury than he had described.³⁹

Murray is clearly an apologist for the doctrine of healthful leisure, and is particularly influential as a prominent pastor. As religious and other thought leaders dealt with the increasing desire for leisure, they began to first create a dichotomy about what sorts of leisure were healthy and morally acceptable and what sorts were not.

Critical in determining acceptable from forbidden pleasures was the distinction between ‘recreation’ and ‘amusement,’ a distinction that the Puritans had established centuries earlier … Recreations were uplifting, they refreshed and readied a person for work. Amusement, however, left people enervated and drained. Puritans counted the theater, for example, as one of the worst and most dangerous sorts of amusement. The theater allegedly incited extreme emotions and left the spectators exhausted. It also encouraged degeneracy amount the actors who, rather than following an ‘honest occupation,’ were ‘making a profession out of a recreation.’ Amusement was ‘pleasure for pleasure’s sake. The scripture endorsed recreation but forbad amusement. ⁴⁰

Murray is clearly describing recreation activities which could be defended as uplifting recreation, which made a person better able to return to work. But the simple dichotomy soon broke down and by the middle of 19^th century the distinction between the recreation and amusement had grown increasingly muddied.⁴¹  In particular, religions such as Unitarianism began to question the attitudes towards leisure. William Ellery Channing, “the dean of American Unitarianism,” suggested that unless “innocent pleasures” were available, people would choose more dangerous and questionable ones.⁴²

We can be sure that the vacation spots for ministers listed in the front page Newark Evening News article from last month’s post are acceptable resort destinations. I will note again that most of the destinations are not in New Jersey. Indeed, the only ones that seem to be in New Jersey are Mt. Tabor, Ocean Grove and Asbury Park, all Methodist Camp Meetings. The latter two are at the seashore, but are not among the New Jersey seaside resorts, which, from the earliest days of resorts, were among the most popular in the nation, Long Branch and Cape May. Why are none of the ministers going there? What’s the bigger message in most ministers leaving the state, which had ample resort options?

For a beginning answer, I will leave you with a little about Long Branch, favorite resort of President Ulysses S. Grant. Long Branch had been long established as a resort when in the 1880s, “two topics chiefly absorbed [it]. . . temperance and evangelism.”⁴³ “Long Branch had by the middle eighties acquired such a wide reputation as a sporting community that it drew to it an exceptional number of unfortunates on the fringes of society who proved ready targets for the moral bombardment of reformers.”⁴⁴\ Presumably, this all makes Long Branch an unacceptable destination for vacationing ministers.

I will come back to Long Branch, never fear, when I discuss the resorts Ella King Adams rejected in favor of Glenside Park, a new resort she could design herself. Until next month.