From Alien to Citizen: A Jamaican Comes to Grinnell

Land-locked in the middle of the American plains, Grinnell does not often attract Jamaicans whose island home rises from the Caribbean Sea 1800 miles to the south. However, if you search for "Jamaica" in the on-line Grinnell College Alumni Directory, you will discover the names of ten Jamaicans, all of them having attended the college in the last ten years. This result is hardly surprising at a time when internationals comprise almost twenty percent of the college's student population. But the numerous internationals attending Grinnell today contrast sharply with the College enrollment of a century ago. The student body of 1920s Grinnell College was overwhelmingly domestic: the majority of students hailed from Iowa and almost every Grinnell student was white.

Photograph of Sebert Dove from His 1930 Declaration of Intention to Become US Citizen

Into this very white, homogeneous midwestern world came Sebert Dove (1895-1948), a Jamaican who graduated from Grinnell College in 1924. Today's post tells the story of Dove, who, having immigrated to New York City in 1917, encountered there Grinnell's Edward Steiner who steered the young Jamaican to J. B. Grinnell's prairie town and its college. After graduation Dove forged a path of accomplishment. Along the way he exchanged his natal country for the United States, to whose less privileged citizens he brought energy and education.

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Jamaican Civil Birth Registration for Sebert Constantine Dove, October 11, 1895
(Jamaican Civil Registration via Ancestry.com)

Sebert Constantine Dove, along with his twin sister, Burdecco, was born October 11, 1895 to Charles Sebert Dove and Adriana Russell Dove in Clarendon, Jamaica. One of the largest parishes in Jamaica, Clarendon is home to tobacco and cotton farmers, but is now also the site of bauxite mines. Although the Anglican church was long the established church in Jamaica, other Protestant churches gained a foothold in the nineteenth century. Early in the twentieth century Clarendon was, in the words of a visiting Catholic priest, "a very nest of Baptists" whom Jesuits were trying to convert to Catholicism ("A Letter from Father Patrick F. Mulry," Woodstock Letters, vol. 35, no. 2 [September 1, 1906], p. 225). Sebert Dove's father was one of the early conquests of the Jesuits, and, once converted, Charles Dove taught in the local Catholic school. Young Sebert followed in his father's Catholic footsteps, and is remembered as having served as altar boy at Catholic mass (ibid.) 

According to a much later account, young Sebert attended Wolmer's School, a highly-regarded Jamaican institution that followed closely the traditional British grammar-school curriculum (Amsterdam News, October 30, 1948). The same source remarks that Dove was subsequently "articled to a barrister"—presumably a kind of training internship—preparatory to his receiving a position in the Jamaican civil administration. Indeed, the Blue Book of the Island Jamaica 1916-1917 confirms that Dove worked as a clerical assistant to the Legislative Council from May 1, 1913 (when he would have been seventeen years old) until February 3, 1917 (p. 48). Almost immediately thereafter the 21-year-old Dove left Jamaica, booking passage on the SS Danube to New York, where he arrived March 29, 1917. 

Undated Photograph of S. S. Danube
(https://www.statueofliberty.org/statue-of-liberty/)

What drove the decision to emigrate and where Dove lived and worked in New York I could not learn. There can be no doubt, however, that over the next few years Dove encountered numerous challenges in the American metropolis, then teeming with immigrants like himself. No evidence reports the details, but it seems likely that the young immigrant, like the immigrant waves that preceded him, worked in low-paying jobs and lived in crowded housing. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to learn that it was in New York City that Dove learned about distant, prairie-bound Grinnell. Several years after his 1917 arrival, Dove, speaking at a Sunday evening service of Grinnell's Methodists, explained that he had met Edward A. Steiner (1886-1956), Grinnell's Rand Professor of Applied Christianity, in New York. The newspaper story on the talk says that Dove "heard [Steiner] lecture, spoke to him and was encouraged to come out here [to Grinnell] and educate himself" (Grinnell Register, March 10, 1924). 

Undated Photograph of Edward A. Steiner
(https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/1953)

Edward A. Steiner was probably the best-known of the college's faculty at that time. Himself an immigrant, Steiner was author of numerous books about the immigrant experience and New York newspapers of the time frequently advertised his books, including On the Trail of the Immigrant (1906), The Immigrant Tide: Its Ebb and Flow (1909), and From Alien to Citizen (1914), Steiner's autobiography. Living in New York for almost three years, Dove may well have seen some of these titles in bookstores or have seen their newspaper advertisements, perhaps suggesting a connection to his own circumstances.

Book Advertisement in New York Tribune, August 30, 1920

Steiner also occasionally lectured in New York, as he did, for example, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on May 4, 1920. Whether Dove was in attendance at this particular talk ("Nationalizing America Through a Common Historic Experience") I do not know, but, as he later told Grinnell's Methodists, Dove in fact had attended a Steiner lecture somewhere in New York, there meeting the professor and accepting his suggestion to attend Grinnell. 

Notice of a Lecture by Edward Steiner at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, May 4, 1920
("What's On Today," New York Tribune, May 4, 1920)

And Steiner, who had encouraged another Black man to attend Grinnell years before, was not beyond encouraging young Dove to enroll at Grinnell. Further evidence of Steiner's role in Dove's life comes from the college directories of the early 1920s, which report that Dove lived at 921 High Street all four years. The owner and occupant of the house at this address was the Edward Steiner family, proving that the professor took more than a passing interest in the education and well-being of Sebert Dove (Grinnell College Directories 1920-1923).

Exactly how Dove reached Grinnell no record survives to say. Like most other Grinnell students of the time, the young Jamaican likely arrived at the Grinnell railroad depot, and made his way a few blocks north to the college campus. Dove was certainly in place in time to begin the autumn 1920 semester. According to the 1924 Cyclone, from the start Dove "loaded up with all the stiffest courses in college, mathematics and chemistry being his major and minor, and in spite of this fact [he] has been able to maintain a high standard of scholarship." His affection for chemistry did not weaken over time, as Dove remarked in a 1938 letter to Grinnell chemistry professor Dr. Leo P. Sherman (1888-1978): "...your communication," he wrote Sherman, "...added much to the ineffable delight I experienced in getting a letter from the Chemistry Department at Grinnell with your name on it. I still live over my days under you—they were rich" ("May 2, 1938 letter from Sebert Dove to Dr. Sherman," Alumni Letters to Chemistry Department, Pamphlet 51-51.3 C42a, Grinnell College Special Collections and Archives).

Photograph of the Cosmopolitan Club; Dove in first row, 4th from left)
(1924 Cyclone)

But Dove was far from a mere classroom grind. Already in his second semester at college he was elected secretary and treasurer of the Cosmopolitan Club, the purpose of which was "to unite peoples of racial, national, and religious differences into a group of brotherhood and democracy" (Scarlet and Black, April 13, 1921; ibid., November 16, 1921; ibid., November 22, 1922). This ambition was also prominent in the Macy Club, a group that focused attention upon politics and society. Dove was the sole international student in the club which in 1922 elected him vice-president (ibid., May 10, 1922; ibid., October 18, 1922). His affection for mathematics led the young Jamaican to attend the annual picnics of the Mathematics Club (ibid., October 7, 1922), and for a time he worked at one of the town's newspapers (Grinnell Register, March 10, 1924), providing him with contacts beyond the campus boundaries.

Photograph of the then-new Men's Dormitories, Grinnell College; Building One on Left
(Grinnell Men's Dormitories [Grinnell College, 1918], p. 2; Digital Grinnell)

Because he lived off-campus Dove extended his familiarity with Grinnell's townsfolk. Like other students who resided in town—either in their own family's homes or in rented rooms—Dove received affiliation with one of the men's residence halls. Along with 19 other men (including three Chinese men), Dove was affiliated with Building One, now known as Smith Hall (Scarlet and Black, October 14, 1922). Joining Dove with this building was probably not random, as all the Rosenwald Scholars—all African American men—also lived in Smith almost their entire four years (Hosea Campbell and Gordon Kitchen both lived elsewhere their senior years) (Grinnell College Directories 1919-1924).

Undated Photograph of Mrs. L. A. Renfrow (1875-1962)

In addition to his college friendships, Dove developed close connections with the town's small African American community. Strong evidence of this relationship comes from two funerals for which Dove, alongside the College's Rosenwald Scholars and local African American men, served as pall bearer. For example, when African American Ruth Lucas (1893-1923), wife of Grinnell's Bruce Lucas, died in February 1923, Dove—like college men Collis Davis '23, Alphonse Heningburg '24, and Gordon Kitchen '25, along with African American townsmen Rudolph Renfrow and George Monroe (b. 1891)—carried the casket (Grinnell Herald, February 20, 1923). Likewise, when Eliza Jane Craig (1841-1924), aged mother of Mrs. L. A. Renfrow, died June 6, 1924, Dove took his place beside Black townsmen L. A. Renfrow, John Brown Lucas (?1861-1946), Solomon Brown and college men Heningburg and Kitchen (ibid., June 10, 1924). Experience with local African American families and with the Black college men gave Dove a network within which he could better appreciate the meaning of race in America.

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Photograph of 1921 High School Graduates of Straight College
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/vieilles_annonces/4602046421)

Apparently during his student days in Grinnell Dove transferred his religious commitment to the Methodists. As noted earlier, at least one Sunday evening Dove was the featured speaker at Grinnell's Methodist church. More telling are newspaper reports that identify Dove, along with local African American girl Helen Renfrow, among the members of the Methodist Tri-M Sunday School class (Grinnell Register, June 24, 1923). Nothing else from his college years speaks to Dove's religion, but, after graduation and a brief return to New York, Dove began teaching in historically Black colleges supported by the American Missionary Association, a Congregationalist institution. In 1925 and 1926 he taught physics, chemistry, and mathematics at Straight College (now Straight University) in New Orleans where some 500 students attended elementary, high school, and college (80th Annual Report of American Missionary Association [NY: American Missionary Society, 1926], p. 60). The next two years found him teaching at Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson University), a women's college founded by Methodists in Austin, Texas. Apparently Dove also served as Dean there before taking a new position as registrar at Paul Quinn College, another historically Black Methodist institution then based in Waco, Texas. 

Undated Photograph of Classroom Building of Tillotson College
(1930 Yearbook of Tillotson College, Blue Bonnet Hill)

One year later he left Waco, accepting appointment as head of the Science Department at Booker T. Washington High School (now Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts) in Dallas, Texas. In the world of Jim Crow, Washington High School was an all-Black school, so that Dove, like James Redmon, his fellow Grinnell alumnus, taught school within the world of racially segregated public education. Dove taught chemistry at Washington, and, by his own account, enjoyed "the respect of students and administrators" ("1938 Letter from Sebert Dove to Dr. Leo Sherman"). 

In September 1928, "culminating a long romance," Dove married fellow Jamaican, Amy Delmena Stern (1897-1999) in St. Louis, Missouri. The 1930 US census found the couple living at 2617 Cochran Street, Dallas, where they shared an address with another African American couple. By 1940 the Doves had their own Dallas home at 2323 Jordan Street, the better to accommodate their four children: Donald (born August 7, 1930); Eleanor (born August 28, 1932); Adrian (born August 31, 1934); and Carmen (born November 17, 1938). In these years, both Sebert and Amy traveled back and forth to Jamaica (daughter Eleanor was born in Jamaica), but Dallas was their home. In 1930 Dove filed a Declaration of Intention to seek U.S. citizenship, but why he chose this moment to file is unclear (his wife did not file until 1949). Perhaps officials at Washington High recommended it. Whatever the motivation, Dove completed the Petition for Citizenship two years later, and was formally sworn into citizenship in March 1933. Alien no more, Sebert Dove was officially American.

Top half of Sebert Dove's September 8, 1932 Petition for U.S. Citizenship
(Ancestry.com)

World War II brought some interruption to the family routine. When Dove registered for the draft in February 1942, he was still teaching at Washington High, but soon he took over direction of the Muller Street USO in Gainesville, about 70 miles north of Dallas. Perhaps in the era succeeding U.S. entry into World War II, Dove, now 47 years old, saw the USO as an opportunity to demonstrate his civic commitment. Like the Brownwood Texas USO that fellow Grinnell alum Gordon Kitchen oversaw, the Muller Street USO served African American soldiers, reflecting the on-going racial segregation of the US Army. Dove threw himself into the job, and earned appreciation within the Gainesville community. Among other things, he engineered the remodeling of USO facilities, providing new showers, locker rooms, and new entry points. When professional architects proved unavailable, Dove even drew his own blueprints, thereby hastening the remodeling, all this with the aim of improving life for the African American soldiers at Camp Howze (Gainesville Weekly Register, February 3, 1944).

Gainesville Weekly Register, February 3, 1944

In 1945 Sebert Dove made a seemingly abrupt move, not only to a different location and different job, but also to a different profession. Reasserting an association with Catholicism, Dove moved to California to become a full-time social worker for Catholic Youth Organization in the Watts and Willowbrook sections of Los Angeles. These areas had grown quickly during the so-called "Great Migration," which had brought tract housing and many African Americans to Los Angeles. Catholic Youth gained a foothold here and proved to be an important ally to the mainly Black working-class population that settled Watts and Willowbrook.

How Dove came to know of this position and what moved him to accept it I don't know, but evidently he took to the work very well. An obituary described him as founder-president of Los Angeles's Willowbrook Community Improvement Organization and as field director for the LA Catholic Youth Organization. His specialty, the newspaper continued, focused upon "the interracial field and organizing clubs, securing scholarships, jobs and housing for youth and their families" (New York Amsterdam News, October 30, 1948). In the spring of 1948 Dove received the Los Angeles Urban League Award of Achievement; the citation lauded "his training, experience, fortitude and persistence" which brought "credit and honor to his vocation and community" (New York Age, May 22, 1948).

Los Angeles Sentinel, May 22, 1948

Hard on the heels of this award, Sebert Dove died suddenly in his Los Angeles home, victim of a ruptured aortic aneurysm (September 30, 1948; the Alumni Scarlet & Black [Nov '48-Jan '49, p. 8] says he died October 2, but the death certificate confirms the September date). Only 53 years old, Dove left behind his wife of twenty years and his four children, the oldest of whom was eighteen, the youngest only ten. Catholic priests presided at his funeral at the Church of St. Leo the Great, and he was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery October 5, 1948 (New York Amsterdam News, October 30, 1948), implicit confirmation of a return to the Catholic Church of his youth. Apparently the entire family embraced Catholicism, because, when daughter Eleanor married eleven years later, she took her wedding vows in the same church that had hosted her father's funeral mass (Los Angeles Sentinel, September 10, 1959).

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A diminutive man—just five feet, four inches tall and about 140 pounds—Sebert Dove, a Jamaican immigrant, had accomplished a great deal among African Americans of his adopted country. Newly arrived in the U.S. when he reached central Iowa, Dove nevertheless made common purpose with the Renfrows and Lucases of Grinnell, just as he did with the African American Rosenwald Scholars at Grinnell College. As member of the college's Cosmopolitan Club Dove helped "unite peoples of racial, national, and religious differences," an ambition he shared with the club's faculty advisor, Edward Steiner. After graduation, Dove immersed himself in African American communities in the U.S. South, teaching at historically black colleges in Louisiana and Texas, and then becoming head of science at the all-Black Booker T. Washington High School in Dallas. There he flourished, sharing his love of chemistry and mathematics with young Black men and women. World War II opened yet another door for Dove, who became director of the Gainesville, Texas Muller Street African American USO club. Working among African American soldiers at Camp Howze, Dove displayed the same enthusiasm for improvement that he had shared with college and high school science students. Finally, he landed in California, where, as a social worker within the Los Angeles Catholic Youth Organization, he reached out to the multi-racial poor of Watts and Willowbrook, helping young men and women find jobs, win scholarships, and obtain suitable housing. As before, Dove lived the motto of the college Cosmopolitan Club, advancing brotherhood and democracy.

Cover of Edward A. Steiner's 1914 Autobiography

Dove formally became a US citizen only in March 1933, but long before that moment Jamaican-born Sebert Dove had applied himself to the citizen's task of improving his adopted country. Over the thirty-one years of his American sojourn, Sebert Dove passed from alien to citizen, repeating the metamorphosis of his Grinnell College mentor and host, Professor Edward Steiner, whose autobiography bore that exact title.  But then, far too quickly, Dove's light went dark, short-circuiting a life of service to African Americans.

Definitely Not a Coffee Table...

Sometimes I stumble upon a mystery that catches my attention. That's what happened a few weeks ago after I received a covid booster shot at Mayflower Community. The nurse asked me to remain in the lounge of Montgomery Hall for a few minutes after the shot to make sure that there were no unhappy consequences. Discovering that all the seats in the lounge were already occupied, I passed through the lounge toward Montgomery Hall's front door and there found a chair. With no one to talk to, I cast my eyes around the unfamiliar space and noticed an unusual table in the entry immediately below the mailboxes that serve Montgomery Hall residents. I got up to take a closer look, and discovered that the table bore a decorative inscription taken from Christian scriptures (Matt. 28:20): "Lo, I am with you alway." Although Mayflower was founded by the Congregational Church of Iowa in part to provide for former missionaries and pastors, the clerical inscription still surprised me as the entryway gave no other evidence of religious service.

Moreover, the table surface featured a small dedication plate that remembered Lucinda A. Haskell Noble (1832-1921), who was, the inscription announced, "A faithful member of this Church."

Well, that was odd. For one thing, the table was not standing in a church, but in the entry of an apartment building. In addition, Lucinda Noble had died more than a century ago and some thirty years before Mayflower was founded. What the heck? I wondered. 

And so began a winding search to learn how this table, built a hundred years earlier, found a home in the entryway of Mayflower's Montgomery Hall in Grinnell, Iowa.

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Finding the obituary for Lucinda Noble proved fairly easy. Thanks to the digitized records of a northeast Iowa newspaper, I learned that the elderly "Mrs. Noble was a devoted Christian woman, [and] a faithful member of the Congregational Church of Strawberry Point" (Edgewood Journal, April 7, 1921). Glad to know what church she had attended, I was nevertheless further discomfited to realize that the table in Montgomery Hall in Grinnell had previously stood in a Congregational Church in Strawberry Point. Why wasn't the table still in Strawberry Point, continuing the remembrance of Lucinda Noble and her faithfulness?

Undated Photograph Postcard of Strawberry Point Congregational Church

Answering that question also proved easy. A newspaper article from March 1953 reported that the First Congregational Church of Strawberry Point had recently been razed. "A decrease in the size of the congregation and no hope for immediate comeback brought an end to the church," the newspaper explained (Dubuque Telegraph Herald, March 22, 1953). As further investigation proved, in fact the church had been closed already early in 1951 (Clayton County Press Journal, July 26, 1951; Cedar Rapids Gazette, January 25, 1953). Clearly the Strawberry Point Congregational Church had disappeared almost seventy years ago, so whom could I ask about the table? Even those who had been members when the church came down in 1953 would now be either quite elderly or dead. How could I learn more?

Photograph from Dubuque Telegraph Herald, March 22, 1953

Happily, the records of the closed Strawberry Point Congregational Church landed, along with other records of the Iowa Conference and its churches, in the Congregational Library and Archives in Boston, Massachusetts. One of the archivists there kindly located for me the papers from Strawberry Point and sent me scans of the church register which recorded minutes of the last meetings of the congregation. These records report that on a slippery, winter night in January 1952 only eight members of the Strawberry Point Congregational Church appeared for the annual meeting at which they hoped to decide "whether or not to disband." With so few members present, a motion to delay the decision and reconvene in late April or early May carried. The reconvened annual meeting did not take place until June 8. That Sunday, after a pot-luck dinner, the twenty assembled members voted to authorize the church's trustees "to make such conveyance of property, both real and personal as shall be agreed upon in said negotiations" to the Iowa Conference of the Congregational Church, although the vote asked that the Conference find a way to share the proceeds of the sale with the Strawberry Point Methodist Episcopal Church, which at the time was organizing a building fund for a new church.

Undated Postcard of First Methodist Church, Strawberry Point, IA

Formal dissolution of the Congregational Church in Strawberry Point did not occur until November 24, 1952 when Dr. Judson Fiebiger (1905-2005), Conference Secretary, Rev. Andrew Craig, Field Secretary, and Mr. D. H. Thomas (1874-1959), Business Manager and Assistant Treasurer, met Strawberry Point church officials at the Union Bank and Trust Co. of Strawberry Point (subsequently succeeded by Citizens State Bank). The meeting concluded with several resolutions. The first conveyed to the Congregational Christian Conference of Iowa the real estate of both the church and parsonage. The second resolved that fifty percent of the proceeds of the sale be placed in trust in the Union Bank and Trust Company of Strawberry Point for the Building Fund of the Methodist Church of Strawberry Point. According to the final page of the church's records, the church sold for $2250 and the parsonage for $5800, thus ending forever the Congregational Church of Strawberry Point.

One other paragraph from the minutes of the November 1952 meeting is important for the history of the table now in Montgomery Hall:

It was agreed that the Thimble Society of the Congregational Christian Church be empowered to dispose of the personal property in the church, all moneys so rec'd [sic] to enhance the Thimble Treasury, it being understood that receipts be spent to advance Congregational Christian projects (Congregational Library and Archive, Iowa Conference Records, Subgroup III, Church records, Series FF: Strawberry Point Congregational Church Records, 1883-1952, Church register, 1935-1952). 

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Coinciding with the dissolution and sale of the Strawberry Point church was a recently-founded and ambitious project of establishing a Congregational retirement community in Grinnell for former missionaries, pastors, and their spouses. The idea of a Congregational retirement home in Grinnell began with Royal and Margaret Montgomery (1883-1957), who at that time were living in a home at 819 Ninth Avenue, Grinnell. Royal Montgomery (1879-1966) had served the Congregational Christian Conference of Iowa for many years in various positions until his retirement in 1948. As Margaret Matlack Kiesel (1908-1987) put it, the Montgomerys "were living comfortably in the house they had built...," but "Dr. Montgomery also was aware that other Congregational ministers and their wives were not as fortunate as he and Margaret" (A Journey in Faith: The Story of Mayflower Home [n.p.: Mayflower Homes, Inc., 2000], p. 7). The Montgomerys decided to donate the proceeds from the sale of their home to help underwrite the founding of a retirement community in Grinnell. Soon thereafter Ferdinand Kiesel (1879-1956), a stalwart in the Grinnell Congregational Church who was impressed with the Montgomerys' idea, agreed to donate his own home on Broad Street toward the project. With this beginning, the Montgomerys approached the Iowa Conference with a proposal to found a retirement community in Grinnell. The Conference formally adopted the proposal in June 1950 and by November of that year the Mayflower Home was incorporated.

Plaque Recognizing the role of Royal and Margaret Montgomery in founding Mayflower Home
(entry to Montgomery Hall)

Although the recruitment of funds to build the new community proved challenging, by August 1952 officials had succeeded in securing sufficient backing to break ground for the first housing unit in the 600 block of Broad Street. The one-story brick structure featured eleven apartments, half of which were endowed to make them affordable to the denomination's retirees. Named in honor of Royal and Margaret Montgomery, this first building was formally dedicated in June 1953.

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Among those attending the June dedication ceremony in Grinnell were several women from Strawberry Point: Mrs. J. J. Matthews, Mrs. Jennie Howard (1876-1955) (who as clerk had recorded minutes of the Strawberry Point Congregational Church's closing), Mrs. Carrie Slagel, and Miss Nell Westfall (1871-1961) (Clayton County Press Journal, June 18, 1953). All four were members of the Thimble Society, a women's organization which, despite the closing of the local Church, continued to operate. When the Thimbles next met, on June 25th, Nell Westfall and Mrs. Jennie Howard reported on their Grinnell visit for the Mayflower dedication (Clayton County Press Journal, July 2, 1953), helping spread the word in Strawberry Point about the Mayflower Home. Later that autumn, now meeting at the Methodist Church parlors, the Thimble Society welcomed "Miss Francis Ackman [sic; should be Aikman] of the Mayflower Home in Grinnell" who "gave a very interesting and informative talk on the Home" (ibid., November 5, 1953). Francis Aikman (1876-1977), who hailed from Minneapolis, was among the original residents of Montgomery Hall, occupying apartment 11. Her father, Rev. J. G. Aikman (1839-1923), had once been pastor at the Strawberry Point Congregational Church (Congregational Iowa and Pilgrim Log, February 1954), which explains both her connection to Strawberry Point and to the Mayflower.

First Residents of Montgomery Hall, Mayflower Home (1953)
Margaret and Royal Montgomery, 1st row, 1st & 3rd from left; Francis Aikman, back row, 3rd from left
(Drake Community Library, Records of the Mayflower Home #92, Box 2, Series 7,
"Scrapbooks, Pre-1959") 

The Strawberry Point Thimble Society, like other organizations within the Iowa Conference, supported the Mayflower Home initiative financially. Already in July 1952 the group donated $100 to the Mayflower Home (Clayton County Press Journal, July 17, 1952) and in December 1953 sent another $75 (ibid., December 10, 1953). The following April the group decided to send an Easter gift of $25 to Dr. Royal Montgomery, "the founder of the Mayflower Home" (ibid., April 22, 1954). Clearly the Thimble Club knew a great deal about and contributed generously to the Mayflower.

But the Thimble Club was not the only party in Strawberry Point committed to Mayflower. The program for the 1953 dedication of Montgomery Hall, for instance, reports that among those who had underwritten apartments in the building intended for clergy were "Dr. and Mrs. James S. Alderson, Strawberry Point." James Alderson (1864-1953) had operated medical practices in several Wisconsin towns and then later in Dubuque, but he had been born in Strawberry Point and was married there to Mary Buckley (1865-1963), who came from a well-known, pioneer Strawberry Point family. After Alderson retired, he and his wife moved back to Strawberry Point where they lived with Mary's sister, Helen T. Buckley (1871-1960) (Clayton County Press Journal, November 5, 1953). Both women were members of the Thimble Society, and therefore had early knowledge of the Mayflower Home. Moreover, both women provided bequests to Mayflower in their wills; the total of the two bequests ($120,000, about $1 million today) anchored the financing that allowed Mayflower to build its fourth apartment building, named Buckley Hall in their memory (A Journey in Faith, p. 36).

Undated Postcard Photo of Buckley Hall, Dedicated September 1963
(https://digital.grinnell.edu/islandora/object/grinnell%3A11644)

"The Newberry Foundation, Strawberry Point" was also identified as a donor to Montgomery Hall. Information on the Foundation proved scarce; a survey of Clayton County newspapers in the decades around the Mayflower's founding yielded only a single reference to the foundation. But the Newberrys were well-known in Strawberry Point. The Honorable Byron Newberry (1853-1944), for instance, had been a local lawyer and banker, and had served several terms in the Iowa legislature. In 1905 he had married Eva Buckley (1858-1951), thus joining two local pioneer families. Eva Newberry's brother was Parke Buckley (1856-1925), who graduated in 1881 from Iowa (later Grinnell) College and who in 1885 married a local Grinnell woman, Nettie Williams (1859-1889), sister of the plein-air artist, Abby Williams Hill. So the Newberrys had a long connection with Grinnell and also with the Buckleys. 

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Documents confirming the dissolution of the Strawberry Point Congregational Church had empowered the Thimble Society "to dispose of the personal property in the church, all moneys so rec'd [sic] to enhance the Thimble Treasury, it being understood that such receipts be spent to advance Congregational Christian projects." Exactly how the Thimbles disposed of furniture and other movables of the old church is not clear. Newspaper notices confirm that the club regularly hosted rummage sales, so it may be that they arranged for a special sale of church furnishings. If they did, no notice of an auction or tag sale came to my attention. However the Thimble women sold off the church possessions, some items proved difficult to merchandise. Not everyone, for example, needs a pulpit or communion service to add to their living or dining room!

Example Announcement of Thimble Society Rummage Sale
(Clayton County Press Journal, October 26, 1950)

Perhaps for that reason, the Strawberry Point Thimbles decided, as reported in Congregational Iowa and Pilgrim Log (v. 70, no. 2 [October 1953], p. 22), to donate "the Communion service and the Noble memorial table and the pulpit" to the Mayflower Home. At that time Mayflower had no chapel as such, so these items, however valuable they might have seemed, had to find a home that might not have corresponded closely to their original purpose. This explains the presence of the Noble table in the entryway of Montgomery Hall; perhaps the table has stood there ever since the Thimbles gave it to Mayflower (waiting for someone like me to ask how it got there).

Wine pitcher from the Communion Service of Strawberry Point Congregational Church (2022 photo)

Likewise, the church's communion service survives at Mayflower. Now decorating the shelves of Buckley Dining Room is a silver wine pitcher bearing the inscription "Cong'l Church, Strawberry Pt., Iowa 1875," two silver cups ("CC," engraved on the base, presumably signifying Congregational Church), and two silver trays for the communion bread. With no formal chapel at Mayflower until the 1959 dedication of the Warren Hathaway Denison Memorial Worship Center in the basement of Pearson Hall, it seems likely that the communion service stood on display in Montgomery Hall or remained in storage, only later being brought into Buckley to help decorate the Dining Room.

Something similar might be said of the Strawberry Point pulpit: without a chapel until 1959, Mayflower officials either kept the donated pulpit in storage or perhaps decided to re-gift it. What makes the latter option more probable is the fact that when the new chapel opened in 1959, it opened with brand new, locally-crafted birch pulpits made especially for the Denison Worship Center. These pulpits remain visible—one in Kiesel Hall beneath Pearson and one in the Lucille Carman Center above the Mayflower Health Center. But a clue survives to indicate that at least initially Mayflower retained and made use of the Strawberry Point pulpit.

Detail from a faded photograph of the June 1955 Dedication of Edwards Hall
(Drake Community Library, Records of the Mayflower Home #92, Box 10, Series 21,
"Photographs 1953-1965") 

Photographs from the June 1955 dedication service of Edwards Hall, the second apartment building erected at Mayflower, show what looks to be a mahogany or walnut pulpit in use.  Much church furniture of the time bore this dark coloring, perhaps an explanation for why Mayflower, sensing the more modern, brighter tastes of the 1950s, settled on bright birch pulpits when opening the Denison Worship Center.  

I have so far found neither the pulpit nor a document that reports what happened to the pulpit, but I suspect that church furniture on view in photos of the Edwards dedication service was the one bestowed upon Mayflower by the Thimbles of Strawberry Point. If so, then we may imagine that the pulpit saw occasional service at Mayflower at least until the 1959 opening of Pearson Hall and its new chapel that was outfitted with light, birch furniture. What happened after that I am not sure. 

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And so I come to the end of my search. The table that first drew my attention is definitely not, as the title here confirms, a coffee table. Although most Protestant communion tables bear a different inscription ("Do This In Remembrance of Me"), I imagine that the table now guarding the entrance to Montgomery Hall for many years occupied center stage at communion in Strawberry Point's Congregational Church. If so, then the silver communion service now at Mayflower regularly stood upon the table's surface, from which the church's pastors distributed the elements. In this way, the Thimble Club's gift joined together these relics of yesterday among Strawberry Point's Congregationalists. The third part of the Thimble Club's gift, the pulpit, was also present in the Strawberry Point chancel. Any photograph of the church interior inevitably would have joined these three items, all central to Congregational worship.

Their transfer to Grinnell's Mayflower did not fully preserve their liturgical service, as the women of the Thimble Club might have wished. Their church abandoned and torn down, the Congregational women of Strawberry Point, casting about for an honorable retirement for these most precious symbols of worship, must have hoped that at Mayflower, among the retired Congregational pastors and missionaries, the pulpit and communion service would enjoy a new season of usefulness. Perhaps for the first few years the Grinnell retirees found opportunities to revive use of the pulpit and communion service. But before long, they, too, slid into retirement, reduced to quotidian or decorative functions only. 

Today, some seventy years after the Strawberry Point Congregational Church closed, the Noble table and the church communion service survive to remind us of a time when Grinnell enjoyed the interest, confidence, and generosity of the Congregationalists in Strawberry Point Iowa.