Park Church

The Park Church was founded by a walkout. In January 1846, forty-one members of Elmira's First Presbyterian Church left over slavery and wrote it into the new congregation's bylaws: 'the using, holding or trading in men as slaves is a sin in the sight of God.' The founders then put their building where their bylaws were — several of them worked Elmira's Underground Railroad station, supporting John W. Jones, the formerly enslaved conductor who moved fugitives through Elmira toward Canada.

Thomas K. Beecher came in 1854 and stayed forty-six years — Lyman Beecher's son, Harriet Beecher Stowe's half-brother, Henry Ward Beecher's younger brother, who'd left his famous half-brother's Brooklyn church because the congregation was too ostentatious. In Elmira he taught science from the pulpit, served as chaplain to the 141st New York in the war, and in July 1864 gave the first Sunday worship service inside the Confederate prison camp — the pastor who preached to the prisoners of the army his church's abolitionism had helped create.

The building itself was his invention — the 1874-76 complex called 'the first institutional church in America,' housing Elmira's first free public library (opened with his own books), a gymnasium, health clinics, parlors, and kitchens. The Langdons were founding members — which is how the church acquired its most famous friend: Samuel Clemens married Olivia Langdon, worshipped there every summer, and eulogized Beecher as combining 'the wisdom of the serpent and the gentleness of the dove.'

The Park Church is the archive's Beecher file — the abolitionist schism congregation where John W. Jones's station worked, where Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother preached for forty-six years and held the first service inside the Confederate prison camp, and where Mark Twain's in-laws built the first institutional church in America.