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History Mystery: You’ve gotta have faith

Methodists built Kenosha’s first church

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BY DIANE GILES

dgiles@kenoshanews.com

The last History Mystery question:

Where was the first church in Kenosha located?

The answer:

The Methodists take the No. 1 spot in this honor, as they were the first to build a structure dedicated as a house of worship.

Even before the church was built, Methodist services were held here in the first six months of the settlement in 1835.

Two years later the first Quarterly Conference was held here.

The building was begun in 1840 and was completed two years later.

A bronze plaque mounted on the northwest corner of the Dayton Hotel, 521 59th St., downtown by the Daughters of the American Revolution commemorates the site: “The first church in Kenosha was built 10 yards west of this site by the Society of Methodists in 1840.”

At that time the population of the village and surrounding area was about 350 people, and the church was built large enough to hold them all.

At a cost of $5,000, it was one of the finest in the Wisconsin Territory.

In 1848, the first Wisconsin Annual Conference gathered here with Bishop Thomas Asbury Morris presiding. It was a prestigious event for a place as small as Kenosha.

Bishop Morris traveled from Ohio by steamboat, stopping at Sheboygan and Milwaukee along the way.

According to his diary, he arrived on July 12, 1848 “at Southport where we were put ashore at 2 o’clock in the morning, amidst darkness that could be felt, because of a dense fog, and were conveyed to the Temperance House; but when daylight came to our relief, we found ourselves in a beautiful village of some 2,500 inhabitants.”

The church building was destroyed by fire in 1883, and the new building that was erected soon proved to be too small.

In 1906 the Park Avenue Methodist Episcopalian Church was built on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 60th Street, but the congregation outgrew the building even after an addition was built. (Early on, the denomination was known as Methodist Episcopalian.)

The congregation purchased the property of the late Zalmon Simmons on Sheridan Road and 60th Street in 1923, and construction began on the First United Methodist Church five years later, at a cost of a half million dollars.

An extension Sunday School on the city’s west side eventually became the Wesley Methodist Church.

This week’s mystery:

What piece of firefighting apparatus did Kenosha have before any other municipal fire department in Wisconsin?

History Mystery appears weekly in the Kenosha News. The answer to today’s question will run next Tuesday.