The American Baptist Publication Society chapel cars on the western frontier of faith

Baptist History and Heritage, Summer-Fall, 2003 by Wilma Rugh Taylor, Norman Thomas Taylor

When Diaz returned to Cuba, newlyweds, E. G. Townsend, a Dallas pastor, and Hollie Harper Townsend, woman's editor of the Baptist Standard, took over the management of Good Will. Planning to stop for only a day in Tenaha in the heart of the piney wood, Townsend reported, "We began to preach four times a day. The people began to come for miles and miles around. They came to see that church on wheels-that wonder car, and a woman who was "a heap better talker than the man." (19)

Hollie's husband may have been proud of her effectiveness as a speaker, but that was not the case with the leaders of the Baptist General Convention of Texas who had strict views as to where and when and how women's voices could be heard in the church. (20) The Townsends, however, continued to draw large crowds to their services. Townsend wrote: "Twice we were forced to move, seeking a larger building. On the third Saturday, I say there were a thousand people present. We worked two weeks longer, baptizing in all forty-six and receiving into the church sixty-five, and some twenty joined neighboring country churches." (21)

Children, dressed in the custom of their settler or immigrant parents, were a delight to Hollie. "I wish you could look in sometimes on the car filled with a squirming mass of young humanity ... their heroic attempts to sing the new songs; their blank dismay when called upon for Scripture verses; and their pathetic apology, 'We ain't never been to no Sunday School to learn one,' or 'we ain't got no Bible at our house.'" (22)

In December 1897, after Hollie's death in childbirth, Townsend, with singer Thomas Moffett, traveled southwest to Comstock, hoping to help abate his grief. (23) Townsend reported to the Baptist Standard: "We are now on the southwestern border not only of Texas but also of the United States. Across the Rio Grande River in Mexico, the Santa Rosa Mountains lift their heads far above the clouds. This is the frontier of two republics.... There are not a dozen houses in sight yet from the ranches for twelve and twenty miles the people came and filled the car." (24) The mother of twelve children who had lived all of her life on a ranch told Townsend, "I have never heard anything about the gospel, because I have never had any chance to go to preaching. But this you preach about is just what I have been longing for these many years." (25)

Three years later, during the Galveston's Great Storm of September 1900, Good Will sat in Galveston's Sante Fe shop for renovation. Thus, the car was protected from destruction by its position between engines in the shop. The home of chapel car singer Vallie Hart, who was responsible for the car at that time, was destroyed, along with the chapel car's belongings. The Hart family barely escaped with their lives.

After the storm and Good Will's release from the shop, G. B. Rogers and Hart traveled to storm-ravaged towns across southern Texas. At Rosenberg, Rogers reported that so little was left of homes they were "pressed to live at all." The Baptist church was destroyed, along with other churches. Good Will was sided near the depot and became the temporary house of worship, not only for the Baptists but also for the town's discouraged citizens. Night after night for two weeks, storm-worn townspeople went to the chapel car. Outside in the streets and saloons, people could see the light from the oil lamps through the windows and hear the comforting strains of the Estey organ along with voices rising in the old hymns. (26)