GARRETT, Reverend Walter E.

[MS] History of The New Oxford Charge of The Reformed Church in The United States, Adams County, PA.

n.p. 1937. Quarto. 28.5cm. Mimeographed typewritten MS. Institutional black cloth half binding over brown paper covered boards, titled by hand to spine. 167pp. A clean, strong institutional binding with some minor wear and scuffing to extremities, solid and durable; internally clean, old library stamp from the Theological Seminary of Lancaster, PA to front pastedown; something of a hybrid beast with some handwritten and typed additions and corrections, and a number of pages inserted into the text at points, on varying sizes of paper which, combined with the number of original photographs laid onto the pages at appropriate places, makes for a pleasing impression; the mimeo'd pages vary in clarity and quality with some displaying a characteristic blur, but remaining legible, and others being crisp and clean.

A very good example of a "work in progress" ms with 29 photographs of notable church figures and locations; some are clearly sourced from other publications, but a number are original photographs supplied by either the Reverend Sheely, pastor at the time of publication, or by local photographers and members of the congregation, with credit often given on small slips bound into the work at the appropriate points.

Garrett states in the preface "While serving as pastor of the New Oxford Charge (1914-1917) it became known that the Charge had no records of its splendid past. Upon inquiry, as to the cause of this loss, it was said that a fire had destroyed the Parsonage at Abbotstown, and with it the records had been destroyed..." Garrett's efforts to remedy this historical void, which became known during the research for his published and rather better known work "History of The Kreuz Creek Charge" [1924], resulted in the current manuscript "the Minutes of Zion's Classis were gone through systematically. At that time a great many notes on the New Oxford Charge were gathered, with the hope of using them some time in the future."


Garrett's history follows the Pastors and notable congregational members of the church from the Rev. Carl Ludwig Boehme in 1775 through to Rev. Sheely in the early 1920's and the contemporary ministers of the church at the time of writing in 1937, covering many of the major events, expansions, victories, and tragedies of the necessarily small, originally German immigrant driven and maintained church in rural Adams County.
The area is necessarily considerably altered from even Rev. Garrett's day, but family names of the original congregation can doubtless be found among the followers of St. Paul's UCC of New Oxford, PA. and a number of other places of worship that serve the descendents of the original German and Scots-Irish inhabitants of the region. It is a safe assumption, from a historical point of view, that the Reverend Garrett's history might be the only collected survival of a number of Pennsylvania families and personalities.
If this work was published beyond this working manuscript, then we can find no trace either in trade, or in US institutional holdings.

Price: $250.00

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