Prominent in the history of the Association is Miss Harriet Bishop. She is credited with helping to start the first Baptist Sunday school in St. Paul only two weeks after her arrival in the area known as “Minnesota” on July 13, 1847. According to the Minnesota Historical Society, “Harriet Bishop was part of the first group of women to complete Catherine Beecher’s teacher training course in Albany, New York. Beecher (sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher) had established this school specifically to train women to teach in remote locations in the American West. Harriet Bishop accepted the challenges offered by this new role for women and responded to missionary Thomas Williamson’s call for teachers in a place called ‘Minnesota.’”
The First Baptist Church of St. Paul credits Harriet Bishop as the one who helped start their church. They give the following information on their website:
Traveling by boat across Lake Erie and then on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, Harriet finally reached her destination by canoe and was surprised that St. Paul was so small. Only a few homes and five stores made up the town. Of the 50 people who lived there, 20 were children without a school.
Harriet set up classes in an old blacksmith’s shop — “a mud-walled log hovel covered with bark and chinked with mud” — where on July 19, 1847 ten pioneer and Indian children came to learn. Six days later, she invited them back to attend Sunday School ‘The children should not only be taught to read and write,’ Harriet stated, ‘but also be taught the Word of God.’ And she invited everyone from the town to join her at the school for Sunday worship services.” The Minnesota Historical Society describes her classroom as frequently housing “more rats, snakes and stray chickens than students.”
Dr. E. R. Pope describes these scholars for us in the October, 1934 edition of the North Star Baptist magazine: “A small blacksmith shop made of logs; seven children, four of whom were Indians; a half-breed woman for interpreter; the young lady (Miss Harriet Bishop) from Vermont. Here is the beginning of Baptist work in Minnesota.”
Elementary schools in Savage and in Rochester have named their schools after Harriet Bishop. Harriet Island in St. Paul is also named after her.
Future postings will take a closer look at Miss Bishop and the times in which she lived.
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Each week visitors to this site will be able to read about a segment of Minnesota Baptist Association (MBA) history. Much of the information will come from a booklet published in 1983 entitled A Light in the Darkness by John Ballentine and Wellie Midgley, two pastors who served in MBA churches. Other information will be taken from Annuals containing the minutes of the annual meetings back to the beginning of the association in the 1850s, along with articles from the North Star Baptist magazine and from The History of Pillsbury Baptist Bible College written by Larry Pettegrew. -Carolyn Van Loh
