London in 1844 was a city surprised by the first great population shift from farm to city. Queen Victoria’s long and generally prosperous reign was but seven years old and England’s industrial revolution was luring hordes of young Britons to their first eye-opening adventures in a great, teeming city.
George Williams, later Sir George Williams by virtue of a Victorian sword upon his shoulders, was born in an Ashbury farmhouse near Dulverton in 1821. He followed the farm-to-city groundswell to London in 1841 to become a clerk in a dry goods establishment he later owned. Success was to light upon his shoulders like the royal lance, both in business and in the Young Men’s Christian Association he founded in 1844.
Industrialization of the modern
city brought a preponderance of young men together in unprecedented numbers,
creating an environment, which made necessary special efforts in their behalf.
Soon prayer meetings and Bible classes were operating in 14 London business
houses. The units in concert rented the first YMCA building in 1848, an
“apartment” that provided a library, reading room, restaurant, social parlors
and educational classes.
By 1851, the year the YMCA hurdled the Atlantic; there were 16 associations in England with 2700 members. The YMCA movement reached Montreal, Quebec, and Boston, Mass., almost at once late that year. Captain Thomas V. Sullivan, a retired sea captain with a bent for evangelism and an interest in work among seaman, founded the Boston association and set the pattern for the future growth and development of the YMCA in this country. By 1855, there were 329 associations in the British Isles, continental Europe, the United States and Canada.
South Bend in the immediate
post-civil war years was a veritable new London. It’s industrial revolution was
given wartime impetus by the northern Army’s
demand for Studebaker wagons, and
as the soldiers began trooping home after Appomattox many were rewarded with
land grants in the west. Studebaker employment reached a staggering 6,950 in
1872, but despite this pace-setting industrialization, initial attempts to
establish a YMCA in South Bend met with only short-lived success.
Five young men formed a Young Men’s Christian and Literary Association in 1868. The five were Elmer Crockett, co-founder of the South Bend Tribune four years later, Will Bartlett, Lucius Hubbard, Homer C. Harmon and O.H. Palmer. The association rented the third floor of the Good’s Opera House on Washington Street. Various businessmen, who permitted the YMCA and LA to assess them the amount of deficits, guaranteed expenses. Unfortunately, an organization built on such flimsy financial footings could not long endure. ”When we disbanded after a few years, we had a balance of $50, which was turned over to a women’s organization which operated a reading room,” recalled Palmer many years later. Palmer was destined to be a key figure in laying the foundation for the Young Men’s Christian Association that would stand the test of time in South Bend.
Dr. Leander W. Munhall in 1882 was State YMCA Secretary for Indiana. An army officer in the Civil War he had later developed strong evangelistic qualities. In 1932, at age 90, Dr. Marshall was still conducting revival meetings. It was during a Munhall meeting, on the evening of March 9, 1882, in the First Methodist Church that the cornerstone was laid for a permanent YMCA in South Bend. Instead of the usual handshaking routine that would normally occur after that meeting, Dr Munhall called several of the young men in the congregation together and urged the organization of an association in the city. The group voted to “proceed at once.” That original group included Marvin Campbell, E.C. Westervelt, H.F. Clipfell, J.H. Wilson, George F. Loughman, Samual Kinney, L. Liphart, H.S. Fassett, J.G. Kline, and Jasper E. Lewis. Two of those names, Westervelt and Campbell, were to be associated with the Y work in South Bend throughout most of the next 75 years. There must have been some feverish work the following day, for that Friday night, March 10, the group came together again after the Munhall revival meeting to adopt a constitution. And 63 names were attached to the document as charter members.
A simultaneous election of
officers brought some of the city’s leading figures into focus as real “doers”
in behalf of the YMCA movement. Clement Studebaker,
president and co-founder of
the company bearing his name, was elected President. Schuyler Colfax,
Vice-President of the United States under President U.S. Grant, was named first
Vice-President. Orlando H. Palmer, one of the pushers behind the “Y’s” first
effort in 1868, was named recording secretary. Thus was the South Bend YMCA
born, and 40 years later General Secretary Mason Danner was to write, ”from its
very inception, the association has appealed not only to men eminent in the life
of the community, but to the boys and young men whose opportunities have not yet
come to rise from the humbler walks of life where most of us mortals live.”