Stephen Perry and the Dakotas Conference Archives & History Commission have released a draft of the first chapter of We Are Yet Alive: United Methodists in the History of North Dakota and South Dakota. Click here to see the entire project in detail. Click here for an overview of the chapter. To view the of the 40-page document click here.

Chapter One uses six interconnected, documented, nonfiction short stories to show how The United Methodist Church came to be, how North Dakota and South Dakota came to be, and how The United Methodist Church came to be in the Dakotas. This first chapter tries to give background and to introduce the people and the issues that will grow in importance in future chapters.

File photo of Rev. Stephen Perry.

The first story in the chapter establishes a connection between the preaching of John Wesley in Gloucestershire and the family whose gift built the Sherman Center at Dakota Wesleyan University.  The second story connects the struggle of Haiti against slavery with Dakota Territory.  The third story compares Thomas Jefferson's intentions in organizing the Lewis and Clark Expedition with the agriculture of the Dakota Indians in the Minnesota River Valley who later inaugurated reservation life in Dakota Territory.  

The fourth story shows what Rebecca McCabe, Charles McCabe, and Abraham Lincoln shared in the early summer of 1863 during the Civil War while Chaplain Charles McCabe was a prisoner of war.(McCabe later helped to start many of today's United  Methodist congregations.)                        File photo of Bismarck McCabe United Methodist Church.

The fifth story uncovers the role that the Evangelical Association (ancestor of the E.U.B.)  played in the transformation of the Great Plains into a major wheat-producing region of the world. The sixth story has to do with the call to ministry and how it brought a young man from the northern shore of Lake Ontario to become the founding pastor of Groton United Methodist Church.

Stephen welcomes comments from anyone who reads the chapter. You can reach him at historian@centurylink.net.  Or contact a member of the Archives & History Commission--(See membership list below).

Dakotas Conference Commission on Archives and History

Rev. R.Duane Coates, Chair, e-mail

Cheryl Finney, Vice-Chair, e-mail

Betty Testerman, Secretary, e-mail

Tom Thaden, e-mail

Rev. Sheri Fadley, e-mail

Rev. Steve Trefz, e-mail

Rev. Hazel Behrens, e-mail

Rev. Charles Finey, Conference Historian, e-mail

Laurie Langland, Conference Arhcivist,e-mail

Pat Breidenbach, Archivist emeritus, e-mail

Rev. Darwin Kopfman, Historical Society Chair, e-mail