TABERNACLE OF 1923 REFLECTS ‘CAN DO’ ATTITUDE

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JEREMY WALTNER – PUBLISHER

“Audacious.”

That’s the word that comes to mind when Tim L. Waltner thinks back on the local effort to host the 1923 Mennonite General Conference and, as a result, construct a temporary tabernacle that could host several thousand visitors over the course of five days.

“How did these people think they were going to host a national conference, with hundreds and hundreds of people, without a facility?” said Waltner, who spent his career as a newspaper editor and publisher with the Courier and, now in retirement, is the communication and education coordinator at Heritage Hall Museum & Archives (HHM&A). “How bold for them to say, ‘Yeah we can do this.’ We’ll build us a temporary church. We’ll figure out how we’re going to serve all the meals without a kitchen … they had nothing.”

And yet the local Mennonite community, utilizing the grounds of what had been established as South Dakota Mennonite College just 20 years earlier, agreed to play host to the every-three-years gathering of the General Conference Mennonite Church, as association of Mennonite congregations in North America that had been established in 1860.

“It was a ‘can do’ attitude,” said Marnette D. Hofer, archivist and executive director at HHM&A, who notes that because many of the details have been lost to time — or are recorded in notes hand-written in a German script font very difficult if not impossible to read — there are as many questions as there are answers. “Did they say, ‘Yeah we’ll host’ before they had a plan, or did they have something in the works prior?”

“It would seem to me that the school had to be a partner in this in some fashion,” Waltner said. “Obviously they had to buy in by saying, ‘Yeah, you can use our grounds.’ But did they take the lead? One of the cornerstones of the General Conference Mennonite Church was education and they took a lot of pride in all the schools that were developing, so maybe Freeman College said, ‘This will help put us on the map.’”

Regardless, the conference was coming to a college campus that up that point only included the original college building (today Music Hall), a men’s dormitory and dining hall to the southeast, and a women’s dorm the north of that.

Two major projects resulted:

1. The construction of a gymnasium built just in time for the conference that would be used for to serve meals to as many as 500 at a time (the building would later be known as IA building and, much later, taken down to make way for Sterling Hall);

2. And that temporary tabernacle, a wooden structure measuring 95 x 108 and constructed using presumably volunteer labor on the site that, three years later, would be used for the construction of Memorial Hall — the school’s administration building still in use today.

As far as anybody knows, it all went off without a hitch.

And because of that — because of the ability for the Mennonite church community, the college and Freeman as a whole to pull off something of this magnitude — it may have been a motivating factor for the continuing development of the town.

“It empowered the school and the community to realize that they could pull off amazing things,” said Hofer.

Waltner notes that all this happened during a time when development was happening quickly — not just in Freeman but across the nation.

“The 1920s were a heady time; there was a lot of energy in the country,” he said. “Cars were rolling off the assembly line, Lindbergh flew over the ocean, there was a lot of breaking technology, radio was coming in — there was this boost of energy. And to some degree maybe this was part of that.”

Waltner also speculates that hosting the 1923 General Conference helped unite the three different ethnic groups within the Mennonite church.

“It was a discipline that forced the Low Germans, the Hutters and the Swiss Mennonites to work together in another way,” he said. “Founding the school (in 1900) had bound them together because there was this big project; this rekindled that birthing process in a way that I think is significant. It helped them unify their mission.”

Because 100 years have passed and those who attended the meetings at the college are long gone, with the exception of a few photographs that remain in the museum’s archives, we’ll never know what that week looked or felt like.

“Marlyn Friesen came by the other day and said how his dad made that trip for the conference,” said Hofer. “People came from a long way in those Model T’s, and you get to this little oasis here on the prairie? It’s not a big town — they say people were staying all over the place — and here’s this tabernacle. It had to be fairly impressive to people.”

“It certainly put Freeman on the map,” Waltner said.

When it was all said and done, after the several thousands of guests had left town, the tabernacle was disassembled. According to the Sept. 13, 1923 Courier:

Saturday was the day when the sale of the tabernacle was to take place. Quite a few farmers who contemplate putting up buildings were on the ground to put in their bid. The building was sold to the Wolf Creek colony for $1000.00 and will be used for a barn for hogs. They started out Monday to tear down the buildings so the lumber can be hauled away at once because the school opened Tuesday which means a cleaning away of everything found on the campus.

And that was that.

One hundred years later, people like Hofer and Waltner, who take a keen interest in history, still marvel at touchstone moments like the assembly of the 1923 General Conference and continue to seek additional information.

“If anyone has any information — a photo, a sketch, a recollection — let us know,” Waltner said. “We want to know.”

As for the impact of that particular time and place, it’s critically valuable.

“We learn from our past,” said Hofer. “We see what they have done and we learn from their attitudes and their ways.

“So, yeah, this matters. This matters a great deal.”