All Site

Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church. Jefferson Park is now Skinner Park. Northeast corner of Adams & Throop St. Billy Sunday started attending in 1886, became an elder, and was ordained there in 1905. Real Billy Sunday: IN 1905 Mr. Sunday was ordained a minister in the Presbyterian Church, by the Chicago Presbytery, the ordination taking place at the Jefferson Park Presbyterian Read more...

Wendy Knickerbocker, Society of American Baseball Research During the winter of 1887-88, Sunday made arrangements to take courses in elocution and rhetoric at Evanston Academy, part of Northwestern University. In exchange for the courses, he agreed to coach the university’s baseball team during their winter practice sessions. On the night of January 1, 1888, Sunday proposed to Nell Thompson. Evanston Read more...

Site of Pacific Garden Mission from 1880-1923, location of Billy Sunday conversion. Wikipedia:  In 1880, the mission moved to 67 E. Van Buren Street, in a location which was formerly known as the Pacific Beer Garden. At that time, the current name of the mission, Pacific Garden Mission, was adopted; However, evangelist D.L. Moody suggested that the name of the former occupant should Read more...

Wikipedia: By fourteen, Sunday was shifting for himself. In Nevada, Iowa, he worked for Colonel John Scott, a former lieutenant governor, tending Shetland ponies and doing other farm chores. The Scotts provided Sunday a good home and the opportunity to attend Nevada High School.[5] Although Sunday never received a high school diploma, by 1880 he was better educated than many Read more...

Tabernacles & Sawdust Trails: “At Ames, Iowa,” he says, “we had to wait for the train and we went to a little hotel and they came about one o’clock and said : ‘Get ready for the train.’ I looked into mother’s face, and her eyes were red, her hair was disheveled. I said: ‘What’s the matter mother?’ All the time Read more...

Billy Sunday (1862-1935) is regarded as the most prominent — and influential — evangelist of the early part of the 20th century. Born near Ames, he spent part of his youth in Marshalltown, then returned here in 1909, where he spoke to a packed tabernacle of his followers. Image Credit: User, Super, et al. “Re-Digging the Wells of Revival: Dutch Read more...

Formerly the site of the McFerrin House, home of John B. McFerrin, the Methodist evangelist who President James K Polk heard at a camp meeting in 1833 and was provoked, but left “a convicted sinner, if not a converted man.” Read more...

From Wikipedia: They sailed on November 19, 1822 on the ship Thames under Captain Clasby from New Haven, Connecticut in the second company from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to Hawaii. They arrived to the Hawaiian Islands April 24, 1823 and landed in Honolulu April 27.[3] On May 28, 1823 he and shipmate Charles Stewart sailed on the Royal Yacht Cleopatra’s Barge to Lahaina and on May 31 founded Read more...

The lock and key from this jail is in the Virginia Baptist History Museum in Richmond, and can be viewed at https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/starexponent.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/7/16/716a0499-9518-5823-9b53-27f1b0b9db61/5c65aa14703d5.image.jpg?resize=670%2C500 Early congregations also gathered at their own risk, as when the well-bred men of Culpeper County galloped their horses through a crowd that had formed to hear the Reverend James Ireland preach from his cell while incarcerated for Read more...

D.L. Moody tells about Henry Moorhouse: “In 1867, when I was preaching in Dublin, at the close of the service a young man, who did not look over seventeen, though he was older, came up to me and said he would like to go back to America with me, and preach the Gospel. I thought he could not preach it, and I said I Read more...

In 1896 the Democratic National Convention would be held in Chicago. Who would emerge as the leader of the party to be their presidential nominee? Image Credit: Wikipedia contributors. 1896 Democratic National Convention. 27 Feb. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_Democratic_National_Convention#/media/File:1896_DNC_(2).jpg.   The Coliseum in Chicago was twice the size of Madison Square Garden, and had just been completed. It almost was finished the Read more...

Billy Sunday’s first professional baseball game was played May 22, 1883, in Chicago at now-Millennium Park. Ten years later, on June 11, 1893, D.L. Moody would preach in a circus tent to his largest audience at the same spot! The 1890s were the peak of the Gilded Age. Industrialization, wage growth, railroads, factories, mines, immigration, formed the boom times that were Read more...

Abraham Lincoln, on his way to the White House to be inaugurated as President, stopped by Dwight L. Moody’s Sunday School in “Little Hell” I was once as poor as any boy in this school, but I am now President of the United States, and if you attend to what is taught you here, some of you may yet be Read more...

On this site in 1855, was where Edward Kimball, taught Sunday School. A young D. L. Moody came to his class one Sunday. Kimball was impressed to visit his at the shoe store that his uncle operated nearby.   Featured Image Credit: Author unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Read more...

John Girardeau was pastor of the Anson Street Presbyterian Mission in the late 1850s, before the Civil War. The Mission was targeted to the enslaved population. In Girardeau’s biography we read: The greatest event in his ministry was the revival in the later fifties. This began with a prayer meeting that constantly increased until the house was filled. Some of Read more...

Written on stationary from the Brevoort House in Chicago, Horatio Spafford penned this famous hymn while on a ship as he crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Not that long ago, his daughters had drowned after the Ville du Havre suffered a tragic crash. His wife telegraphed back, “Saved alone.” The manuscript is now found at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. Read more...

Now private home   “[James] McQuilkin had put away the fighting cocks he had been rearing and had turned away from all the worldly pleasures because he claimed God had cleansed him from all his sins. All three of them, being old-line hyper-calvinistic Presbyterians, thought that such a claim as McQuilkin’s was, to say the least, presumptuous. Jeremiah Meneely was Read more...

Lewis Wallace (April 10, 1827 – February 15, 1905) was an American lawyer, Union general in the American Civil War, governor of the New Mexico Territory, politician, diplomat, and author from Indiana. Among his novels and biographies, Wallace is best known for his historical adventure story, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), a bestselling novel that has been called “the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century.”[1] He finished Read more...

Named for their student, Eric Liddell. From the website: Eric Liddell is one of the most famous pupils to attend Eltham College. He joined the school in 1908 at the age of six and like all the other boys in the school at the time, Eric was the son of missionaries – his parents lived and worked in China. Eric Read more...

Frank Jenner spoke with over 100,000 people on George Street in Sydney, asking them: “If you died within 24 hours, where would you be in eternity? Heaven or hell?” Ray Comfort would often tell the story of the faithfulness in evangelism of Frank Jenner Featured Image Credit: Royal Australian Navy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Read more...