- Oysterville Methodist Church (1872-1921)
The two main religious groups in early Oysterville were the Methodists and the Baptists. Thirty years after the town’s founding, the Methodists abandoned our little town on the bay in favor of newly founded Ocean Park.
According to some accounts, the busy boomtown character of Oysterville gave the town a ‘sporting atmosphere’ which was distasteful to the Methodists and to avoid it they looked elsewhere for a more pastoral setting. It was I.A. Clark (co-founder of Oysterville with my great-grandfather Espy) who platted Ocean Park for “The Ocean Park Camp Meeting Association of the Methodist Episcopal Church.”
In 1989 Lucille Smith wrote about Ocean Park’s beginnings for the Sou’wester: The Plat of Ocean Park contained hundreds of lots (the average measuring 50 x 100 feet) arranged into blocks and lots. To begin with, leases were given to members of the association, but in 1888 the association started selling deeds. Each deed contained prohibitions on the use and manufacture of intoxicating drinks, gambling and other immoral practices. Today, many of the deeds still contain these prohibitions, but they are no longer enforceable.
While the Methodists were busy establishing themselves in Ocean Park, the Baptists stayed in Oysterville and in 1892 built their church which is the only one still standing. (The abandoned Methodist Church finally blew down in a winter gale in the early 1920s.) Somehow, since it was the Baptists who stayed on, I’ve always thought they were the ones the Methodists wanted to disassociate themselves from.
But I’ve also found it curious that the Methodists were the group that found Oysterville’s rowdy, pioneer ways distasteful. There are Methodists and Baptists, several of them ministers, on both sides of my family as far back as those churches go. In my family it has been the Methodists who were the more tolerant group – better educated, more cultured and sophisticated, and more likely to overlook the shortcomings of others. Indeed, my great aunt Dora Espy, raised in a strict Baptist household, told this story of her childhood in Oysterville:
There was a Methodist church on one corner and a saloon on the other. There were 7 saloons…The Methodist church across the street would hold revival services. Carruthers at the saloon would go to the service and get converted. People would go around saying how nice it was that Carruthers was saved. Then he would back slide again. As a kid I would wonder what God would do with him after he got him saved.
Since saloon-owner Carruthers was a member (albeit backsliding) of the Methodist congregation, I wonder if those church members who left town were actually trying to separate saints from sinners within their own ranks…
People become so dogmatic and narrow minded when it comes to religion and everyone thinks they are correct in their thought. The first time I visited my father’s ancestoral town I asked my grandmother why there were three Bapist churches in such as small town, two of them on the same street. Grandma as nominally Church of Christ. She laughed and said, “Some of the congregation get mad and take different notions, so they go down the street and start another church and congregation.” I have always thought the Methodists more tolerant than the Baptists…at least less “don’ty”.