102 / Growth-and Some Decline-of the Churches

Mennonite settlement in Fulton County served the congregation for a while.`

From 1805 to 1885 there was a small Mennonite settlement in West Township of Columbiana County, Ohio. Jacob Stoffer and John Freed, both from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, settled in this area during the years 1805-8. Others moved into the settlement and by 1825 a congregation was organized largely through the efforts of John Freed. The congregation, according to tradition, was organized by Jacob Nold, and services were held in the home of one Jacob Smith, a minister. In 1859 Jacob Newcomer deeded a tract for a wooden frame church building which was erected and stood till 1932. The congregation, however, ceased to exist by 1885. Migrations to other parts of Ohio and to Indiana as well as the loss of youth to other churches prevented the settlement from becoming large or permanent."

What lessons are learned from the extinct communities? Though less than a century away the facts of the matter are not sufficiently at hand to judge with complete accuracy. Yet it would seem that stronger leadership (economic as well as spiritual) might have easily saved some of these communities from extinction. A part of the story is told too in that the churches could not adapt to the demands of a changing frontier scene. Internal dissensions played their part in many a declining community. Cause and effect are hard to distinguish. For example, was intermarriage the result of decline, or a cause of it, or was it both? 39 The successful transplanting of religious communities was never easy, including those by Mennonites on the Ohio frontier of the nineteenth century."

Schismatic Movements in the Nineteenth Century

The Ohio churches in the last half of the nineteenth century saw some growth and made progress as they built their common life on a growing frontier. But they could not escape tensions that led to divisions among them. Both the Mennonite and Amish branches underwent strain and stress. What was the nature of these tensions? How and why did they originate? What results followed and what seem to be the permanent deposits in the life of the church?

The Holmes County Division

One of the earliest divisions in the Ohio Amish churches was