Transitions, Leaders, and Changing Churches (1865-1900) / 141

In summertime the barn, which took care of fine livestock and large crops, provided the space for Sunday worship. John Umble describes such a service.

The well-swept barn floor on the second story of the Pennsylvania bank barn afforded a spacious room, flanked with well-filled mows of sweet-scented clover and timothy hay. While the horses that had brought the worshipers to the ser

vice contentedly munched hay from the well-filled mangers of the floor below, the pious worshipers sat on the homemade benches and sang their hymns from the Ausbund, joined their hearts in silent prayer, gave their attention to the reading of the Scripture from the Froschquer Bible, and listened attentively to the earnest exhortations to holy living delivered by untrained farmerpreachers ordained from among their own number."

An additional change that affected John K. Yoder and his time was the wave of immigrants who between 1860 and 1880 joined his churches in Wayne County. The immigrants came directly from the Alsace and Montbeliard region of France and perhaps a few from Switzerland. Their families bore the names of Meyer, Graber, Rich, Gerig, Conrad, Kauffman, Berkey, Ramseyer, Krabill, Richard, Kropf, Miller, Stoll, and Frey. Some of these families also settled in adjacent Stark County. These immigrants could speak both French and German and they naturally possessed some different outlooks and experiences than their fellow members who had come from Germany to the New World a century or more before them. Their absorption into the Wayne County community called for some adaptation.

Among the nineteenth-century immigrants was Benjamin Gerig who was to become John K. Yoder's successor. Gerig was born in Pfastatt, France, in 1842. At the age of seventeen he came to the United States to avoid military service and settled in Wayne County. Gerig had joined the church while still in France, though it was not till 1895 that he was ordained a minister. In the following year he became a bishop, which office he held till his death in 1913. He was married to Lydia Schrock and had five sons and five daughters. He was a respected churchman in the brotherhood and a successful farmer in one of Ohio's leading agricultural areas. His son Jacob S. Gerig became his successor as bishop in the influential Oak Grove Church at Smithville.

Yoder's role as leader of the Wayne County community was especially important on the temperance issue. Like all frontier communities the manufacture and use of strong drink was all but taken for granted. Harvest saw jugs of whiskey in the fields as a