Methodist church

Manawa’s Methodist church is your classic post card clapboard church, don’t you think? It appears quite dark in the upper photo, and even when taking into account the sepia tones of old photos I’d guess that it was once painted in darker colors, but ever since I can remember it’s been snow white.

I’d guess the top photo probably dates from about 1908. You can practically watch the box elder trees in the church yard grow when you compaire these series of photos. With the exception of an entryway added to the front door, the Methodist church has always looked pretty much the way it did when it was dedicated in 1905. Only Sacred Heart church appears so traditionally and delightfully unchanged as this church.

It’s worth nothing that the Methodist church is the only wood-frame church building that I know of in town. I find that remarkable for a building that’s over one hundred years old.

The church looks almost exactly the way it did almost 100 years ago, with a few changes that are immediately obvious but don’t detract much, in my opinion, from the simple, clean lines of the original building. Besides the entryway I mentioned already, an extra room was added at the back of the church, the north rose window is covered over for reasons that I don’t know, and there are screens over the lower parts of the narrow flanking stained glass windows.

The church stands on the west side of Depot Street, just a hundred feet or so south of the spot where the “new” High School was. There was a playground between them, filled with the kind of monkey bars and seesaws that make modern insurers cringe, and put a litigious gleam in the eyes of lawyers.

I was in the Methodist church just once and, if memory serves me, I recall that the congregation sat with their backs to the east windows, which are on the left.

You might be able to make out, from comparing the photos, that when they added the entryway they either moved or copied the stained glass window over the front door.

The bottom photo also gives you a clear view of the weather vane at the top of the steeple, which you can’t see in any of the other photos. That bugged me for the longest time, and I’ve wondered if that’s always been up there.

The house visible in the background of the bottom photo was the residence of the church’s pastor.

[The various sources I've found for the information on this page refer to the church variously as the Methodist Evangelical church, the United Methodist church, or simply the Methodist church. According to a the lists of churches currently in Manawa, the congregation is known today as United Methodists. On this page, I've resorted to using the simple term Methodist in the hopes of avoiding confusion.]

Every single gosh-darned word © 2004-2006 Dave Okonski