Cooksville News: Cooksville and the Famous Unity Preacher Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, by Larry Reed

Thanks to a recent gift to the Cooksville Archives by Stanley James (“Jim”) Naysmith of Cooksville more is known about the famous Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones and his missionary influence on the Village of Cooksville. Jim’s gift was the “Unity Society of Cooksville: Secretaries Book, Sept.1880,” a small, neatly hand-written notebook that contains the minutes, the finances, the activities and the constitution of that local Society.

Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones

Jenkin Lloyd Jones, the famous “Unity” preacher and advocate of Unitarianism in the late 19^th century, was based in Chicago and was a frequent visitor to Cooksville. Rev. Jones gave a dedicatory sermon at the first church constructed in Cooksville, the Congregational Church, on Dec. 18, 1879. And he was a frequent visiting lecturer after that, invited no doubt by the many New England pioneer settlers in the village who viewed with interest his philosophy of uniting all religions instead of focusing on just one in a creedless, universal, ethical, spiritual belief that had its roots in New England’s liberal Congregationalism.

Cooksville Congregational Church (1879), photo c.1900

In August 29, 1880, the Secretaries Book tells us that Rev. Jones “closed a course of lectures" in Cooksville at the Congregational Church, and the local sponsors of his visit issued an invitation to those in attendance who felt “friendly to the work” to meet the next day at the house of Benjamin Hoxie for a “a social and to greet Rev. Jones and to consent in regard to future work” in the village.

The next day, August 30, 1880, according to the Secretaries Book, “an organization was affected to be known as the Unity Society of Cooksville.” The attendees adopted a constitution, and twenty persons signed the constitution and became members. The preamble stated that they would “band ourselves together for the purpose of mutual helpfulness, intellectual improvement and the advancement of practical righteousness in the world.” Officers were elected at the first meeting: J.P. K. Porter, President; Eliza B. Porter, Vice-President; Jane I. Dow, Vice-President; J.T. Dow, Secretary; and James Fergrieve, Treasurer. They decided to meet every two weeks on Sunday evenings in the church with a special invited speaker or with “readings” by various local persons.

Eliza and Joseph Porter, photo c.1895

According to a local newspaper account, when that first business meeting was concluded, Rev. Jones “found himself in that somewhat novel situation for a preacher—a listener, not a talker,” because Benjamin Hoxie took the floor and proved “that he could talk, and talk well and to the point.” Then Hoxie presented Rev. Jones with a complete set of Herbert Spencer’s works, which took the preacher by surprise, and at a loss for words, he thanked them “in a somewhat broken way” and told the group how hard it was to leave Rock County and travel back to Chicago. (But he would often return to Cooksville to preach on other occasions.)

Benjamin Hoxie (1827-1901)

The Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones (November 14, 1843-September 12, 1918), who inspired the Cooksville group, was born in Wales, England. As a one-year-old, he immigrated with his parents and nine siblings to Ixonia (in Jefferson County), Wisconsin, and then ten years later to a farm near Spring Green in Iowa County.

Jones was a pioneering Unitarian minister, missionary, educator, and journalist. He expanded the ranks of Midwestern Unitarians and built up much of the structure of the Western Unitarian Conference. He founded a major program church in Chicago, All Souls, together with its associated community outreach organization, the Abraham Lincoln Centre. A radical theist, he tried to move Unitarianism away from a Christian focus towards non-sectarian engagement with world religion. Later in life, during a time of popular enthusiasm for war, he was a prominent pacifist

Unity Chapel, near Taliesin, Spring Green

In 1886, Jones directed the building of Unity Chapel in the valley near Spring Green. His nephew, Frank Lloyd Wright, served as a draftsman on this project with Joseph Silsbee as the designer. Jones's ties to family and the Wisconsin River Valley remained strong. There, on Tower Hill, with the help of his brothers, he founded a retreat center for city ministers and families. In 1890 this became the Tower Hill Summer School of Literature and Religion. For two months each summer, he vacationed there and used the Summer School as a channel for his energy. Worship was held in Unity Chapel near Tower Hill, where he eventually would be buried in the churchyard and where, nearby, his nephew Frank Lloyd Wright had built Taliesin in 1911.

In Cooksville, the Unity Society met regularly, often in the basement of the Congregational Church, which it voted to “furnish ½ the wood and lights” and help maintain the church where the Society held many “socials” and “entertainments” to help raise funds to pay for guest preachers and to pay the $5.00 annual dues to the Western Unitarian Conference. At one social in 1885, “chocolate & cake, sandwiches & pickles, coffee & doughnuts, pumpkin pie and cheese, and peanuts, constituted our Bill of Fare,” according to the secretary’s minutes. A “Social and Dance” was held at the Masonic Hall with “Nett proceeds $10.71” on Dec. 11, 1885.

With that last entry, the “Secretaries Book” entries end on Dec. 11, 1885. Whether Cooksville’s Unity Society continued its programs is not known.

Other religious communities had settled in Cooksville or nearby from the 1840s onward, some briefly. These included Free Will Baptist, Primitive Methodist, Methodist, Universalist, Congregational, Catholic, and finally Norwegian Lutheran, the latter established in 1891 and still in existence as the Cooksville Lutheran Church.

In an interesting footnote, Frank Lloyd Wright, nephew of Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, would design a small. Prairie-style chapel for Cooksville in 1934, commissioned by the Gideon Newman family, but it was never built.