Plymouth Church, United Church of Christ.

ABSTRACT:  Records of the second oldest church in Milwaukee, located on Milwaukee's East Side, dating from the church's founding in 1841 to the present.  The collection includes annual reports and meeting minutes; financial records; membership and sacramental records; newsletters and pamphlets; information about the church's pastors, including their sermons and research materials; photographs; and church club records including the Women's Guild.  The collection also includes audio recordings of sermons, lecture series, and oral histories.  Since its inception, Plymouth Church has been active in social, political, and religious issues, such as the abolition of slavery, temperance, and more recently, gay and lesbian issues, living with AIDS, and human rights.   

ACCESS RESTRICTIONS:  There are no access restrictions on the materials, and the collection is open to all members of the public in accordance with state law. However, the researcher assumes full responsibility for conforming with the laws of libel, privacy, and copyright which may be involved in the use of this collection (Wisconsin Statutes 19.21-19.39).

ARRANGEMENT:  The collection is arranged into two series:  Manuscript Material and Audio/Visual Material.  Within each series, items are arranged alphabetically.  

SCOPE AND CONTENT:  This collection documents the history of Plymouth Church, located on Milwaukee's East Side, from its founding in 1841 to the present.  The collection is arranged into two series:  Manuscript Material and Audio/Visual Material.

The Manuscript Material series contains records documenting church administration; members and the membership process; and Plymouth Church pastors and deacons.  Also included in this series are sermons, publications, photographs, and information about the church's radio programs and lecture series.

Administrative records include correspondence; constitutions and by-laws; annual reports; meeting minutes of various boards, councils and committees, including the Board of Deacons, Board of Christian Education, Board of Trustees, the Church Council, the Joint Board, and the Renovation Committee; financial records, including fund drives; and remodeling and expansion plans.  

Membership materials include applications, letters of transfer and dismission, directories, as well as Membership Task Force and Membership Committee materials.  Pew books from the 1880s are also found in the collection.  Sacramental records in the collection consist of baptism (1882, 1946-1948) and marriage certificates (1949-1955, 1976-1984).  

The collection also contains biographical information about, correspondence from, and sermons given by the church's pastors.  Pastor Paul Flucke's research materials for his history of Plymouth Church, "Plymouth: A Church and Its World," and a manuscript copy of his work, are also included in the collection.   

The collection contains a variety of publications relating to the church, including newsletters, theses, and pamphlets about the history of Plymouth Church and some of its members.  Church publications include Plymouth Rock (1885-1896), Plymouth Church News (1961-1981), Plymouth News (1981-1997), and Plymouth Bulletin (1914-2001).     

Photographs in the collection include images of members, pastors, church school classes, church celebrations, anniversaries, and various church buildings.  Other materials in the collection document activities and events, such as anniversary celebrations, conferences, retreats, Habitat for Humanity work, and political activism.  Also included are records relating to church clubs and associations, such as the Women's Guild (1927-1984), Men's Club (1957-1972), Business Women's Club (1941-1962), Colony Club (1950-1969), Young People's Society (1902-1909), the Eastside Inter-Church Association (1970-1979), and the Sunday Evening Club (1894-1897).  

The Audio/Visual Material series contains material recorded on audiocassette and reel to reel tape, as well as videocassette recordings and film. 

Included in this series are sermons (1981-1984), and oral histories of congregation members (1986-1988), as well as recordings from the Plymouth Agora lecture series (1989-1996), which include lectures on current social issues, like welfare reform, education, and racial inequality, by Milwaukee civic leaders such as Dr. Howard Fuller, State Representative Tom Barrett, and Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist.

ADMINISTRATIVE HISTORY: Plymouth Church was founded on May 20, 1841 in a school room in downtown Milwaukee through the cooperation of Deacons Samuel Brown and Robert Love.  The church, originally organized in the style of the Orthodox Congregational churches of New England, secured its first pastor, Rev. John Miter, in 1841.  The congregation held meetings at Spring and Water Streets (now W. Wisconsin and Plankinton Avenues), and within a year had grown from 24 members to 65.  The following year the congregation made plans to erect a meeting house.  This building was completed in 1844 on the corner of Spring and Second Streets.  In 1845 the church was incorporated as the First Congregational Society in the town of Milwaukee.  

The congregation continued to grow throughout the 1840s and took stands on issues such as abolition and temperance.  A new building opened in 1851 on the corner of Milwaukee and Oneida (now Wells) Streets. While the church was under construction, the First Congregational Society began discussing an official name change.  On August 21, 1850 the society voted to change its name to Plymouth Church.

By 1864, Plymouth Church had become the largest congregation in the Wisconsin Convention with 456 members.  From 1863 to 1864 the church's combined contributions to other churches, agencies, and institutions totaled over $23,000.  Over the next several years Plymouth Church contributed over half the amount raised by Wisconsin churches to endow a professorship at the Chicago Theological Seminary.

Rev. Judson Titsworth and other congregation members were suggesting a move to Milwaukee's developing upper East Side by the turn of the century.  At the 1910 annual meeting the congregation authorized the church board to sell the building at Oneida and Van Buren, which they had built 23 years earlier, and purchased land for a new church on the southeast corner of Hackett Avenue and Concord (now Hampshire) Street on Milwaukee's East Side.  During 1913 the congregation met in a temporary "barracks" while a new building was constructed.  On Easter Sunday of 1914, the congregation celebrated its first worship service in the new building and continues to worship there today.    

In 1963, Plymouth Church voted to become part of the United Church of Christ, a denomination which was formed in 1957 with the merger of Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church.

Plymouth Church continued to support a politically and socially active congregation throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.  The congregation has been active in controversial issues facing religious institutions, from the abolition of slavery in the 1850s to gay and lesbian issues in the 1980s and living with AIDS in the 1990s.  

In the 1980s, the congregation and pastors became active in preserving church history, resulting in a series of oral history interviews capturing the recollections of long-time church members and a book researched and written by Pastor Paul Flucke entitled "Plymouth: a Church and its World."

COLLECTION CITATION: This collection should be cited as:

Plymouth Church, United Church of Christ. Records, 1841-[ongoing]. UWM Manuscript Collection 165. University Manuscript Collection. Archives, Golda Meir Library. University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee.

RELATED COLLECTIONS:

Church and Cemetery Records (Genealogical Society of Utah Project): Milwaukee County, Wisconsin [microform], 1836-1982. (Milwaukee Micro Collection 70) (Contains Plymouth Church baptism, member, and funeral records, 1850-1924.)

Friedens United Church of Christ (Milwaukee, Wis.). Records. (Milwaukee Manuscript Collection 163)

Hope United Church of Christ (Milwaukee, Wis.). Records. (Milwaukee Manuscript Collection 190)

New Hope United Church of Christ (Milwaukee, Wis.). Records. (Milwaukee Manuscript Collection 162)

ACQUISITION: Plymouth Church donated the bulk of this collection in November 2000 (accession 2000-024), with additional materials donated in April 2002 (accession 2001-108) and May 2006 (accession 2005-066).

PROCESSING: Lisa Jacobson began processing the collection in 2000. Nicole Jackelen, Christel Maass, Matthew Peterson, and Amelia Klem finished processing the collection in 2002-2003. Ryan Claringbole processed accession 2005-066 in January 2007. 

SEPARATION NOTE:  Negatives have been removed from the collection and are stored separately.

DEACCESSION NOTE: Per authority of the Plymouth Church, Michael Doylen removed and discarded a series of duplicative member records originally housed in box 9 in January 2007.

MARC RECORD SEARCH TERMS: The following terms were used in the online bibliographic MARC record to this collection:

• AIDS (Disease)--Social aspects--United States.
• Church records and registers--Wisconsin--Milwaukee.
• Church societies--Wisconsin--Milwaukee.
• Church and social problems--United States.
• Flucke, Paul.
• First Congregational Society (Milwaukee, Wis.)
• Friedens Evangelical Church (Milwaukee, Wis.)
• Gay rights.
• Milwaukee (Wis.)--Church history--Sources.
• Slavery--United States--Anti-slavery movements.
• Temperance--History.
• Titsworth, Judson, 1845-1919.
• United Church of Christ--Wisconsin--Milwaukee.

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URL: http://www.uwm.edu/Libraries/arch/findaids/uwmmss165.htm
Last edited on April 17, 2007.  
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