Our Graphic Timeline USH

Our Graphic Timeline – an in-depth focus on congregational life

This is about the graphic timeline in our church lobby. It began several years ago in my head as a dialogue. This was prompted by questions and comments by friends, relatives, neighbors and some fellow members (including myself) who knew little about our beginning and history. Either locally or nationally. There were tales repeated over the one hundred plus years of our existence in Hartford. Some turned out to be accurate and some not. But most challenging was whether or not Unitarian/Universalism was even a religion. It could be a sect with no significant history. No creed and no apparent discipline. The church architecture was likened to a larger tent, adding to a sense of the temporary.

I hoped the pictures in the timeline (the graphics) would catch the eye of busy people (including children) and stimulate a desire to read and learn more. Among other sources to read and immediately available to us was Freeman Meyer's book Hartford Unitarianism 1844-1944.”

Happily we had a wealth of archival material due to the saving habits of the Rev. Nat Lauriat. Entering our archives (as they were then) and being exposed to that material had all the excitement of an archeological dig. It was “as left in action,” held on to by category so that there were highlights and surprises that surfaced, outstanding events and patterns one might have missed if the material had already been historicized. There were photographs, formal printed sermons by earlier ministers, Council minutes and years of treasurer's reports, scrapbooks with newspaper clippings as well as bound copies of Council records. There were pictures and records of the congregation's four churches including much information and architectural drawings of our present church and the theological symbolism that went into the design. The individual qualities and interests of our ten ministers stood out and could be tracked.

Dr. Samuel May, for example, befriended Prudence Crandall when she was threatened by the community in Brooklyn, CT for including black girls as students in her boarding school. In a sermon, the Rev. John Kimball spoke about the Haymarket Riots in Chicago and compared the situation and experience of the so-called anarchists who were hanged to the situation of Jesus when the crowd demanded that he be crucified. The Rev. Charles Graves used a sermon to clarify issues in the Scopes trial pointing out that there are two stories of creation in the Bible, which weakened the case for the prosecution. Rev. Graves, in a newspaper article, recalled the earliest years in Connecticut before disestablishment when it was illegal to profess a lack of belief in trinitarianism. That could have meant jail for Unitarians. Do our children know that?

It seemed important, in the first panel, to show the early beginnings of concepts leading to Unitarian/Universalism. It was at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD where the Trinity was made church law over the objections of those led by Arius and others. So our history and presence are at least as old as that of the churches around us.

As consultants, the project had a theologian in Rev. Jon Luopa, an historian in Freeman Meyer, a librarian/archivist in Margaret Sax and a graphic artist in Carolyn Soutter. I saw myself as Everywoman.

Dorothy Fowler

Let us know of any comments, errors and corrections - thanks (revised 2/21/05)