Notes on Two Hundred Years (and More)
by Douglas H. Parkhurst
This writer prepared a reminiscence for a September 2009 “History Sunday” service at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Danbury. I shared memories of growing up in the Danbury UU church during my childhood in the 1950s and 60s. This article is adapted from that presentation.
The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Danbury (UUCD) moved to its present location at 24 Clapboard Ridge Road during the period 2003 to 2005. Office and meeting space in the existing house was occupied first, while Sunday services and religious education were conducted in rented space on the downtown campus of Western Connecticut State University. With the construction and November 2005 opening of the new Fellowship Hall the move was completed. Before this our congregation spent thirty-plus years at “the Barn,” 9 Picketts Ridge Road in West Redding. Our last permanent home in Danbury prior to West Redding was at 347 Main Street, a short distance south of the railroad crossing. The Universalists constructed this building in the early 1890s and it was our church home until 1966, after which it was sold and in 1974 torn down. Photos of this church, with its ivy-covered walls, tower, and steeple, have been on display in the fireplace room downstairs in the house. This is where I went to church for my first fourteen years. A modern office building now occupies the space where the old church stood.
My parents, Wallace and Louise Parkhurst, began attending what is now the UUCD in the mid-1940s, after coming to Danbury from Massachusetts. My father, the son of a clergyman, grew up in a Universalist household. My mother was raised a Roman Catholic. Over the years both became very active in the congregation, my father as president of the board, superintendent of the Sunday school, youth group leader, moderator of the church, and during the 1950s, president of the Connecticut Universalist Convention. My mother taught Sunday school, worked on church suppers and rummage sales, and served a term as president of the local Association of Universalist Women. Both were active in the MMT (Meet Me There) couples club of the church. Also living with us during my early childhood was my paternal grandmother, Anna B. Parkhurst, who herself had grown up in the Universalist faith and attended church regularly. Gram worked on turkey suppers and led at least one adult religious education group. She was good friends with several of the older ladies of the church, among them Mrs. Voegele, Miss Ritton, Mrs. Hersey, and Miss Grabert.
I was born in Danbury in 1952 and christened (which was what the child dedication ceremony was called in the Danbury church at that time) a few months later. My parents liked to recount that the evening before I was born the family attended a ham and baked bean supper at the church. My mother suspected those baked beans had something to do with my arrival before dawn the next morning!
I was a baby in the church nursery and when I was old enough began attending Sunday school, what today we call religious education. Classes were held in the large room on the second floor of the church, with movable bulletin board-type partitions to separate the age groups. Our lessons were varied and taught often by mothers and occasionally by fathers. My mother liked working with the younger children while my father, a teacher and coach at Danbury High School, worked with the youth group. I recall having a book about Bible stories wherein a child could color and paste or glue pictures and Bible scenes. We read stories about Martin and Judy, children whose experiences taught positive, UU-friendly lessons about growing up. Other books introduced Moses and Jesus and Beginnings and Other Lands….These and other books and curricula were the inspiration and creation of 20th century denominational religious educators, prominent among them Sophia Lyon Fahs (Unitarian) and Angus MacLean (Universalist). For many years copies of these very same books could be found on the shelves of our congregtion’s religious education library. I’m not sure if any remain today.
One of my Sunday school teachers was the senior Seabury Lyon. Long-time members of the congregation will remember him and his wife Eleanor attending at the Barn. Mr. Lyon seemed older than most of our teachers (at the time he was probably middle-aged) and was an expert on plants and growing things. He brought samples and did his best to explain their mysteries to the fourth-graders in his charge. I think one day he took the class to his home and property in Bethel to see the Christmas trees he grew there. Over the years many of these trees found their way to the church (and the Barn) to be decorated during the holiday season.
To be continued…