Crossing the Line Now and Then

Written By Jonathan Krogh

Dear Good People of La Grange, IL/TN:

Last week I spent a few days in Memphis, TN, visiting my friend The Reverend Dr. R. Milton Winter (retired), a former colleague of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. We spent one evening with Steven Smith, Director of Finance & Operations of Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis. His residence is Tiarra, the former home of Franklin D. Cossitt, founder of La Grange, IL, and former resident of La Grange, TN. We also visited Immanuel Episcopal Church in La Grange, TN, a house of worship significantly more modest than Emmanuel Episcopal Church in La Grange, IL, but a tidy space appropriately appointed and substantially restored in 1977.

Immanuel Church (it is unclear why Cossitt spelled Emmanuel with an “E” in our La Grange) was founded as a result of the persistence of a Mrs. Mary Hayes Willis Gloster, a doctor’s widow who arrived in West Tennessee distressed that there was no Episcopal church. In 1830 she and her son-in-law, John Anderson, made the harrowing wilderness journey east to Franklin, TN, in hopes of persuading The Reverend James Hervey Otey to establish a church in La Grange, TN. The Reverend Otey had just been appointed as the first bishop of Tennessee and was Mrs. Gloster’s grandson and good friend of Mr. Anderson. Tradition holds that they traveled with John Anderson’s infant child with hopes that the presence of a baby would protect them from attack.

Immanuel Church was established in 1832 and was a fully operating house of worship when Franklin Cossitt arrived in 1835 at the age of 14 to live with his uncle, Major George Germain Cossitt, after the death of Franklin’s father in Granby, Connecticut. The rector of the parish was missionary priest The Reverend Mr. Thomas Wright of New York. 

While visiting, I learned how the cupula high atop Tiarra was lifted from the house in the tornado of 1900 and carried nearly 18 miles, landing in a cotton field relatively unscathed. It was brought back to the house by horsedrawn wagon and reattached, the repairs noted by the contractor assisting with the house’s restoration a few years ago. I also learned how the house was commandeered by the Union Army after the fall of Memphis in June 1862, with officers occupying the first level of the home while Franklin lived on the second floor. It was these Union officers who persuaded Franklin to travel north. He was not a secessionist, a fact borne out in trial following the war when he applied for and won reparations for the Union Army’s damage to his Tennessee home. The church too had been confiscated as an ordnance depot and later used as a Union Hospital. According to local accounts, the building was terribly abused. The pews and chancel furniture were used to make coffins for the Union dead. If you’ve read this far, congratulations.

I have no profound application in today’s musing, no profound insight about history or the spiritual strength of ancestors. Just some random stories bouncing around in my head. Perhaps they will jell into something meaningful, perhaps not. “The past is a foreign country,” were the opening lines of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go Between. And traveling into the rural towns around Memphis, I found myself grappling with language and customs as if in a strange land. Had the Civil War (or War Between the States) turned out differently, I would have needed to wait in long lines with my identity papers waiting for my luggage to be searched, worried about guardsmen rounding up people of color... Thank goodness I was saved from that indignity.

Knowing that travel broadens the mind, and may also numb it, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor

Jonathan Krogh
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