The open-mindedness of David Orr
In his “History of Arkansas Baptists” (1948), James Sterling Rogers does not offer a source for his story about Antoine Toncray, an ancestor (Rogers says) of Silas Toncray. The earlier Toncray, “… hearing of America, left his horse and vehicle in the streets of Paris and embarked on a vessel there about to sail for the new land.”
While undocumented, it’s a great story and we can hope it’s true.
Silas Toncray, a silversmith, preached for the first Baptist congregation in Little Rock, organized on July 24, 1824. By 1825 it had a handsome brick building on the south side of Mulberry Street (now Third) between Scott and Main.
Rogers gives a bitter account of the congregation’s change of name to First Christian in 1832: He says that while the Baptist church was without a preacher in 1832, a follower of Alexander Campbell came to town and persuaded the Baptist church to start calling itself the “Christian” church. Campbell, a Presbyterian with an interest in “primitive” Christianity, is considered the founder of the Disciples of Christ and the Church of Christ.
Rogers, writing over a century after the change of name, calls it “a shameful advantage taken of courtesy,” which “would not have happened” if Silas Toncray or Isaac Watkins had been present. (Toncray had moved to Memphis and Watkins had been shot and killed by a man who’d stolen some of his hogs.)
In any case, the change of one congregation’s name was no hindrance to the growth of the Baptist church in Arkansas.
The settlement of Fourche de Thomas in Lawrence County (now Columbia in Randolph County) became, in 1818, the site of Salem Church, the first Baptist church in what would become the Arkansas Territory the next year.
Maria Toncray Watkins remarked of Little Rock in 1821 that “the sound of the Gospel of Jesus is not heard in this village,” and by 1828, little Salem Church notwithstanding, settlers in northeast Arkansas wanted for preachers as well. Or so goes David Orr’s account of what brought him to Arkansas. I cannot locate his memoir, but Sterling quotes it at some length and later scholars have quoted it as well.
“In the spring of 1828,” writes Orr, “some two or three pious and cross-bearing old sisters” in northeast Arkansas sent him a plea to come and preach. He showed their appeal to the churches he led in Missouri and, against objections from his flocks, set out for the Arkansas Territory, intending to preach only for five or six weeks. Finding the place “destitute of Baptist preaching,” he decided give up Missouri and settle in northeast Arkansas.
David Orr was born in Bourbon County, Ky., in 1798. According to Edward Harthorn’s entry on Orr in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Orr was baptized by Jeremiah Vardeman and began preaching in Missouri in 1823.
Orr married Eliza Caldwell in 1821; she gave birth to at least nine children. Orr was, according to his family, six feet six inches tall, and according to a Dr. P.S.G. Watson quoted by Rogers, was “slim, straight, long-faced,” with a “high forehead, long chin and thin lips, long nose, deep sunken, piercing, black eyes, and long curly black hair.” Orr’s “education was superior to that of his hearers, therefore for some years he possessed almost unlimited influence.”
In the years after his arrival in Arkansas, according to Charles Bolton, Orr founded nine churches and helped establish the Spring River Baptist Association. Orr was considered a missionary (to a wilderness) by the Baptist establishment back east.
In addition to preaching and founding churches, he joined the Arkansas Territorial Legislature, where he was known as David, the High Priest.
The Arkansas State Archives has published a report called “Disturbing a religious congregation: U.S. vs. Stubblefield Brothers,” in which a grand jury finds that on Dec. 13, 1829, brothers Coleman Stubblefield and Fielding Stubblefield “did … maliciously and contemptuously disquiet and disturb a congregation assembled at the dwelling of one Benjamin Jones” in Lawrence County. Their disturbance included “profanely swearing and using indecent gestures to one David Orr in the peace of God and the United States.”
This is the first occasion I’ve had to wonder what indecent gestures looked like in 1829.
While an undergraduate at Williams Baptist College, Edward Harthorn published an article on Orr in the journal of the Lawrence County Historical Society, a fine account of a later incident in which churchgoers in the Reeds Creek community invited a Mormon, John Stewart, to speak about his religion “at a local public meetinghouse.”
Apparently spirits were high and Samuel Smithee, well armed, was in the pulpit in order to prevent Stewart from occupying it. Witness Nicholas Woodsome, who had also tried to prevent Stewart from preaching, said that “Mr. Orr took hold of Smithee, and I thought was going to hurt him by pushing him back over the pulpit.”
Two cases—one against Smithee and five others for disturbing a religious assembly, and one against Smithee alone for assault against Orr—led to findings against the defendants.