COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL • JANUARY 30, 2019 •
7A
Off beat Oregon: ‘Uncle Joab’ Powell was West’s most famous pioneer preacher
er and steeple rising from the
front. Simple, but welcoming.
It’s old, but it’s not the
original Providence Pioneer
Church. Th at structure was
built of logs back in 1854,
and according to legendary
Oregon pop historian Ralph
Friedman, it “had an air of
vigilant righteousness, as
though erected by Jeremiah
and maintained by avenging
angels.”
And, as Friedman goes on
to note, that’s not far from the
actual truth.
Th ere will surely never be a
second Jeremiah. But the man
who led the congregation of
Missionary Baptists who built
Providence Church may have
been the closest the world has
come to producing one.
Joab Powell, better known
as Uncle Joab, stood over six
feet tall, with a great barrel
By Finn J.D. John
for The Sentinel
(Note: Th is is part 1 of a 2-part
series on pioneer preacher Uncle
Joab Powell)
A
bout halfway be-
tween Crabtree and
Lacomb, tucked into
the side of a gentle hill, stands
an old and somewhat aus-
tere-looking little white build-
ing known as Providence Pio-
neer Church.
Th e “pioneer” part of the
name is somewhat superfl u-
ous. Just one look at it suffi ces
to tell it’s an old-style church
of the kind built 150 years ago
by people who’d come to Ore-
gon in covered wagons. Th ere
is no stained glass, no icons
or statuary — just four simple
sash windows along each side,
a steep roof, a simple belltow-
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chest enclosing a pair of lungs
whose capacity was already
legendary when he arrived in
the state via covered wagon in
1852.
Uncle Joab is probably best
known in Oregon today for a
sequence of political “fi rsts,”
not all of which would have
met with his approval. Th e
main ones are these: He was
the fi rst chaplain in the state
Legislature, in the year Or-
egon became a state; and, of
course, he led the lawmakers
in off ering up the Legislature’s
fi rst prayer.
But interesting as these lit-
tle factoids may or may not
be, they’re far from the most
interesting part of Uncle
Joab’s story.
J
oab Powell was born in
1799 in the hills of Ten-
nessee — Claiborne County,
north of Knoxville, close to
the Kentucky state line. His
was a Quaker family, and he
was brought up in the classic
manner of the plain-dress-
ing, plain-speaking Society
of Friends, bitterly opposed
on Biblical grounds to the
institution of slavery, the con-
sumption of alcohol, and the
treatment of black people and
Indians as something other
than fellow men and women.
Th ese moral characteristics
seem to have soaked deep into
his bones, for when he left the
Quakers and became a Mis-
sionary Baptist, he brought
them with him — except for
the plain-speaking part, the
1600s-style use of “thee” and
“thou,” which in the mid-
1800s was already starting to
look a bit like an aff ectation.
In 1817, he married Anna
Beeler; and the two of them
got started building a family
that would, by the time they
were fi nished, number 14
members.
Anna was a critical and usu-
ally-forgotten part of the Un-
cle Joab story. For one thing,
Joab Powell was illiterate: he
had no formal schooling at
all. But he had an uncanny
ability to absorb and remem-
ber information.
So Anna would read to
the family from the Bible; he
would absorb and memorize
whole books of it; and, at
Sunday services, out it would
come — somewhat imperfect
word-for-word, but spot-on
in spirit and intent, and deliv-
ered with enthusiasm and fi re.
Not surprisingly, he was
promptly called into the min-
istry.
He had been preaching in
Tennessee for six years when,
in 1830, the family moved to
Missouri — which was pretty
much the frontier at that time
— and took a 640-acre land
claim, which he started in
farming as a sort of side hus-
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tle. His real avocation in Mis-
souri was, of course, as a cir-
cuit preacher, riding all over
the frontier to hold services.
Anna essentially fi nanced
this avocation by managing
their farm with the help of
their growing brood of chil-
dren.
Twenty years passed. Th en
the Oregon Trail opened,
and the Powells, living right
there in Missouri, were per-
fectly positioned to join the
throng. Th ey promptly did so,
crossing the plains in the ap-
proved Oregon Trail fashion
and taking up a land claim at
the forks of the Santiam Riv-
er — where Anna set up her
farming operation anew with
the help of her now-mostly-
grown children and, in sever-
al cases, their spouses.
Immediately upon arriv-
ing, Uncle Joab joined several
other members of the party
— Missionary Baptists all, of
course — to establish Prov-
idence Church. Th en, onto
his long-suff ering horse he
hopped, and set out into the
wilderness to obey the Great
Commission.
I
t took a stunningly short
amount of time for Uncle
Joab Powell to become the
most famous preacher in the
West. He had, as you will no
doubt have gathered, that
magical combination of fero-
cious passion and brotherly
love that good Baptist preach-
ers are known for — and he
seemed to have more of both
than anyone else alive. To
that, add his prodigious lung
capacity — it was said, only
half in jest, that when he was
preaching a sermon in Scio it
could be heard in downtown
Jeff erson, ten miles away —
and you can imagine what the
Forces of Evil found them-
selves up against.
He would start off by sing-
ing a hymn — or, perhaps it
would be more accurate to
say, roaring one. His pitch,
several sources say, was not
as good as his memory; but
he made up for any such de-
fi ciency with volume.
Nor did he care: He was
there to save souls, not to land
a spot on Team Christina.
Next he would start into a
sermon, and hold the congre-
gation spellbound. His im-
perfectly remembered Bible
verses would come out “trans-
lated” into frontier English
— which the homesteaders
always related to better than
they would have the original
King James text.
“When he went on a
preaching trip he always took
one of the brethren with him,”
recalled his granddaughter,
Rachel Arminta Peterson, in a
1939 interview with a Works
Progress
Administration
writer. “Th ey went two by two
just as the early disciples did
at Jesus’ command. In many
of the places where they went
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S entinel
C ottage G rove
there was no church building,
so they preached in log cab-
ins, in schoolhouses, in court
houses or out of doors under
the trees. At Lebanon he oft en
held meetings in the old San-
tiam Academy building. …
His journeys took him south
as far as California.”
When Uncle Joab rode into
a town, he typically would
stay with a relative or friend,
and then put the word out.
He didn’t follow a schedule;
he just dropped in, preached
a “sarvice,” and moved on
the next day to do it all again
somewhere else.
“He always came unexpect-
edly; we never knew when
he was coming,” Peterson re-
called. “He always spent the
night with us and as soon as
he came it was the business
of us children to start out and
notify all the neighbors that
there would be preaching at
Father's house that night. We
children would run every-
where and by evening when
the meeting began there
would be a good housefull.
Th at is the way he went all
over the country.”
On occasions when there
wasn’t a river nearby for pur-
poses of baptism, tanks built
of planks were sometimes
knocked together and fi lled
with water. Uncle Joab was a
stickler for baptism, and at ev-
ery service the opportunity to
get “soaked and saved” had to
be ready to hand.
B
ack at home in Linn
County,
Providence
Church had swelled to more
than 400 members — an
enormous congregation for
the population of Linn Coun-
ty at the time. And by 1859
— on the eve of Oregon’s fi -
nally becoming a state — Un-
cle Joab was far and away the
most famous clergyman in
the territory.
So, naturally, when the fi rst
state Legislature convened
and thoughts were turned to
the need to start meetings off
properly with bowed heads
and folded hands, his was the
fi rst name to come to mind.
An invitation was dispatched
to him forthwith, off ering a
$30 fee for his services as the
new state’s fi rst offi cial man
of God — the Chaplain of
the Legislature. It was just as
promptly accepted.
It became clear, though,
immediately upon his arrival,
that the Legislature had had
no idea what sort of preacher
they were hiring when they
sent for him.
Th ey would learn, the hard
way, over the next few weeks.
We’ll talk about that, and the
assorted hilarity that ensued,
in next week’s article.
(Sources: “WPA Interview:
Peterson, Rachel Arminta
(Powell),” a government doc-
ument transcribed by Patricia
Dunn in 2000 and published
on the Linn County Gene-
alogical Society Website at
www.lgsoregon.org; Road-
side History of Oregon, a
book by Bill Gulick pub-
lished in 1991 by Mountain
Press; In Search of Western
Oregon, a book by Ralph
Friedman published in 1990
by Caxton Printers Ltd.)
Finn J.D. John teaches at
Oregon State University and
writes about odd tidbits of
Oregon history. For details, see
http://fi nnjohn.com. To contact
him or suggest a topic: fi nn2@
offb eatoregon.com or 541-357-
2222.