This new church at Shelby begins its existence under most favorable circumstances, most of its members being present or former pupils of the college. All are colored people; two are preparing for the ministry; one has been a student at Oberlin, Ohio; one was for some time a resident of Hartford, Ct., and more recently of Columbus, Ohio, a graduate of the high school there and a former pupil here; one is principal of an academy of ten years’ standing at Shelby and a graduate from Talladega. With two or three exceptions, all of them have for some years been trained in our Sunday-schools. The Shelby Iron Company is in hearty sympathy with the movement; the Superintendent, himself a Methodist, coming into the preliminary meeting and saying publicly that the Iron Company would look with peculiar favor on this church should it be organized, recognizing as it did the necessity for more intelligent Christian instruction for the colored people.
The sectarian walls, which in the South are built heaven-high, have in this particular place been badly shattered. There is no outspoken opposition on the part of the colored people, as in every other place known to me. The different denominations worship in the same building, the lower story being devoted to the school and the upper one to the churches. The Iron Company own about two-thirds of the building, the original cost being three thousand dollars.
I suppose there are a million of dollars invested by the Shelby Iron Company at this place, mostly owned in the North. One owner is an honored member of the Centre Church, Hartford, Ct.; another, of the Park St. Church, Boston; another is a Massachusetts man well known among “iron men” both in this country and abroad. The Superintendent is a noble Christian man from Illinois, and was a colonel in the recent war. Several of the local managers are from the North, some are from the South. Most of the workmen, white and colored, who stand all day side by side, are gathered from the surrounding region. Here the North and South meet and learn to know and love each other. The Iron Company is helping to solve the great national problem no less truly than missionary schools and churches. It seems to me sometimes that its entire business is carried on as a kind of missionary enterprise on the broadest basis. Owning thirty thousand acres of land immediately about the “Iron Works,” it exercises wholesome restraint over all classes. Nothing seems to be overlooked; the church, the school, the home, the village morals, the town adornments and the State, are all cared for.