A Piece of Dixon History: Billy Sunday led largest Christian event Dixon has ever seen

The largest Christian event in Dixon actually started in Sterling 120 years ago this week, on Feb. 12, 1904. That’s when Billy Sunday, the former Major League Baseball player and young evangelist, came to Sterling.

For his revival meetings in Sterling, Sunday commissioned a special tabernacle to be built at Fourth Street and Second Avenue, near today’s bandshell, holding a capacity of 2,000 people. Members of the Dixon Ministerial Association attended the Sterling revival meetings with great interest and took note of Sunday’s powerful preaching.

A few weeks into the meetings, Billy Sunday traveled to Dixon on March 12, 1904, to meet with a group of Dixon pastors, city officials and church leaders. The Dixon delegation then agreed to bring the evangelist to Dixon for an entire month of meetings that would start a year later, on Thursday, Feb. 17, 1905.

Later, several leading Sterling citizens came to Dixon to promote the upcoming Dixon revival. Moses Dillon, a leading Sterling manufacturer, testified in Dixon’s Presbyterian Church that many of his family and employees were converted by Sunday’s revival in Sterling.

The Dixon of 1905

The remarkable impact of Sunday’s visit to Dixon in 1905 can only be understood against the backdrop of Dixon culture at that time.

While almost everyone traveled by horse and buggy, the interurban Sterling Dixon & Eastern Electric Railway has just begun regular trolley service between the two cities in May 1904, a benefit that the Sterling revival lacked.

The sale of alcohol was a hot topic, as local citizens vacillated between voting for Lee County, or Whiteside County, to be “wet” or “dry.” In 1905, though, Dixon was “wet” and had granted 25 liquor licenses.

The local temperance movement, opposing saloons and alcohol, had a long history that dated to the 1850s. But by 1905 the temperance cause was gaining strength throughout the country and in Dixon. Billy Sunday’s preaching would become a lightning rod of support for the pro-dry crusade.

‘A scene of spiritual dearth’

In 1903 Joseph Fort Newton, a Harvard-educated pastor who would later achieve a measure of fame, came to Dixon and started the “People’s Church.” His congregation met in the former Universalist Church at Second and Hennepin, where the First Christian Church now stands.

Newton was probably too harsh when he described 1905 Dixon as “a scene of spiritual dearth and intellectual desolation.” He said, “Almost all the members of the (Dixon) City Council were saloon-keepers or their henchmen,” adding that “a house of ill-fame (was) allowed to flourish near the end of the (Galena Avenue) bridge.”

It’s worth noting that, in the election of 1904, Dixonites resoundingly supported Theodore Roosevelt for president. Local citizens loved his bold speaking, his strong sense of moral fortitude and his charismatic decisiveness. Billy Sunday would bring a similar forceful charisma to Dixon in 1905.

The Dixon tabernacle

Like Sterling, Dixon also built a special “tabernacle” for the Billy Sunday 1905 revival, except Dixon’s tabernacle was over 50% larger. A massive structure of 12,320 square feet, it could seat 3,300 with a choir loft for 300.

Organizers were not allowed to build the tabernacle at Second and Galena, where the Post House stands today. So, they erected the structure on the south riverbank at West First and Madison, next to the car barns of the Sterling-Dixon trolley, which is today’s Kitzman’s Lumber site.

This location allowed easy access by trolley riders from Sterling as well as train riders who came from as far away as Rockford. After getting off at the train station in Dement Town, the trolley took them directly to the tabernacle.

February of 1905 was the coldest winter in decades, but four stoves kept the interior warm. Since Sunday spoke without a microphone, a quiet sawdust floor helped large crowds hear every word.

A ‘union meeting’

Sunday wanted his revivals to be a “union meeting” of all churches in town. While the Dixon Ministerial Association was the primary force behind the revival, seven churches contributed the key funds: Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, Christian, West Side Congregational on Van Buren, and Grace Evangelical, at Ottawa and Fellows.

Notably absent among the supporting churches were Newton’s People’s Church, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. Their lack of support was not disruptive, except in the case of Newton, who openly opposed the revival.

The first day

Just before coming to Dixon, Sunday spoke in Mason City, Iowa, where temperatures had plummeted to 35 below zero on his final night. Just before his Feb. 17 start in Dixon, the local thermometer read 27 below zero.

Nonetheless, on Sunday’s first night in Dixon, a crowd estimated at 1,800 to 2,000 poured into the Dixon tabernacle. Thanks to the four stoves, the interior temperature was 70 degrees.

When Sunday first entered the tabernacle and proceeded down the aisle, the local crowd welcomed him with the “Chautauqua salute” as they waved white handkerchiefs. The meetings attracted generous coverage from Dixon’s newspapers, which provided detailed reporting on Sunday’s speeches and the 200-voice choir assembled from Dixon churches. For the next five weeks, even larger crowds filled the auditorium each night.

Sunday’s speaking style

Billy Sunday came to Dixon in an age devoid of movies, television, radio and internet. These factors helped to make a powerful speaker a must-see attraction for an entertainment-starved city.

He captivated the audience with an energetic delivery laced with potent – and sometimes shocking – words and statements. He commanded the entire stage with movements and gyrations that kept eyes fastened on him from start to finish.

Instead of wearing a clergyman’s clothes, he dressed like a businessman. Some church ladies gasped when he removed his collar and coat and rolled up his shirt sleeves.

Critics accused him of being vulgar and crude. However, since he was raised in orphanages and in rural Iowa, Sunday explained, “I don’t use much highfalutin’ language. I learned long ago to put the cookies and jam on the lowest shelf.”

Master of the sound bite

His speeches were heavily sprinkled with “Sundayisms,” blunt one-liners that etched themselves in the memory and conscience of the audience. Here are some samples.

• “The average girl today no longer looks forward to motherhood as the crowning glory of womanhood. … Her society is made up of poker players (and) wine and beer drinkers.”
• “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.”
• “If every boy and every girl today had a good mother, the saloons and disreputable houses would go out of business tomorrow.”
• “When a girl comes into church with skirts six inches above her shoe-tops, a man cannot keep his mind on prayer-meeting.”

The Dixon revival meetings were held every night except Monday. With three meetings on Sundays and several afternoon meetings, he preached 64 sermons in 32 days. Each sermon typically filled a full hour.

The instrument of music

Every Billy Sunday meeting featured singing led by a professional choir director. Fred Fischer served in that role from 1900 to 1910 (at Dixon), while the renowned Homer Rodeheaver marshalled the music from 1910 to 1930.

The typical service included a half hour of singing before each sermon. One writer said that Billy “succeeded in having the gospel sing its way into the affection and interest of every-day folk.”

The choir director consciously attempted to blend old familiar songs with newly published songs. Sunday’s later revivals often featured unfamiliar new songs like “The Old Rugged Cross” and “I Come to the Garden Alone,” which were composed in 1913.

The final night

On March 20, 1905, the final night of his Dixon meetings, Sunday spoke for 1 hour and 45 minutes to a packed crowd. The Dixon Evening Telegraph reported: “Never had he preached more fervently, never had the great choir took part more feelingly in the song service, never had there been a greater enthusiasm, a greater love for fellow man prevalent among the listeners than last night.”

On that night, 146 persons “hit the sawdust trail” and came forward to “take the stand for the better life,” said the Telegraph. Overall, between Feb. 17 and March 20, 1,354 persons publicly confessed Christ at the Dixon tabernacle meetings.

The results in Dixon

Rev. William Craven of the Methodist Church said the combined membership of the churches supporting the crusade was 2,700 people. Consequently, the 1,354 responses injected a potential increase of 50 percent of the combined church rolls.

Rev. S. S. Cryor of Dixon’s Presbyterian Church declared, “If there is ‘Joy in heaven over the sinner that repenteth’, then surely Dixon has come nearer to heaven in the last four weeks than ever before in her history.”

Estimates of the total attendance at all meetings in Dixon ranged from 147,200 to 185,000. Even though this number would certainly include duplications of people who attended multiple times, no Dixon event has ever attracted as many people to the city.

Dixon’s first YMCA

As compensation for his ministry, Billy Sunday was paid the entirety of the collection on the final night ($2,800), as was his custom. Other dollars donated during the campaign raised $14,570, which is about $500,000 in today’s dollars.

Of that total, $8,403 went to construct Dixon’s first building for the Young Men’s Christian Association. The new YMCA building, erected next to the Nachusa House at Third and Galena, was finished in 1907.

The YMCA would become a staple of the community, continuing even to this day. As a visible result of the Sunday revival, the YMCA would be a wholesome influence on thousands, including the young Ronald Reagan in the 1920s.

The 1905 revival was the first of six visits by the renowned evangelist to Dixon. He returned at least four other times for one-speech events, appearing at the Rock River Assembly dome in 1908, 1919, 1922 and 1932. He preached in only one Dixon church, the Methodist Church, at Second and Peoria, in an event for the Anti-Saloon League in 1931.

His growing fame

By 1915 he was preaching to massive audiences in even-larger tabernacles in major cities from coast to coast. Even presidential candidates such as Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson felt it necessary to express publicly their regard for Billy Sunday.

Converts from his campaigns far outdistanced the totals of Dwight Moody, Charles Finney and other great revivalists before him. By the time of Sunday’s death in 1935, he had preached to 100 million persons, resulting in one million conversions.

He died at age 72 without any blemish on his reputation. In his 1935 obituary the New York Times heralded him as “the greatest high pressure and mass conversion Christian evangel that America or the world has known.”

But 30 years earlier, people in Dixon and Sterling just called him “Billy.”

- Dixon native Tom Wadsworth is a writer, speaker and occasional historian. He holds a Ph.D. in New Testament.