Unitarian Church in Mt. Pleasant, Florida - dedicated in 1915

Dedication of the Mt. Pleasant church building on April 25, 1915. Photograph above obtained from the Harvard Theology Library. The photograph below is from the family papers of my grandmother, Irma Eugenia (Bevis) Jones, who was born in Mt. Pleasant in 1898.  

Irma's sister, Dora Bevis, also mentions the church in letters she wrote to her future husbnd, Jim Evans.  Jim’s parents, J.T. and Marzee Evans, were active in the Unitarian church and Dora mentions attending with them in 1917.  Also, when Jim was in the Army preparing to join the War effort in France, Dora wrote about the Unitarian minister having dinner with them in February of 1918, “We have company tonight, the Rev. Zastrow, he is certainly pro-German.  If he were to talk to outsiders like he does here to us I believe he might get his light put out.”  The church appears to have become inactive a few years later.

 

Unitarian Ministers of the Florida Circuit

 

Rev. Jonathan Christopher Gibson – He was born in Alabama in 1843 and served in the Confederate Army.  After the war, he went to Florida and became a teacher and a Baptist circuit preacher.  Around 1887, he met the Southern Secretary of the American Unitarian Association,Rev. George L. Chaney, who influenced him to become a Unitarian.  He then began evangelizing for the Unitarian faith in the same communities where he had formerly preached the Baptist Gospel, in the region extending from Apalachicola to Quincy.  He depended upon the support given to him by voluntary offerings from local alliances in the South and from the more established Unitarian churches in the North.  Rev. Gibson established the first Unitarian church in the state of Florida, in Bristol (Liberty County) in 1902.  Poor health caused him to retire from the ministry in 1910 and he died in 1913.

 

Rev. Francis M. McHale – He was born in Ontario, Canada in 1858 and spent his early years in New York and Michigan.  He attended Northwestern University and was admitted to the bar in Illinois.  After practicing law in Colorado and Kansas, he became a Unitarian minister around 1898.  In 1910, he succeeded Rev. J.C. Gibson as circuit preacher in Florida, making his home in Greensboro and later Marianna.  Rev. McHale organized and built the church in Mt. Pleasant, which was dedicated on April 25, 1915.  He died September 4, 1916.  

 

Rev. Gustave H. Zastrow – He was born in Nuremberg, Germany in 1876 and grew up in Wisconsin.  He served in the Spanish American War.  He was admitted to the clergy in 1910 and served in various places in the U.S., including Florida, where he was secretary-treasurer of the Southern Unitarian Conference.  He took over the Florida circuit after Rev. McHale’s death in 1916.  Census records show Rev. Zastrow resided in Tallahassee as late as 1920.  He died in 1925.