Mission Yearbook: Presbytery of Cuba’s 1949 photo album illustrates church’s growth

Staff at the Presbyterian Historical Society have recently digitized in full a 259-page photograph album pieced together by the Presbytery of Cuba in 1949.

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Presbytery of Cuba photograph album, 1949, page 18. Primera Iglesia Presbiteriana de la Habana (First Presbyterian Church of Havana). Images clockwise from top left: choir, receiving the missionary, veterans, Sunday school teachers and officials. Middle image: governing body. 

The scrapbook was created with the intention of commemorating the first 50 years of mission work in the country — inside, group shots of students, teachers, pastors and their families, and missionaries abound. They are complemented by photos of the urban areas in which the seeds of numerous congregations were planted and subsequently blossomed.

In March 1890, the PCUS Board of Foreign Missions received a letter from Evaristo Collazo of Cuba. Collazo wrote of his and his wife’s work in Havana, where they ran a day school out of their home. He then asked for help — he wanted to continue offering this service to his community but also had to bring in financial support for his family. Would they send someone to assist him in this important work?

The Rev. Anthony Graybill, the founder of the PCUS Mexico Mission, arrived in Havana not long after. He hit the ground running, baptizing 40 adults, ordaining multiple elders and installing Collazo himself as pastor of the small congregation. 

Collazo and his wife continued serving in Havana; Magdalena Collazo until her death in 1893; Evaristo Collazo until he joined the liberation army in 1895, where he served as a male nurse with the rank of lieutenant. At this time, the deteriorating situation in Cuba led the PCUS Board of Foreign Missions to suspend work for the time being. It wasn’t until after U.S. intervention in the Cuban War of Independence that the church reinstated mission work in Cuba. In fact, the mission boards of nine U.S. Protestant churches sent missionaries to Cuba as the 19th century gave way to the 20th. One example is the April 1899 arrival of PCUS missionary Juan G. Hall in Cardenas, who was received by Ezequiel Torres and Isabel Waugh — all three are names that readers will find dotted throughout the photo album’s captions. The First Presbyterian Church of Cardenas, organized by Hall on Feb. 11, 1900, with 21 members, two elders, and two deacons, is known today as Iglesia Presbiteriana Reformada “Juan G. Hall” en Cárdenas. After Hall’s death in 1904, he was succeeded by Robert L. Wharton.

In 1904, there were seven Presbyterian churches in Havana alone. This includes Collazo’s congregation at the Primera Iglesia Presbiteriana de la Habana (First Presbyterian Church of Havana), which traces its official organization to the year 1901. Upon his return to Havana after his stint in the liberation army, Collazo began collaborating with a missionary sent by the PCUSA Board of National Missions. Pedro Rioseco, of the Presbytery of Philadelphia, arrived in Havana in 1899, where he and Collazo opened a day school together. 

After a letter from Rioseco arrived detailing how their last service in Havana filled the space entirely, leaving barely room to stand, the board sent the Rev. Dr. Joseph Milton Greene to assist the two men in organizing their congregation into an officially recognized church. Greene arrived in October 1901; on Dec. 8, the First Presbyterian Church of Havana was established. Collazo continued his work as before, taking to the pulpit and teaching the local children. He became an official member of the PCUSA and served as moderator of the Presbytery of Havana in 1906.

The Presbytery of Havana was organized on Nov. 16, 1904. It included five pastors, seven congregations, and 416 members. 

By 1918, the presbytery consisted of 27 churches — some of which had previously belonged to other denominations. After experiencing firsthand the rising influence and strong impact of the Presbyterian missionaries on the local Cuban communities, the Congregational Church formally transferred four of its congregations to the Presbytery of Havana in February 1909. 

The unification of all Presbyterian mission work in Cuba in 1918 added more congregations, bumping the number up to 27. Six ministers previously working under the auspices of the PCUS were added to the presbytery’s roll, including Robert Wharton of Cardenas. 

In 1930, the Presbytery of Havana was renamed the Presbytery of Cuba. On Jan. 1, 1959, the Presbytery of Cuba reported 4,293 members in 34 congregations with 46 ministers.

McKenna Britton, Communications Associate, Presbyterian Historical Society Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Rachel Anderson, Global Ecumenical Liaison, Global Ecumenical Liaison Office, Interim Unified Agency
Molly Atkinson, Senior Administrative Assistant, Financial Aid Service, Interim Unified Agency

Let us pray:

God of steadfast faith, we give thanks for the generations who planted seeds of your love in Cuba, and for missionaries, pastors and families who served with courage and dedication. Bless the work of remembering and preserving their stories, so that we may learn from their faith, perseverance and vision. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Presbyterian Historical Society revisits Tucson Indian Training School records

Staff repair harmful language and enhance description of student experiences in the collection

September 28, 2024

Tucson Indian Training School students, 1937. Pearl ID: islandora:

362723

In the winter of 2023, a team of archivists at the Presbyterian Historical Society began the process of reparative description on the records of Tucson Indian Training School. Over the next six months, they worked not only to remove outdated and harmful language, but to enhance the descriptions of students so that their full names, tribal affiliations and experiences are better represented in the collection.

Reparative description is the practice of critically examining and ultimately adjusting the way an institution describes or characterizes marginalized groups, paying particular attention to instances where our description inflicts harm, spreads false narratives, or minimizes past and ongoing injustices. This work began in earnest at the Society at the beginning of 2023, when the Reparative Description Committee formed and committed to developing policies and workflows for a more inclusive approach to describing collections.

After first testing their workflow on the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Christian Education Department of Colleges and Theological Seminaries and National Japanese American Student Council Records, the committee began reviewing additional collections that might be candidates for reparative description work. When they read the collection guide (a document that provides historical background and describes collection material) for the Tucson Indian Training School, the committee immediately recognized that outdated terms were used to refer to the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Tohono O’odham (Papago) people. Upon further reflection, the group noted that the lived experiences of these Indigenous groups were erased and misrepresented through omission and under-description rather than through outdated language alone.

Throughout the 19th century, Christian denominations and the United States government worked together to enact their agendas of cultural assimilation, conversion, proselytization and evangelization upon American Indian/Indigenous peoples. Building upon the Rev. Charles H. Cook’s proselytization and missionary efforts in Sacaton, Arizona, and in the Pima Agency, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Home Missions (BHM) moved to open a contract mission school (a federally supported Christian boarding school) in Tucson, Arizona, targeted at converting “Papago” (Tohono O’odham) and Pima (Akimel O’odham) children to Christianity and assimilating them into white American society.

Page from one of the last issues of “Escuela News,” 

a Tucson Indian Training School periodical, 1960. 

Pearl ID: Pearl ID: islandora:370335

The Tucson Indian Training School — originally the Indian Industrial Training School — opened at a temporary location in early January 1888, then moved to a permanent location later that year. The records of the school, originally transferred to the Presbyterian Historical Society in 1967, were first arranged and processed by Society archivists in 1973.

Fifty years later, members of the Reparative Description Committee began their work to recontextualize the history of the school and lift up the experiences of the students in the collection’s descriptions.

Knowing that Indigenous students’ names had been inconsistently and inadequately recorded, sometimes under aliases or with traditional names misspelled, staff verified and transcribed the students’ full names and tribal affiliations from their original applications, added date ranges for materials contained in each folder, and noted the presence of photographs and personal correspondence, when applicable, on the physical folder titles and in the collection inventory online.

During this process of repairing the Tucson Indian Training School records, the committee also came across over 300 photographs pertaining to the Tucson School in a separate collection (the Support Agency photographs). These photographs have been digitized and made available in the Society’s new online collection, Indigenous peoples of North America history. Along with the photographs, which document student life at the Tucson Indian Training School, the online collection includes student registers and an issue of “Escuela News,” a Tucson Indian Training School periodical.

In the wake of repairing the Tucson Indian Training School records, the Committee has created a process to evaluate connections between repaired collections and other PHS collection guides, catalog records and digital archival content. They hope this process will guide them when they begin reviewing additional collections for repair this fall.

Read an in-depth analysis of the Presbyterian Historical Society’s work repairing the Tucson Indian Training School records. Visit the Indigenous peoples of North America history collection in Pearl Digital Collections.

Presbyterian Historical Society Staff, Special to Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: Presbyterian Historical Society revisits Tucson Indian Training School records

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Rheannon Sicely, Director, Implementation & Continuous Improvement, Board of Pensions 
Manuel Silva-Esterrich, Manager, Call Process Support, Ordered Ministry & Certification, Office of the General Assembly 

Let us pray

Lord, may we be inspired by the beautiful witness of our sisters and brothers who in faith have developed disciplines of family, prayer, reading and reflecting on your Word. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Presbyterian Historical Society

PHS celebrates the Katie Geneva Cannon Digital Collection

July 28, 2023

Katie Geneva Cannon, 1983 (left) and 1995. From the 

Katie Geneva Cannon Digital Collection at PHS.

In 1987, the Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, the first Black woman ordained in the United Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), used the term “Womanist” to explore an interpretation of the Bible connected to Black women’s liberation. Her book that followed one year later, “Black Womanist Ethics,” helped launch the field of womanist ethics.

The Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS) is thrilled to announce that this year, 35 years after the publication of that groundbreaking work, the entirety of Cannon’s personal papers has been digitized and made freely accessible through Pearl Digital Collections.

In 2021, PHS partnered with the Center for Womanist Leadership at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond and The Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary (Columbia University Libraries) to unite the records Cannon distributed across the three institutions. Over a two-year period, PHS staff members scanned and digitized over 450 of Cannon’s sermons, lectures and writings.

The result — the Katie Geneva Cannon Digital Collection — can now be accessed from anywhere in the world for free.

Thumbnail from Calling for the order of the day: 

lessons of liberation for the 21st century, 2012. 

From the Katie Geneva Cannon Digital Collection at 

PHS.

The digital collection was funded by PHS’s African American Leaders and Congregations Collecting Initiative. The AALC redoubles PHS’s efforts to document Black lives, work and witness in an increasingly multicultural church — from the organization of the First African Presbyterian Church in 1807 to the election of the first African American Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in 2016. Click here to learn more about the African American Leaders and Congregations Collecting Initiative.

PHS shared about the collection in its Spring 2023 issue of Presbyterian Heritage, the society’s biannual newsletter. Along with the Katie Geneva Cannon Digital Collection, the issue also highlighted incoming collection items including recently digitized records from the Rev. Dr. Edler Hawkins, the first Black moderator of the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and U-matic videotapes that document More Light Presbyterians’ history.

On the evening of Oct. 12 from 5 through 7 p.m. Eastern Time, PHS will host an event in Philadelphia to honor Cannon’s legacy and celebrate the completion of the project. Guests will hear about the impact of her work and explore records digitized as part of the project. Click here to register for this free event.

Kristen Gaydos, Presbyterian Historical Society

Today’s Focus: Katie Geneva Cannon Digital Collection

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Carissa Herold, July 28 Marketing Associate, Presbyterian Women
Nell Herring, July 28 Mission Specialist for Volunteer Ministries, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

We praise you, God, for the bountiful harvest and pray that the fruit of this harvest will remain and grow. Amen.

Minute for Mission: Presbyterian Heritage

May 17, 2020

The first Earth Day is celebrated in New York City in 1970. (RNS photograph by John C. Goodwin)

Americans celebrated the first Earth Day 50 years ago this spring, on April 22, 1970. That same year the United Presbyterian Council on Church and Society undertook a study on threats facing human survival on an increasingly crowded and polluted planet. The study culminated in the 1971 United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. General Assembly adopting the council’s report, Christian Responsibility for Environmental Renewal.

A brand new Heritage Sunday church bulletin insert for 2020 connecting to the Christian responsibility for environmental renewal is available at https://www.history.pcusa.org/history-online/presbyterian-history/heritage-sunday.

Heritage Sunday is an annual day of celebration set aside by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Download past bulletin inserts and learn more about Presbyterian history at history.pcusa.org/hs.

Presbyterian Historical Society

Let us join in prayer for: 

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Jayne Culp, Office of the General Assembly
Norma Cunningham, Presbyterian Foundation

Let us pray:

Gracious God, grant us the humility and strength to follow your call wherever it may lead, whether close to home or on distant shores. Amen.