One day during the mid-seventies, the members of this congregation received a phone call from an attorney representing the City of Greenville. He was offering to pay $3,000 for a small lot which he said they owned.
When member Carroll Webber described their reaction in his manuscript; “The History of UUCG”; he reported they said; “What? We own what?”
The City of Greenville wanted to develop public housing, near Dickinson Avenue, 10th Street and Grand. Doing research, the attorney had come across a will that deeded a small parcel of land just west of the train tracks to the Universalist Church of Greenville. The representatives from the city figured that the then Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Greenville was the rightful owner. So they called making an offer to buy “our” land.
There weren’t many folks left in Greenville who had any memory that there had been a Universalist church near the corner of Dickinson and Grand. Although a number of educators and scientists, who moved here the early 50’s, had formed the Emerson Study group; they were Unitarians. By 1953 they had organized themselves as the Unitarian Fellowship of Greenville. It wouldn’t be until 1961 that the Unitarian and the Universalist denominations would merge on the national level. The Greenville group didn’t add the second U to their name until 1963.
All during the first half of the 20th century Universalist congregations scattered throughout this nation were closing their doors and losing their buildings. By the second half of the century some Universalists still remained in Eastern North Carolina; but not in Greenville…
Yet their spirit and their legacy was still here…
In the ECU library you can find articles from The Daily Reflector that report the July, 1906 dedication of the “Delphia Moye Chapel” by the Universalist Church of Greenville. Later records show that this congregation occupied their building until 1922, until a primitive Baptist congregation moved in. In 1931 the building was donated to the Salvation Army. And, in 1950 the Delphia Moye Chapel was demolished…just 3 years before the Unitarian Fellowship of Greenville would be founded.
Carroll indicates that the parcel of land that the city valued at $3,000 in the mid 70’s was across the street from where the Moye Chapel, home of the Greenville Universalists stood.
It was named for Delphia King Moye, who was the second wife of Elbert Alfred Moye. Dr. E.A. Moye was a well known figure in Greenville, who owned a pharmacy, and was involved in several other successful businesses. He was 64 years old when the chapel was dedicated. Delphia was only 48 when she died, just nine months before the Universalist Church of Greenville was dedicated in her memory. She was the daughter of the long time Greenville sheriff, Colonel William May King and his wife Almeta. We know from the journals kept by visiting preachers that Delphia’s parents, the King’s, were lifelong Universalists.
Delphia King Moye and Dr. EA Moye had been married just a little short of ten years when she died. He went on to marry a third time, and it is not likely that he remained a Universalist. I’d like to know more about the Kings…as it is still a mystery to me, when and why they became Universalists.
It is no mystery that the $3,000 earned from the sale of the Universalist land was put into a CD which for a time was jointly held by UUCG and UCONCI (the Universalist Convention of North Carolina, INC). The investment grew and when UUCG was ready to buy land and a building on Arlington Street in 1990, UCONCI agreed that UUCG could use the CD (which had grown to more than $10,000) for the down payment. Only 3 years later the city, then ready to widen Arlington, bought that piece of land, too.
It was the money earned on that sale, plus a mortgage loan from the denomination that made it possible for UUCG to purchase this home in 1993.
So, you could say, that with the city’s help, the legacy created by Greenville Universalists long ago is still alive…and thriving.
If you subtract the years of dormancy we UU’s can legitimately claim to have been present in Greenville for at least 75 years.
I like to think, we are just getting started here!
If you know the history of Universalism in America, you know it goes back nearly 250 years, when John Murray arrived on the shores of New Jersey in 1770.
I have no idea how the King’s of Greenville came to be Universalist, or if their daughter grew up a Universalist. That piece of the story might be lost!
What we do know is that John Murray was not the first person in what would soon become these United States to believe in a God that is kind and merciful. There were already folks in America, who had come to believe in the good news of universal salvation, who understood that God had through Jesus made sure that all his children would be with him after death.
John Murray, often called the Father of Universalism, was like many others, tireless in traveling this new country to bring the good news, to “preach the kindness and the everlasting love of God.”
Many - about to be citizens of a new nation - were eager to hear that “all” are equally embraced by the One who is Love. It was a radical new message that fit a new nation composed of equals…(or those who were eager to be counted as equals !)
Preaching “not hell, but hope and courage” John Murray and many others who rode the “good news” circuits helped make Universalism the fifth largest denomination in the United States in America by the mid 1800’s.
Everywhere he went, John Murray and all the other Universalists who came after him proclaimed “God is Love!” The phrase was carved on Universalist pulpits, painted on their churches, quoted on the mastheads of their publications.
For the Universalists, the message was simple and straightforward. In response to a God who loves all equally, we are to do the same.
Somewhere, somehow the Kings heard this message. Their daughter Delphia King Moye heard it. Being a second wife, I have to wonder if she knew about John Murray’s second wife?
John Murray eventually settled in Gloucester, MA. Even before he arrived there were people there, including one Winthrop Sargent, a prominent sea merchant who had already come to believe in universal salvation. He and others left the “official” parish church and began what they named the Independent Church of Christ. They called John Murray as their minister, and in so doing in 1779, their congregation became the first Universalist Church in America.
John Murray’s first wife had died in England before he set sail. When John decided to settle in Gloucester, he not only met Winthrop Sargent, but also met his daughter. Nine years later, after she was widowed as well they married. (At the time they were married he was 47 and she was 37.)
Eventually, Judith would move with John when he was called to the First Universalist Church in Boston. She was his ardent supporter, his biographer later after he died, and his advocate when the Boston church had difficulty paying his salary on time! Before she even met John Murray, she had been a prolific writer, often publishing her works under a male name….because in the late 1700’s women were not taken seriously in public!
By the time they moved to Boston she had come out of hiding!
Judith Sargent Murray was the first published advocate for women’s equality. The Massachusetts Magazine carried her essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” in the March and April 1790 editions. Yet her essay was foreshadowed by the much more well known one by Mary Wollstonecraft; “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, which was published in England 2 years later.
Judith, because she was a Universalist, believed that every woman should be educated and should be raised with the same sense of self worth as boys. If the world could be made over to give girls the same education as boys and the same self esteem, she knew that eventually women would themselves believe they were and to be seen by others as equal to men.
John Murray was a fully supportive partner of his wife’s advocacy. She was a playwright, an essayist and a poet. She was well known in her day for a three volume book of essays and plays titled “The Gleaner” published in 1798. Records show that her works were purchased by George Washington, John Adams and Henry Knox and other well known leaders. In her three set volumes she championed the new republic, discussed Universalism, advocated for women’s equality, and covered lots of other subjects that would be familiar one’s to any of today’s UU’s.
She was the first to write a “curriculum” for the education of Universalist children.
Yet for a long time after John Murray’s death and then her own, her life and works were lost to history. It wasn’t until 1974, with the publication of Alice Rossi’s book “The Feminist Papers” that Judith Sargent Murray’s place in the struggle for women’s rights would reemerge. In that seminal work that sparked the Second Wave of Feminism, Judith Sargent Murray’s essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” was first among the first wave documents.
It was Judith religion that made the difference in her politics, in her “public” self!
In their heyday, Universalists were among the leaders of almost every effort for social reform in this nation, they worked to end slavery, to promote women’s suffrage, to reform public education and health care, to end poverty and to change how the mentally challenged were treated. John Murray and Judith Sargent Murray both left a legacy…of what it means to “preach the kindness”, not just so we are all happy in a heavenly home, but fulfilled on earth, as well.
After John Murray died, Judith went to live out her last years with their only daughter and son in law in Natchez, Mississippi. She took with her and likely completed there what she called her “letter books”, 20 volumes that she had begun at the age of 23 in which she had transcribed every piece of correspondence she had ever engaged in (almost 2500 letters). In these volumes she documented for future generations what her time is history was like.
These volumes were considered lost until 1984, when they were discovered in Natchez by a Unitarian Universalist minister!
She left a legacy, as did her husband, as did the King’s of Greenville, and as did Delphia King Moye, and as will we!
It’s in our genes, as Universalists, as Unitarians, to make a mark on history, to make a difference….to preach the kindness, to promote the equality of all …
May our “steeple” rise again over this city, metaphorically and for real!
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