Date & Context
The meeting took place in November 1903 at St. Charles, the Kane County seat. Findings and supporting statistics were subsequently published in the Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Kane County (1904), which included a township-by-township breakdown of church membership, financial outlay, and Sunday school enrollment across the county. (Source: Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Kane County (1904))
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a broad expansion of Protestant Sunday school organizations across Illinois. County-level unions served as coordinating bodies, collecting data from individual congregations and advocating for religious education as a complement to public schooling.
Participants
The meeting drew representatives from Protestant Sunday schools throughout Kane County's townships. No individual attendees from Dundee are recorded by name in the available source.
At the time of the meeting, Dundee Township reported:
- 3 churches with a combined annual outlay of $19,500
- 10 Sunday schools with 109 officers and teachers and 1,048 scholars, for a total enrollment of 1,157
Dundee's share of the county's Sunday school enrollment — roughly 7.6 percent — was notable given the relative size of the township, suggesting an active network of congregations engaged in organized religious education.
Significance
The statistics reported at this meeting provide one of the few quantified records of religious institutional life in Dundee during the Progressive Era. The figure of 10 Sunday schools serving a combined enrollment of over 1,150 individuals indicates that Sunday school participation in Dundee extended well beyond formal church membership, likely encompassing children and youth from across the township.
The county's aggregate outlay of over $1.1 million annually suggests that Protestant religious institutions were among the more substantial civic organizations in Kane County at the turn of the twentieth century. Dundee's $19,500 outlay, while modest by comparison, reflects a community sustaining multiple active congregations.
It should be noted that these statistics cover Protestant Sunday schools only, as reported through the Union; Catholic parishes and any other institutions outside the Union's membership are not reflected in these figures.
Sources
- Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Kane County (1904). Available via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/historicalencycl00unse#offset-3900160