An eyewitness account of five-year-old Dundee
The church's historian preserved two 1841 letters from circuit-riding missionary Rev. N. C. Clark to the American Home Missionary Society — among the earliest surviving firsthand descriptions of the Dundee settlement. Writing March 3, 1841, two months before the church's founding:
"This place is on the Fox River five miles above Elgin. It is a small village, and at present its appearance is not very promising... The village contains 150 or 200 inhabitants. It has a flouring mill, a saw mill, a store and a tavern, at both of which places are sold intoxicating liquors. A distillery is nearly ready to send forth its stream of poison."
Clark also noted the settlement's Sabbath School (organized about six weeks prior, with 24 members and a 150-volume library donated by an Essex, Massachusetts congregation) and reported plans underway for "the formation of a church" of twenty to twenty-five members. Writing again May 20, 1841, days after the church's founding, Clark noted continuing "increasing interest in matters of religion" alongside no improvement in the village's drinking — a new distillery had just gone into operation that spring. (Source: "A Century and a Decade," 1951)
Charter members
Elihu and Lucy McEwen, Harriet McEwen, John and Abigail Giddings, Thomas and Elizabeth Perkins, Gen. George and Sarah E. McClure, Steven K. and Eleanor Tourtelotte, W. R. and Lucy Hemingway, Abiel and Anna Barker (with Elizabeth Barker), Squire and Alvina Simpson, and Amos Perry. (Source: "A Century and a Decade," 1951)
Building history
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| May 8, 1841 | Church founded |
| 1843 | First building dedicated ("the little white frame building") |
| Nov 9, 1854 | Second building dedicated (Rev. George Bent, minister 1853–1855) |
| Oct 6, 1901 | Cornerstone of the present (third) building laid |
| Apr 27, 1902 | Present building dedicated, with a week of celebration |
| 1906 | Rev. H. William Stiles begins a ten-year pastorate — the longest in the church's history to that point |
| Mar 13, 1910 | Casavant pipe organ dedicated, installed at a cost of $3,300 |
| 1915 | Present brick parsonage built |
Notable Associations
- Jesse Oatman — quoted (via the church historian) describing the former Potawatomi village site as "about 80 rods" below where the potteries now stand — an independent corroboration, from a second source, of the Chief Nickaway material already on Oatman's wiki page.
- Mrs. Edmund H. Haeger (V. Mills Haeger) — the church's historian, author of the 1951 centennial-plus-a-decade sketch this page draws from.
[VERIFY] A reference to "Rev. W. A. Sunday" appears in the 1951 source in connection with the church — plausibly the evangelist Billy Sunday, but the exact context hasn't been confirmed from the full 62-page text yet. Don't cite as a confirmed Sunday connection until checked.
Sources
- 1951-01-01_physical-archive_first-congregational-church-dundee-century-and-decade — "A Century and a Decade: The First Congregational Church, Dundee, Illinois," Mrs. Edmund Haeger (V. Mills Haeger), Church Historian, 1951. Original digitized by the Fox River Valley Public Library District. Collected by a resident, sourced from FRVPL, 2026-08-18.