For those who love Montreat and the sweep of Presbyterian history, it was a painful moment when the 2006 General Assembly voted to close the office of the Presbyterian Historical Society at Montreat, N.C.
But now another chapter is being written.
The formal archives of the southern branch of the Presbyterian church have been moved. Most of the material went to the Presbyterian Historical Society offices in Philadelphia, and some to Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga., and other places.
But now a nonprofit group that wants to keep the sense of Presbyterian history alive for visitors to Montreat is working, in cooperation with the Montreat Conference Center, to create a new Presbyterian Heritage Center.
The group has created a Web site, (www.phcmontreat.org/) and is working on an agreement to lease space in Spence Hall at Montreat that formerly was used by the Historical Society. It hopes to have the new center up and running by late spring or early summer, in time for the summer rush.
“We have a lot of folks who are enthusiastic about their faith, but they don’t know a lot about the heritage of their faith,” said Richard Ray, a retired Presbyterian pastor who has been active in the effort to create the new center.
Instead of providing access for scholars to official church archival material, the heritage center hopes to provide interactive exhibits on international mission work and church history, particularly in southern Presbyterianism. For example, exhibits are planned on “Religion in Appalachia” and on the centennial anniversary of the 1907 Great Awakening in Korea.
The Web site offers a “This Week in History” section. And there will be a research library at the center with access by computer to original documents, according to the Web site.
Every year, thousands of visitors come to Montreat for camps and conferences — everyone from teenagers to senior citizens. A tremendous loyalty to this beautiful spot in the mountains and for the tradition it represents has built up over the years.
Last year, however, the General Assembly voted to close the Historical Society office at Montreat, citing financial savings and the advantages of having more records consolidated in Philadelphia.
The Montreat office had maintained the records of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, the Southern branch of the denomination that merged with the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America in 1983 to form the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
More than 1,000 Presbyterian congregations from Southern states also had sent their session records to the Historical Society office at Montreat, making it a rich trove of resources both for academic scholars and for people wanting to trace the history of the congregations where their families had worshiped through the generations.
The General Assembly in 2006 voted to create a new Center for the Study of Presbyterian and Reformed History and Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary, to house some historical records there and provide programming involving theology and church history, some of it at the Montreat Conference Center.
According to Frederick Heuser Jr., director of the Presbyterian Historical Society, the society’s office in Montreat officially closed at the end of 2006. About 60 percent of the materials from there were sent to Philadelphia, including all records of the General Assembly and the synods of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, and about 20 percent went to Columbia. Some records were returned to individual donors who had provided the materials, and some went to archives at other seminaries.
“We basically looked at everything we had and said, ‘What makes the most sense?'” Heuser said.
Because the materials from Montreat were already on the Historical Society’s database, “the only time the Montreat materials were inaccessible and unavailable … is when they were on the truck headed from Montreat to Philadelphia,” he said.
Since the consolidation, the Philadelphia office has noticed an increase in people wanting to use the materials. The Montreat collection “is being heavily used,” Heuser said.
And now, the Presbyterian Heritage Center at Montreat is getting organized — a balm of sorts to some who felt wounded by the closing of the archival office.
After the General Assembly’s decision, people from the area “began to talk a little and dream a little,” Richard Ray said. Now they’re raising money, negotiating a lease, and “we’re kind of proud” of what’s happening.
