While organizing our collection of Stark County Photographs I discovered some neat connections!
Our newest Volunteer, Retta helped us identify a few photographs in our Gibbs collection. The photographs were of the First Christian Church on Cleveland Avenue South. The images show the construction of the Third Building of the First Christian Church, according to one of our regular researchers.
She spoke of a book, P.H. The Welshimer Story by Francis M. Arant. I told her the title sounded familiar. She and I looked at our donations from August 2015, and there was the book!
The story doesn’t end there. Back to organizing our Stark County Photographs. I was identifying a photograph of the Frank Ake farm, 1883.
While studying the records we have from 1975 when this object was first donated to our museum, I discovered in the same collection a photograph of P.H. Welshimer!
Rev. Welshimer now rests peacefully in Forest Hill Cemetery on the same street he spent so much time in his church, Cleveland Avenue.
Find-A-Grave Entry:
Gospel preacher. P. H. Welshimer was born on a farm near York, Union County, Ohio, April 6, 1873. At the age of nine his parents moved to West Mansfield in an adjoining county where they still live. There he was reared and attended the public schools. He graduated at Ohio Northern University at Ada in 1894 and from Hiram College in 1897. Spent five years in his first pastorate at Millersburg, Ohio. January 1, 1902, he took the pastorate at Canton, Ohio, where he still resides. The church at Canton in this time has grown from a membership of less than four hundred to a resident membership of 3,400 with a non-resident of seven hundred. The Bible school has grown from less than two hundred to be the largest in the world. The enrollment in the attending school is above 5,000. Cradle Roll and Home Department bring the total enrollment to nearly 6,000. May 15, 1900, he was married to Miss Clara Hornig, of Vermilion, Ohio. They have three children–Helen, Mildred and Ralph. Reference: Rev. P.H. Welshimer Find-A-Grave
More Later…
Archivist's Attic... 