A CHURCH CLOSES--A Way of Life Vanishes
The Northwest Herald reported today that the tiny Riley United Methodist Church will hold its final services this Sunday. It is the second small Methodist church to close in the county due to a dwindling and aging congregation. The church in Ringwood befell a similar fate two years ago. The Alden church hangs on by its fingernails, sharing, as did Riley a modern day circuit rider. These rural outposts are vanishing and can no longer maintain congregations.
The Methodists are not disappearing from the County. The Crystal Lake church is one of the largest Protestant congregations in the City. Active churches are still alive and well in all of the county’s bigger municipalities.
The Methodists held on longer to their rural outposts, but the same process that began the dispersal of tiny agricultural villages long ago caused the shuttering of once thriving Universalist congregations like those at Pingree Grove.
Rural families have not become less religious, but they prefer to hop in the car to travel to a larger church with full services, often one with up-beat “contemporary” services. Just as they no longer identify with the cross roads communities in which they live, they have no particular loyalty to denomination. They are just as apt to choose a non-denominational mega church as the bigger Methodist church the next town over.
So we can pause for just a moment to reflect what is passing, and what is lost.
At the heart of most Midwestern agricultural communities stood a typically white clapboard church. It anchored the community. The church in Riley Township was newer than most, attesting to the vigor of the community at the turn of the 20th century. Erected in 1897, the building was distinguished by a unique hexagonal bell tower. The community moved from the simple frame Riley Township Hall-now preserved as Perkins Hall by the McHenry County Historical Society-and before that worshiped in an 1858 log cabin. Reflecting the New England/Up State New York origins of the original settler stock, the church was originally Congregational, but switched to the Methodists early in 1900s. The Methodists, with churches in the centers of thousands of similar villages, were simply better prepared to furnish ministers than the Congregationalists, whose highly educated clergy preferred more sophisticated-and lucrative-calls.
The church and the Township hall, and a school clustered at a crossroads with a handful of farmsteads within a mile or so. The crossroads never rose to the dignity of a village. The nearest store and post office were at South Riley two miles to the southwest. Both of those closed decades ago. There never has really been a village core to this most rural of McHenry County’s townships.
Located south of Marengo and cut off from encroaching development by Interstate 90-the wholly inappropriately named Jane Adams Expressway-to the south, the County’s southwestern most Township remains a rural bastion. In 1800 the census reported 915 residents. A century later the population had not even doubled-- 1,811.