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The Reverend Meets Miss Tovrea






Reverend O. Meets Miss Dora Lulu Tovrea



The train journey from the floor of the Verde Valley to the bustling mining town of Jerome perched somewhat precariously on the side of Mingus Mountain took almost two and a half hours on the narrow gauge railroad tracks that snaked slowly up the steep curves to their destination.

On this October day in 1900, a passenger gazed apprehensively out the window. It was not the perilous climb along rocky ledges and wooden trestles over deep jagged canyons that occupied his thoughts. It was the challenges he was about to face as a newly ordained minister appointed as pastor to one of the few churches in the little town.

Turn of the century Jerome was a teeming, dusty, largely lawless copper mining camp in the Black Hills of Arizona Territory. Many of the approximately 12,000 residents were men who worked the mines from daybreak to nightfall. There were shopkeepers who catered to the needs, whims, wants and desires of its inhabitants, and there were but few families and even fewer single women, except for those who worked in the brothels and bars.

The young pastor, John Oliver, stepped from the train at the depot, took a deep breath, and surveyed the scene in front of him incredulously. Later that night, he would write the first entryin the journal he would faithfully keep during the two profoundly important years he lived and worked, and fell in love, in Jerome. However, his first impression was one of horror: "Never shall I forget the first night I spent in Jerome and saw its sin and vice," he wrote. "Saloons, brothels, and gambling dens run wide open. Oh, the sin and shamefacedness of women and men!"

John Oliver had come to the United States from England 1889, staying with a distant cousin in Illinois. For three years he earned his living in the cooper's trade he learned from his father, making butter tubs for dairymen. After attending a revival meeting held by a traveling minister, he received "the call" as he would write, "to become a man of God." He traveled on to the West coast where he spent the next six years as a student at the University of Southern California, in its early years largely a theological school run by the Methodist Church.

In Jerome, the newly built and organized Methodist Episcopal Church, with just seven members, would be the young Pastor Oliver's first assignment to lead. Though he was optimistic by nature, he knew his work would not be easy.

Most of the miners were coarse, uneducated, independent men, toiling underground to bring the rich copper ore to the surface, or sweltering in the immense heat of the smelters turning it into metal. At that time, the United Verde Copper Mine at Jerome was the largest producing copper mine in the Arizona Territory. Mining towns, as the young pastor was soon to discover, existed for one purpose: to make money.

He set out immediately to build his church membership to help bring a sense of community to Jerome. He was successful in attracting womenfolk and some of the businessmen to Sunday school and Bible study, but not many miners. "How wicked and blasphemous the men are here," he wrote. "I pray the time will come when they will respect my presence."

The enthusiastic preacher reached out to the miners, going to them because they would not come to him in his church. He spent two days a week walking, rather hiking, around the rugged, dirty streets of Jerome, which was a mile high and had a quarter mile change in elevation from one end of town to the other. Reverend Oliver complained often in his journal about the altitude's effects on his energy. Yet, he persevered. He would persuade miners drinking in the saloons to leave, taking some of their pay home to their wives and children. He would often walk them home himself, to the gratitude of their women.

He went to the mines, the smelters, the saloons, the gambling dens; anywhere the miners gathered. He became an almost constant presence in front of saloons, debating with saloonkeepers and inebriated workers. Many saw him as an irritant, others as a well-meaning idealist, but he began to gain the grudging respect of more and more members of the community.

"Some of the good folks of the town advised me to go slow in talking against the clubs (saloons, brothels, gaming places)," he wrote. "I was told it is impossible to enforce the law in a mining camp."

The townspeople, miners and "respectable" citizens alike welcomed his public disagreements with club owners as entertainment. John Oliver was glib, folksy, and funny. In one of his most quoted street sermons, he said: "A number of good people have come to me this week with the suggestion that this not a temperance town, but that this is a mining camp that there are always saloons and booze in mining camps and there always will be," from the atop his soapbox. "Perhaps they are right, but folks, who do think called me to preach? What makes a preacher any way? If you had called me to preach, then, of course, you would have the right to dictate what I shall preach about, but so long as I believe God Almighty has called me to preach, I expect to take my orders from Him."

The miners' respect for the tenacious, silver-tongued preacher increased over time, and he grew to respect them as well, feeling compassion for their rough and hard lives.

Once, during a mining strike for shorter hours, he spoke publicly in defense of the miners' position. "It is morally and patriotically wrong to deprive the family of its father and the father of his family 12 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year," he said.

Drunken brawls and mining accidents, especially horrific underground fires, led to many early deaths among the young workers and when Pastor Oliver learned that most of the dead were dumped unceremoniously in unmarked graves, he began to conduct funerals at the rapidly growing graveyard at the edge of town. "When I heard a gunshot in the night," he wrote in his journal on one such night, "More than likely I would have a funeral in the morning."

But his tenure in Jerome was also rich with joy and satisfaction. He performed marriages and baptized babies. He organized a prayer group for the Chinese, who had come to Jerome to earn their living as laundry men and cooks. Once a week, he would journey to the valley floor to meet with the Indians living there "and other poor souls in need of prayer and salvation."

One day, while building some new pews for his ever growing congregation, he met the woman who was to become his wife. Dora Lulu Tovrea had come to Jerome from a poor farm in Kansas, where she had been keeping house for her father and younger brothers following they death of her mother. Her brother Ed and brother-in-law Ben Clay had established a meat and vegetable market in Jerome several years before. Dora's sister Mary was married to Clay.

After her father gave up on his unsuccessful farm, Dora moved to Jerome to be near to her brother and sister and worked as a cashier in the Tovrea and Clay Market.

One fine day in early spring, while taking a walk around Jerome, Dora was astonished to see a man who had been pointed out to her as a preacher in dusty coveralls pounding wood with a hammer and whistling. Later she would tell her sister that: "He certainly didn't look like a preacher to me," Mary replied, "Well, he sure can preach!"

Intrigued, Dora began attending services at the M.E. Church, her admiration for the passionate young preacher growing by the day. She had a beautiful contralto singing voice and soon, with the young preacher's encouragement, was leading in the singing of hymns.

Some months later, Reverend Oliver, always on the lookout for more converts, decided to hold special prayer meetings for people who lived in the "Gulch", an area about a half mile down the side of the mountain on the road to nearby Cottonwood in the Verde Valley.

A church member loaned him an empty house, another an organ and chairs; and a "branch" of the M.E. Church came into being. As there was no one else to play the organ, Dora, who had taken some lessons when she lived in Kansas, offered her services. She wrote in her diary of that time: "I walked with Mr. Oliver each night the half mile sometimes through a marvelous moonlight and helped in the meetings. Small wonder our courtship began there." When the preacher proposed, Dora hesitated. As she would later write: "I told him of my lack of education (she had reached the eighth grade level), and asked him if he thought it would in any way hinder his work in the ministry." He reassured her, complimenting her on her "common sense and willingness to study and learn."

They were married in San Pedro, California and upon their return to Jerome after a three week honeymoon, they were greeted by church members and other townspeople who threw a reception for the couple at the M.E. Church, which had been filled with lilies for the occasion. "We wore our wedding clothes and came in to the wedding march. There were original songs written for us, originals poems recited in our honor and a most elaborate and beautiful three story bride's cake," Dora wrote.

The young minister and his wife continued their works among the people of Jerome and surrounding territory until early in 1903 when, after a particularly virulent fire in the mines, hundreds of folks left town, among them the Olivers', who were then expecting their first child.

John Oliver continued his ministry in Williams, Arizona for two years, until he was assigned to various parishes for the Methodist Church in California, retiring in Whittier in 1941. Yet, his experiences in Jerome were among the most memorable of his long life, and he spoke often about those years with his family and friends.

Many members of his large family have traveled over the years to Jerome to see for themselves the place in which John Oliver had learned so much about his fellow human beings and himself.

And, although much has changed in Jerome since its heyday as "the wickedest town in the west" where John Oliver worked to save souls, one thing may not have changed at all: the spectacular view of the Verde Valley from the sloping hillside is much as he described it in his early days in Jerome.

Awed by the sweeping panorama of ancient rocks and wide canyons he wrote: "The Verde Valley was in view for 30 miles. The Verde River flowed through the lowest part of the valley with a ribbon of green about half mile wide on either side of the stream. In the canyons and gulches and ravines, through which the storms of centuries made their escape from their granite prisons, nature had chiseled the designs of her own architecture in what appeared to be immense castles, and pinnacled temples, mosques and minarets, while here and there amidst the rolling dunes of rock arose a majestic mountain of sculptured beauty, which had defied the action of volcano first and the wear and tear of storms and tempests."

"It is so primitive that I could well believe it was a playground where Earth's first children made mud pies."



Editor's note: This is my sister's telling of the story found in our grandparents' papers.

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