This congregational history was prepared by Rev. John O. Edgar, who served as Southfield RPC’s pastor from 1969 to 1979, at the request of a congregational meeting held in January 1972, as part of the church’s 140th-anniversary observance. It draws on the session’s minute books, newspaper clippings, and Mary E. Thompson’s 1915 account. It is summarized here, and the complete original remains available for anyone who wants to read it in full.
Edgar traces the congregation from its 1834 organization, when a roll of founding members was drawn up and Alexander McClung and David Stewart were elected as the first elders, through nine pastorates spanning 140 years. He describes the session’s active role in the community — mediating members’ civil disputes, disciplining absenteeism, and even settling a dispute over whether it was proper to take an offering on the Sabbath — and recounts the building of the present sanctuary in 1861 by contractor Joseph Torrens, whose bid of $1,989 left him little profit for his labor.
Several episodes from the church record stand out: a Civil War-era resolution declining to hire substitute soldiers because the required oath omitted any acknowledgment of God; a season in 1864 when the pastor, Rev. J. S. T. Milligan, took leave to organize a mission to formerly enslaved people in Washington, D.C., a ministry the congregation supported with special offerings for years afterward; and two Session resolutions, in 1863 and again in 1867, asking members not to spit tobacco on the floor of the new church.
Edgar profiles each of the congregation’s pastors in turn — Neill, Milligan, Hill, McCracken, Patterson, Robb, Willson, French, Mathews, Thompson, and McFarland — noting their education, their financial hardships (one year the treasurer’s balance after expenses came to thirty-seven cents), and their lives after leaving Southfield, several of whom went on to overseas mission work. He closes by reflecting on the congregation’s long, sometimes lean twentieth century and its continuity of witness across seventeen pastors and fourteen decades.