This book identifies churches in most of the old Northwest Territory, where slavery was forbidden by law, and each township was required to use part of its territory to fund public education.  These clauses in the 1787 Territorial Act grew out of the powerful advocacy of Massachusetts' Congregational pastor Manasseh Cutler.  The very next year regular preaching began for what would become the First Congregational Church of Marietta, Ohio, the oldest continuously worshiping Protestant Church in the entire Territory.

      Connecticut held on to the title of its "Western Reserve" in northeast Ohio to provide land to its Revolutionary War veterans.  The Yankee settlers soon founded Congregational or Plan of Union churches in almost every town in the Reserve.

      In 1801 the Presbyterian General Assembly and the Congregational General Association of Connecticut adopted a Plan of Union that intertwined the two traditions for the next half-century.

      Covering Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, this book includes an engrossing history of these two traditions, their union and separation.  It documents the Congregational churches and Presbyterian churches in the Western Reserve, Michigan, and Wisconsin and Union congregations in other parts of the old Northwest.

      Read the stories of missionaries, abolitionists, and ethnic minorities.

      Special sections document ethnic outreach and organizational structures.

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OVER 3,500 CHURCHES DOCUMENTED !!

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      Also included are post-merger Congregational Christian and United Church of Christ congregations, and Unitarian churches organized before 1850.

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Annotated Bibliography Limited Edition    

Soft cover. (2009)  353 + viii pages;   8 1/2 x 11" folio

Library of Congress No. 2009900818    ISBN: 978-0-962248-65-8

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