Heirloom #17
by Will Frank
After the closing of the First Unitarian Church of Norfolk in December 1917, the American Unitarian Association let eleven years pass to allow the animosities to settle within the body that made up the old congregation, and to allow new people, a new generation, to recovenant the church on a new and more healthy basis. The Norfolk situation was not unusual. Even the strongest Unitarian church in Virginia, the First Unitarian Church of Richmond, was a recovenanting of the earlier Unitarian-Universalist Church of Richmond of 1830. And when the new church was formally organized in 1893, it took another eleven years of struggle and moments of near collapse before the church was able to establish itself on a sound footing, which lasts up to today.
In the late 1920s, The Laymen’s League, the national organization of Unitarian men (paralleled by the Women’s Alliance), searching for a fulcrum to boost Unitarianism and to stabilize a declining membership base, tried regional conferences, religious education summer institutes, liberal religious college groups, Bible Institutes to open up liberal religious ways of looking at the Bible, and especially preaching missions to towns without a Unitarian church. A major effort went into establishing five new churches in 1929-30. One of these, very much on the mind of Laymen’s League leaders for some time, was Norfolk, Virginia. The Laymen’s League contacted the Rev. Frank W. Pratt, minister to the Richmond church and an old friend of Norfolk Unitarians, to see whether, despite a recent illness, he would be up to holding Unitarian lectures again in Norfolk. Where others were cautious about putting an effort into Norfolk, Pratt responded that he had turned down other similar offers, but he could not refuse Norfolk, to whose Unitarians he retained a special bond.
Prompted by the Laymen’s League initiative and Pratt’s willingness to make an unexpected effort, the AUA commissioned the Rev. Charles R. Joy to look into the possibilities for Norfolk. His November 1929 report concluded with a sober but cautiously optimistic assessment.
In early December Joy traveled to Richmond to confer with Pratt and then went to Norfolk to canvass the possibilities. His December report was even more positive.
'Norfolk seems to me a place of great importance and of great promise. If we can establish new churches anywhere we ought to be able to do it in Norfolk. It is the second city in population in the State, and when the next census is taken it will undoubtedly be the first. Already if adjoining cities and towns are counted it is by far the largest in population.
In any consideration of the situation there, Portsmouth, Va. should be included as a part of Norfolk. Norfolk and Portsmouth together have a population of 240,000. Within a radius of eighteen miles the population is 300,000. Portsmouth is only across a narrow stream with a five cent ferry fare, and has a population of 60,000.
Norfolk is one of the most important railway and shipping centres on the coast. It is the world’s greatest coaling port; the second port in America for the total volume of water-borne tonnage; the greatest centre for naval activities; the first, second or third greatest in half a dozen other particulars. Across the harbor is Newport News, 35 miles away, with a population of 53,000; a possible centre for extension work from Norfolk.'