Page 158 - Grace150 Devotional

A History of Grace Presbyterian Church
by Christopher Summers
Grace Presbyterian Church has two birthdays. The church itself was established
in 1868, but it grew out of a Sunday school outreach that was started six years
earlier in 1862.
In 1861, Daniel W. McWilliams moved from New York
to Peoria to take a job with the Logansport, Peoria, &
Burlington Railroad as secretary and treasurer. He was
24 years old and newly married. At that time, Peoria was
small at about 14,000 people, but was growing quickly
because of its distillery industry.
McWilliams joined the Second Presbyterian Church
in Peoria. During his first year in town, he was invited
to a friend’s house for dinner to meet a little-known D.W. McWilliams
evangelist from Chicago named Dwight L. Moody. The
two men were the same age, and Moody made a big impression on McWilliams.
They became lifelong friends.
McWilliams visited Moody in Chicago and got a tour of Moody’s parish. “We
visited house after house of the poor, sick, and unfortunate,” McWilliams later
wrote of that trip. “[Moody] was everywhere greeted with affection, and carried
real sunshine into those abodes of squalor.”
This trip evidently had a big impact on McWilliams. Just a few months later, in
the spring of 1862, he worked with some other members of the newly-formed
Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) to establish a “mission school” in
the roughest part of Peoria at that time. The city was divided into wards, and the
fourth ward was located in the northern part of the city, which today is called the
“near north side.” The city tried to keep the taverns and brothels confined to this
area, making it essentially a red-light district.
The goal was to reach the children of the area, and through the children, the
parents. A committee was appointed to find a meeting room for the mission
school, but no suitable meeting place could be found. However, the area by the
river was a large train yard for the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad, and there
were several passenger coaches standing on the tracks. Someone—most likely

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