Long before Bexley Hall was a part of Kenyon College, the building was the site of an Episcopal seminary school founded in parallel by the college’s founder, Bishop Philander Chase.
For many years, before the organization broke off from Kenyon and relocated elsewhere, it served as a training ground for ministers for the Episcopal Church, and many of its students went on to prominent lives in the church across the United States.
But there was one student the seminary school probably later wanted to forget. William Montgomery Brown became briefly infamous in the 1920s, when he become the only person in modern church history to be put on trial for heresy.
He was born on a kitchen table near Orrville in Wayne County, Ohio, on Nov. 6, 1855. His mother, Lucina, was a servant girl to a local farm family, and she was out working in a field. She collapsed in labor pains and was rushed into the closest house, belonging to the Gardner family, where she promptly gave birth on their kitchen table.
Struggling with poverty and the loss of her husband to illness during the Civil War, the woman was unable to fend for her children, so she bound out young William at the age of seven to Amish farmer Jacob Yoder in Smithville. Yoder regarded Willy Brown as little more than a farm animal, housing him in the barn, and working him relentlessly.
According to Brown’s autobiography, in 1870 he had a chance meeting on the road with a boy using a stick to roll a hoop. The boy asked Willy Brown if he wanted to play with the hoop, and the scrawny 14-year-old said, “What is it?”
Play had not been a part of his childhood, so he didn’t recognize that the hoop was a toy. The 10-year-old boy was shocked to find that Willy was 14, for they were exactly the same size. He was furthermore stunned to hear that Willy lived in a barn with the other animals.
Disturbed, the boy went home and spoke to his father, who happened to be one of the Wayne County commissioners. The following morning, Brown was rescued from his virtual slavery, and the Gardner family volunteered to take the boy in and give him a proper home.
In gratitude to God, Brown vowed to devote his life to the ministry.
Bolstered by food and care, Brown became a successful student, working hard to catch up with his age group. After he completed his initial schooling, the Cleveland philanthropist Mary Scranton Bradford agreed to pay for the industrious young man to go to seminary school. That’s how William Montgomery Brown ended up at Bexley Hall in Gambier in 1880, one of only 13 seminary students admitted that year, all of them intent on training to become Episcopal ministers.
Brown was a fine student, and he came out of Bexley with rich prospects, though not with a degree, as the seminary did not accept all of Brown’s transfer credits. Nonetheless, he was ordained.
Brown’s first job was at a church in Galion. Brown had remained close to his benefactor, marrying her daughter, Ella. The mother-in-law gave them the money to build an elegant home near the church — where she could move in with them — and thus Brownella Cottage was built from 1885 to 1887.
But Brown was dutiful, obedient, and well-liked by his superiors. He impressed the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church, and they kept promoting him to more prominent positions, which eventually took him away from Galion for months every year.
His service was so distinguished, Kenyon College in 1898 made up for the seminary’s snub by presenting him with an honorary doctorate.
At the height of his career, Brown became the Archbishop of the Arkansas See, overseeing the church system in that part of the country. During his tenure there, Brown’s ornery streak began to emerge, and he became embroiled in arguments about church governance.
Increasingly unpopular for his know-it-all attitude, Brown retired in 1912 and returned to Galion. With church no longer taking up his full time, Brown used retirement to read through his entire library of theological books. Finishing that a year later and growing restless, he started reading them all again, only to drop them in boredom.
The Bishop was suddenly hit by a novel idea. Why not read some of the books he’d always preached against?
Things like The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and Das Kapital by Karl Marx. He’d done as he was instructed and preached against the controversial books for many years. But he had never actually read them.
Bishop Brown read Darwin’s book on natural selection and Marx’s political manifesto in 1913. And he realized in a moment of shocking clarity that those two publications made more sense to him than anything else he had ever read.
Most of all, Brown decided that these two books were far more believable than The Bible which he had been preaching from for decades. He felt that finally his eyes were being opened to the truth of the world.
In retirement, Bishop William Montgomery Brown became a fiery atheist and communist.
At first, the Episcopal Church decided that the best course was to ignore Brown when he announced his conversion. But when he started publishing pamphlets and books advocating for atheism and Marxism, they decided that tolerance was too good for the man who was becoming known as “The Red Bishop,” or, to some, “Bad Bishop Brown.”
Situated in his study, connected to the main house at Brownella Cottage by a glassed-in walkway, Brown gleefully kept churning out reams of commentary to support his new beliefs, despite the church’s eventual order to cease and desist.
In 1924, the Episcopal Church put Brown on trial in front of an ecclesiastical court assembled in New Orleans, charging him with heresy. As several commentators at the time noted, Brown was his own worst enemy at the affair, clearly enjoying the controversy and responding to questions with teasing counter-questions and facetious asides.
Indeed, having read Brown’s autobiography My Heresy, I can add to the testimony that Brown could be irritatingly clever and obnoxiously witty, though always fascinating. He stuck to his guns at the trial and refused to renounce communism and atheism.
The church found him guilty as charged and excommunicated him, stripping him of his title. The triumph of orthodoxy was temporary. The Episcopal Church has an agreement with other Christian churches to honor their colleagues’ priests according to the right of apostolic succession.
So when the small but respected sect the Old Catholic Church (which is an offshoot of the main Catholic Church) offered to ordain Brown as a bishop in their church, the Episcopals were forced to acknowledge that he was a proper bishop after all.
The OCC titled him Bishop to the Bolsheviks and Unbelievers, arguing that whether those people believed in God or not, it was the the church’s duty to minister to them as they would to anyone else.
The Red Bishop returned to Galion and lived out his life peacefully, ministering to the poor and publishing his radical pamphlets, including a series entitled The Bankruptcy of Christian Supernaturalism.
When Brown died in 1937, his will attempted to leave his house to the American Communist Party. As that organization had been outlawed, the estate went into legal limbo, where it remained for over half a century.
The house was locked up and preserved all that time, so when the property was finally turned over to the Galion Historical Society (on the condition that they keep the Bishop’s publications available), the historical property proved to be an astonishing time capsule. It is regularly open to the public for tours today.
Visit www.GalionHistory.com for more information.
As for the Bishop’s Knox County connections, he left the contents of his library to Kenyon College. A number of his books were indeed moved to Kenyon, though many remain, lining the bishop’s walls.
The Galion Historical Society also has copies of some of the Bishop’s books and pamphlets on site. Read a few of those and you may wonder that the church waited so long to put him on trial.
Brown clearly delighted in pushing people’s buttons. One could only imagine how much fun he would have arguing religion and politics today.
If in no other way, Brown stands in the tradition of Bishop Philander Chase himself. According to the biography of him written by his granddaughter Laura Chase Smith, Bishop Chase was a vigorous veteran of in-fighting within both his own church and the organizations he created.
He eventually left Kenyon and Bexley Hall to go found Jubilee College in Illinois in 1839, where he died in 1852. While he would have loathed Brown’s beliefs, perhaps Chase would have related to his fighting spirit.
