The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 79, July 1975 - April, 1976 Page: 299
528 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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William Stuart Red, Historian
While exhorting scholars of other denominations to preserve valuable
materials, particularly unprinted minutes, diaries, and letters, he deposited
.a shelf of photostated sources of the Southern and Cumberland Presbyterian
churches in the archives of The University of Texas at Austin. But he also
wanted to encourage the leaders of his church to lend moral and financial
support to a Presbyterian center for historical research. He found a kindred
,spirit in a fellow Texan, S. M. Tenney, who was also patiently gathering
materials. Tenney importuned his church to establish what is now called
the Historical Foundation of the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches,
presently located at Montreat, North Carolina, and described by H. Sheldon
Smith as "the one indispensable repository of source materials for the study
.of the religious history of the South." Tenney became the Foundation's first
director and Red one of the major boosters of the enterprise.'
While combing the minutes of meetings of early presbyteries, Red was
'struck by the obsession of the church fathers to educate a native clergy.
Early Texas Presbyterian clergymen were extraordinarily well schooled for
frontier parsons. Red, who had attended among other institutions Austin
College, Princeton Theological Seminary, Columbia Theological Seminary,
-the University of Leipzig, and Free Church College, Glasgow, was no
'exception in wanting a religion of the head as well as the heart. For several
'years he taught Hebrew at the Austin School of Theology, a small enterprise
which for eleven years before its demise in 1895 prepared Texans for the
pulpit. When this school closed, Red and others moved swiftly for the
creation of a permanent and educationally adequate seminary. Arguing
doggedly that the school of divinity should be located in Austin near the
,state university and not at Austin College in Sherman, Red mobilized his
'relatives to deed the land and buildings of Stuart Female Seminary, a
family-owned preparatory school in East Austin, to the new school of
'theology. Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary was housed there from
1902 to i907; after a brief period in temporary quarters, it moved in i908
-to its present location near the University of Texas.'
"Malcolm Purcell to R. B. H., February 4, 1974, interview; Stuart Purcell to R. B. H.,
April 1o, 1974, interview; Historical Foundation of the Presbyterian and Reformed
'Churches, Historical Foundation News, XXX (September, 1974), I (quotation). The
Red and Tenney papers at the Historical Foundation reflect their tandem efforts to
promote the archives. See, for example, Tenney to Red, May 26, 1926, Red Papers.
For Red's role in the General Assembly, see Presbyterian Church in the United States,
'General Assembly, Minutes of the Sixty-Sixth General Assembly of the Presbyterian
Church in the United States (Richmond, 1926), 51, and Thomas Hugh Spence, Jr.,
The Historical Foundation and Its Treasures (Montreat, North Carolina, 1960), o0-2.
7Hughes, "Old School Presbyterians," 325, 329-336; Presbyterian Church in the
,United States, Presbytery of Central Texas, Minutes of the Presbytery of Central Texas,299
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 79, July 1975 - April, 1976, periodical, 1975/1976; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101203/m1/344/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.