NESTLED IN ROLLING HILLS AND RINGED BY CLEAR, COLD trout streams, Salisbury, North Carolina, was very much a Southern city in 1937 when Charles J. Woodbridge arrived to become pastor of the First Presbyterian Church.
Settled by Scotch-Irish pioneers who traveled 450 miles by wagon from Pennsylvania to establish homes on the Yadkin River in Rowan County in 1753, Salisbury had a rich and often dark history. Daniel Boone was dispatched from there to explore Kentucky. Andrew Jackson studied law there.
During the Civil War, or the War of Northern Aggression, as some there called it, Salisbury was the site of a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. Built for two thousand prisoners, it once housed up to ten thousand men living under ghastly conditions. Many did not survive their brutal incarceration — more than five thousand unidentified Union soldiers were buried in unmarked graves outside the prison walls. In August 1865, four months after the war, Union General George Stone-man burned it to the ground.
By 1930, the city had seventeen thousand residents, and most of them believed that Salisbury’s attractive tree-lined streets, well-manicured Fulton Street residential district, accessible downtown with many stores, numerous churches, good schools, and well-manicured parks made an ideal place to live and work.
When Woodbridge and his family arrived, whites constituted the town’s privileged majority. The Salisbury Railway Passenger Station reflected the social mores of that time and place. Black Americans had no choice but to enter the general waiting room through a different door than the one used by whites; ironically, nearly eighty years earlier, a group of locals had promoted a number of civic resolutions that included calling for the abolishment of the African slave trade. But in 1930, restrooms were segregated, and on the train, black Americans were forced to ride in cars at the front, where they suffered much stronger doses of soot and noise from the steam engines than did cars at the back of the train reserved for whites.
The station was an important stop on the railway line between Atlanta, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. In 1945, after Franklin Roosevelt died, hundreds of residents arose in the predawn darkness to line the railroad tracks and pack the station to view the president’s funeral train as it made its way north from Warm Springs, Georgia, to Washington, D.C.
Many of Salisbury’s young women embraced “white-glove” Southern etiquette. They dated under the watchful eye of chaperones and carefully heeded curfews. They followed traditional customs for “debutante,” or coming-out, parties. Few young ladies considered professional careers or aspired to run businesses. Nevertheless, women often exercised considerable influence over the community’s social life through their participation in clubs, civic organizations, school boards, and church activities.
As in much of America, the town’s economy was mired in the Depression and feeling its effects in various ways. African Americans were moving northward in droves to industrial cities in the North and to the farms of California in search of work. For every antebellum mansion there were scores of sharecropper shacks. For a time, banks across the nation were failing at the rate of more than one per day. After the stock market crash in 1929, the annual gross national product dropped precipitously, and farm income dropped by more than half. In 1933, one out of four workers was unemployed. President Roosevelt instituted the first of his “Fireside Chats” in 1933 to try to assure Americans that the nation would recover and to encourage them to support his New Deal measures. It was a time when many were haunted by moral and spiritual doubts.
Like the original pioneers who had settled Salisbury, Charles Woodbridge and his family journeyed from Pennsylvania, where, in 1930, he had married Ruth Dunning, the daughter of Smith Gardner Dunning and his wife, Agnes. From 1929 to 1941, Smith Gardner Dunning was the pastor of Beulah Presbyterian Church in Churchill, Pennsylvania. Woodbridge traced his ancestors back to John Woodbridge, a fifteenth-century Lollard preacher in England. The Lollards were followers of the Oxford scholar and pre-Reformation theologian John Wycliffe, who spearheaded the first translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible into English. Since then, a Woodbridge in every generation had been a minister.
Charles was born in China in 1902, the son of Presbyterian missionaries. His mother, Jeanie Wilson Woodrow Woodbridge was a first cousin to Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eighth president of the United States. In fact, Jeanie had reintroduced Wilson to her best friend, Ellen Louise Axon, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. Ellen Louise Axon became Woodrow Wilson’s first wife.
Woodbridge worked his way through Princeton University, earning undergraduate and graduate degrees there. He was an all-American soccer player, holding his own against bigger and stronger foes by drawing on his expertise learned from the English children he had played with while in school in China. He earned a theological degree from Princeton Seminary and was ordained in 1927.
He first served the First Presbyterian Church in Flushing, New York, where he established a reputation as a hardworking clergyman with an outgoing personality who was interested in the lives of his church members. Athletic and vivacious, he endeared himself to others with a finely tuned blend of preaching within church walls and an avuncular sense of humor beyond the pulpit. Much of his ministry here was devoted to house-to-house visitation, and he met his goal of one thousand visits per year.
In 1932, he felt a call to become a missionary. This was not surprising. His father, the Rev. Samuel I. Woodbridge, had been a missionary in China and was the editor of the largest English-language religious newspaper in that country, the Chinese Christian Intelligencer. Not only had Charles Woodbridge been raised as an intellectual — he was a Phi Beta Kappa scholar at Princeton; knew Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, and German; and had studied under some of the greatest theologians of the time, including Adolf von Harnack — he was schooled to have an appreciation for and understanding of the global community.
Samuel Woodbridge, his father, exchanged correspondence with and provided counsel to President Wilson. In a September 1914 letter to Samuel, Wilson expressed his personal anguish over the outbreak of World War I, although the U.S. did not declare war on Germany until 1917:
I cannot send you an adequate reply to your generous letter of August fifteenth which has touched me very much. I can only say how fully I realize your power to sympathize with me in my present darkness and distress and how sincerely obliged I am for the voice of sympathy and of comfort which comes to me with your letter.
We think of you very often, particularly in the present extraordinary circumstances of the world, and I hope things are going as well with you as it is possible for them to go in these circumstances, and, besides, that you are well.
Cordially and sincerely yours,
Woodrow Wilson
Presbyterians had long been active in missionary work around the globe, and Ruth Woodbridge had spent three years in French Cameroon, West Africa, teaching the children of missionaries. She returned to the United States, where she met Charles on a blind date at a dinner party in New York City. They were married on March 4, 1930, by Ruth’s father in his church in Churchill, Pennsylvania. In June 1932, Charles, Ruth, and their one-year-old daughter, Norma Jean, embarked again for West Africa. Time magazine featured a photograph of the three in its religion section.
Their stay was brief. In September of 1934, Woodbridge accepted an invitation to go to Philadelphia to become the secretary general of the newly constituted Independent Presbyterian Board for Foreign Missions that was founded by Dr. J. Gresham Machen, a renowned theologian and former professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. But that decision turned disastrous when a dispute broke out among some church officials who saw the board as a direct challenge to their authority to control the foreign missions program of their church. Machen was put on trial by an ecclesiastical court and suspended from the exercise of his ministerial functions by the Northern Presbyterian Church. A disheartened Woodbridge suffered the same fate.
When the call came from the First Presbyterian Church of Salisbury, Woodbridge saw it as an opportunity to start anew. His father had been a Southern Presbyterian, so he saw going to Salisbury as a return to his family roots.
The church had been founded in 1821 and was a town landmark, its bell tower facing Innes Street. The family moved into the church’s two-story brick manse on the corner across the street. On many evenings, the family gathered to read and relax on the veranda flanked by Doric columns.
In the living room hung a portrait of Maxwell Chambers and his wife, Catherine, both of whom had wielded enormous financial influence in the church. After their deaths in the 1850s, they were buried under what later became the lecture room in the church. Along with gifts of money and property, the Chamberses had stipulated in their wills that a religious service be held once a month on the floor above their graves.
Woodbridge was a dynamic speaker who loved to preach and teach the Bible. A clear and gifted communicator, he carefully outlined each sermon in a manner that listeners could easily follow. In 1938, he was invited to be a guest speaker for a week of meetings at the Independent Presbyterian Church in Savannah as part of a revival campaign. The Historians Report, a publication of the church, noted that he exuded “great personal charm, a brilliant mind, and keen understanding.” Those characteristics were on full display in Salisbury and church members — particularly young men and women — embraced him enthusiastically.
In 1938, a Sunday school room was opened and more pews were added as the congregation began to swell. Woodbridge organized a volunteer choir whose ranks were soon populated with talented singers from nearby Catawba College.
He developed close personal ties with a number of his parishioners, many of whom were influential citizens such as Charlie Burkett, Salisbury’s fire chief, and Ross Garrison, the assistant fire chief and town barber, who, according to Woodbridge, “knew all the Salisbury gossip.” More than once during church services, the town fire alarm would sound, Burkett and Garrison would bolt out the door, and Woodbridge would immediately stop preaching in order to pray for those whose lives might be in danger.
Woodbridge also became a part of the social fabric of the town, participating in all manner of non-church activities, such as goose hunting with Harry Frymoyer, a sergeant of the state police, and Sheriff Jim Krider. On one occasion, Krider invited Woodbridge to accompany him on his evening patrol, saying, “Pastor, then you will know how your church members really live.”
Woodbridge would later recall one of those spine-tingling night rides: “Krider drove like Jehu [a biblical commander of chariots] for several miles in pursuit of a drunk culprit who drove head-on into a garden wall, was unharmed, and turned out to be one of my more docile members!” The parishioner was likely mortified to see his pastor sitting next to the sheriff in the police car.
In October 1939, Woodbridge began teaching a Bible class, which quickly became popular among the city’s young men. Though nearing forty, Woodbridge was filled with an appealing youthful energy. He was clearly a man of God, but with his familiar manner, contagious sense of humor, and worldly intelligence, he easily related to young people, even those who were not particularly godly or spiritual. Townspeople of Salisbury who did not normally attend the First Presbyterian Church began to receive invitations from their friends to join them and hear the pastor preach.
One person to receive such an invitation was Teen Palm.