February 20 Today in OPC History

To decide whether the Rev. John Davies and his pregnant wife, Hermima, should minister on the Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin in 1936, they camped for two weeks in an umbrella tent. The couple had previously ministered to the Chippewa for two years. They decided to stay, serving both the Menominee and Stockbridge-Munsee Native Americans for eighteen years. Hermima raised John, Janice, Beth, Helen, David, Rachel, and Rebecca while serving these congregations, receiving her heavenly rest on this date in 1995. John and Hermima over the years had many adventures while serving the Lord. The Davies used this same tent, pitched next to a public school, to hold vacation Bible school. Once fierce winds bent some of the tent poles, but God kept them safe in the tent and not a tent peg came loose. Yet the tornado had blown out a school window and knocked down a nearby barn. Less dangerous, every Halloween children on the reservation tipped over the Davies’ outhouse (they never had indoor plumbing).

John and Hermima ministered to the Menominee as well as the Stockbridge-Munsee Native Americans on the adjoining reservation. They held “Sunday” school in the woods or at the Roundhouse, the Indian dance hall, on Saturdays on the Menominee reservation. It took John two trips to pick up twenty-five children in his Model A Ford, with kids standing on the running boards, hanging onto the hood. Hermima played hide and seek with the first group while John picked up the second group. During Sunday school Hermima pumped and played their portable folding organ and also directed the senior choir. She also often visited homes on the reservation with John as a man couldn’t properly visit a woman on his own.

Although John accepted a call to Wildwood, New Jersey in 1954, and later served in Glenwood, Washington, their hearts were united to their Native Americans brothers and sisters. As a legally blind widow in 1994, Hermima returned to speak at a mother-daughter dinner for both congregations, one year before her final Home Going in 1995.

Read more about Hermima in the newly published book, Choosing the Good Portion: Women of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which is available on OPC.ORG here.

Picture: Hermima Davies (center) with the members of the Ladies Prayer Circle in Morgan Siding, Wisconsin.