Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Mostly unknown to many of today’s Winona Lake residents is the one-time high visibility, huge influence and nationally prominent best-known citizen, Billy Sunday.
Many are aware of the facts of Sunday’s life. Born in 1862 in Iowa, he had a difficult childhood, being raised by a single mother and grandparents, and spending time in several Iowa orphanages.
Sunday’s path out of poverty was his running ability. He signed on with a local firefighter baseball team because they needed a speedy baserunner. That led to a tryout with a major league team, and Sunday secured a spot with the Chicago Whitestockings, who would later become the Chicago Cubs.
Sunday played with Chicago for five years, then with Pittsburgh Alleghenies for two years, and then was traded to Philadelphia. He was offered a very large contract from Cincinnati, but by then he had experienced a religious conversion at the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago, and had married a fine Presbyterian young lady named Helen Amelia Thompson.
Feeling a pull toward Christian work, he turned down the baseball contract and went to work for the Chicago YMCA for $83.33 a month. After several years there, he signed on as the advance man for a traveling evangelist named J. Wilbur Chapman.
Chapman, in addition to his evangelism work, was the first director of the Winona Lake Bible Conference, and he frequently invited Sunday to come to Winona to speak to Bible conference audiences. Sunday was popular, and his fame grew rapidly.
When Chapman left his evangelism career to become a pastor in Philadelphia, Sunday was left without an employer. Just then, some churches in Iowa invited him to come preach an evangelistic series, which he did. And that’s what he did all the rest of his life.
Sunday and his wife moved to Winona Lake with their four children and a housekeeper in 1911. By then he had already achieved a national reputation as a speaker.
His evangelistic crusades were first conducted in tents. To gain capacity, they then moved to sports venues and large auditoriums. Realizing the futility of finding venues large enough, the Sunday team resorted to constructing temporary wooden tabernacles to house his meetings. An advance crew would find a vacant lot, purchase wood locally, and construct tabernacles seating 5,000, 7,500 or even 10,000 people. His New York tabernacle held 18,000 people, and Sunday would fill it three times a day,speaking morning, afternoon, and in the evening. In all, they constructed 26 such tabernacles.
Every evangelist needed a good musician, and for Sunday that role was filled by Homer Rodeheaver. A lifelong bachelor, Rody was an engaging platform personality. He would warm up the audience with group singing, would lead massive choirs of thousands of voices, would play his trombone and would perform amateur magic tricks before Sunday came on to preach.
Sunday, then, brought explosive energy to his sermons. Often using athletic illustrations, he preached in common language to the common man. He leaped, pounded, shouted and slid on the platform. And the public loved it. Over his career, Sunday spoke to 100 million people face-to-face. There was no radio, no television,and no amplification.
The peak of Sunday’s career was approximately from 1915 to 1920. In addition to his evangelistic sermons, he also crusaded strongly against alcohol, and many credit him with helping to gain passage of the 18th Amendment in 1919. When Prohibition became the law of the land, Sunday’s appeal began to fade.
He continued preaching another 15 years until he died in 1935, but now the venues and audiences were much smaller.
The Sundays raised their four children in the Arts and Crafts bungalow that today sits at 1200 Sunday Lane in Winona Lake, just atop Evangel Hill or 12th Street. Billy Sunday, at age 72, died in 1935, and Mrs. Sunday outlived her husband by several decades, passing away in 1957. By then all four children had also died; Mrs. Sunday outlived the entire family. There are no known descendants.
It is hard to overestimate Sunday’s national influence. His house is decorated with autographed photos of his friends and supporters. They include Presidents Harding, Coolidge, Wilson, Taft and Hoover, financier John D. Rockefeller, auto magnate John Studebaker, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, food entrepreneur H. J. Heinz, war hero John “Black Jack” Pershing, entertainer Buffalo Bill Cody, film impresario Cecil B. DeMille and many more.
In all, somewhere around 850,000 people made conversion commitments during Sunday’s crusades, and many of them went on to found churches, colleges and seminaries, denominations, radio and TV ministries and much more.
Artifacts from Sunday’s life and career are on display in the Winona History Center in Westminster Hall on Ninth Street and in the Sunday home in Winona Lake, which is available for touring.
Winona Lake became world-famous, in part, because it was the home of Billy Sunday, the renowned “baseball evangelist,” who had a major impact on the religious life of America during the early 20th century.
