Look to your right and you will spot the First United Methodist Church, a massive symmetrical fortress of smooth Bedford stone fronted by towering columns and crowned with a prominent Roman glass and copper dome capped by a Latin cross.
It looks like a building that has never missed a mortgage payment in its life. But the polished exterior hides a much scrappier history. This congregation actually started back in 1845, meeting in a humble log structure called the Rathburn Cabin. The founders had slyly slipped across the Raccoon River to snatch up the two best cabins on the north bank. It was in this harsh frontier setting that Reverend Ezra Rathburn delivered the very first sermon ever heard in Des Moines, preaching at the funeral of a young child of the second-in-command at the nearby Fort.
By 1848, they managed to build their first actual church on Fifth Street. Des Moines was basically just dirt roads and ambition back then, lacking any proper civic spaces. So, echoing the makeshift civic life we saw with other buildings earlier on the tour, this early church had to multitask. It doubled as a public hall, a general utility auditorium, and even a courtroom.
Flush with growth, they gambled on a much larger brick structure in 1856. Unfortunately, their timing was terrible. They were hit by a devastating financial blow in 1860 caused by mounting, unmanageable debt. The crisis was so severe they actually lost ownership of their own brand new building. Imagine the indignity... they were forced to rent back just the basement for three years to hold their services, while their beautiful main sanctuary upstairs was rented out as a public hall for concerts and lectures to pay off their creditors. At a regional conference, church leaders formally resolved to sympathize with their desperate Des Moines brethren, and authorized their pastor to travel abroad just to beg for funds. At the time, that poor pastor was surviving on a meager salary of 500 dollars a year... which is roughly 18,000 dollars today.
It was a harsh lesson in frontier economics. But they stubbornly survived, merged with another congregation, and eventually hired Proudfoot and Bird to design this present Neoclassical masterpiece in 1905. That is why you see that massive pedimented portico... the triangular roof section over the entrance, supported by those tall, scroll-topped Ionic columns. The architects actually matched the building proportions to the famous Pantheon in Rome.
Of course, old financial habits die hard. The estimated construction cost was 175,000 dollars... over 6 million dollars today. To avoid another catastrophic debt, they simply stripped away some of the planned decorative details to keep the budget strictly out of the red.
That cautious pragmatism paid off. Interestingly, back in 1866, this church's basement actually housed Des Moines' very first public library, starting with just 2,300 books. From those makeshift basement shelves, the city's literary culture grew into something spectacular. Let us go see what that legacy looks like today. We are heading to the modern Des Moines Public Library next, which is about a seven minute walk from here.
