A Nod to the Baptists

The Baptist Church had a presence in Iowa from the time the territory opened for settlement, and Baptist missionary and itinerant preacher Moses J. Post traveled southeastern Iowa beginning in 1841. After Marion County was formally organized in 1845, Post was commissioned to Eddyville, where he worked in Marion County and other parts of the New Purchase, preaching once a month at the Nossaman family cabin a few miles south of the future site of Pella. In 1846 he was reassigned to Fairfield, serving as a traveling pastor at four rural churches while also carrying mail weekly between Fairfield and Fort Des Moines along the primitive State Highway, which passed the Tuttle farm in northeastern Marion County. Because these travels gave Post unusual familiarity with the region, he was able in the summer of 1847 to guide Dominie Henry Peter Scholte and a five-man Dutch search committee from the Fairfield land office to the future site of Pella after a chance meeting between the two reverends. There Post introduced them to the Tuttles and nearby settlers, and within days Scholte purchased several settlers' claims, securing the future location of Pella; eventually 18,000 acres were acquired for the Dutch settlement. In 1852, when the Baptist Church sought a location for a university to serve Iowa, Scholte and other prominent citizens offered land and incentives to bring it to Pella, leading to the founding of the Central University of Iowa there in 1853, now Central College. In 1916, the Baptists transferred control of the university to the Reformed Church in America, under whose auspices it remains. Although Scholte and the Dutch immigrants were not Baptists, Baptist assistance was crucial to Pella's location and later success.

Pella, Iowa · United States