For years the standard accounts have told us that Billy Sunday and Sam Jones never actually worked together. The biographers grant that Jones influenced Sunday — the coarse humor, the slang, the theatrical pulpit manner — but they stop there. Jones is treated as a stylistic ancestor Sunday admired from a distance, not a man he ever shared a platform with.
The record says otherwise. In June 1897, in the small town of Fonda, Iowa, Billy Sunday joined Sam Jones for a joint revival that ran at least ten days. It is the earliest documented collaboration between the two evangelists, and it deserves a place in any serious telling of Sunday’s early years.
The departure from Lincoln
The story opens not in Fonda but at a railroad platform. On June 18, 1897, Sunday and his co-worker French Earl Oliver left Lincoln, Nebraska, bound for Fonda to join Sam Jones. A newspaper account of the send-off captured the scene in a single, telling sentence:
“As many people were down to see him leave as witnessed the departure of the Bryan train for Chicago prior to the democratic convention.”
Sit with that comparison for a moment. The reporter is measuring Sunday’s farewell crowd against the throng that saw William Jennings Bryan off to the 1896 Democratic National Convention — the journey that produced the “Cross of Gold” speech and Bryan’s nomination. In the tri-state corner around Sioux City and eastern Nebraska, Bryan was a regional hero, and his departure was a public event. To put Sunday’s crowd “on the order of” Bryan’s is to say that a man barely a year into his solo evangelism was already a genuine draw, well before the big-city tabernacle campaigns the histories love to dwell on.
A campaign, not a guest sermon
From Lincoln, Sunday and Oliver traveled to Fonda — roughly ninety miles east of Sioux City, in Pocahontas County — to meet Jones. The Sioux City Journal of June 19, 1897 (page 6) reports the meeting beginning, and the record shows Sunday still preaching there as of June 27. That gives us a documented floor of about ten days, and the campaign may well have run longer.
The length matters. This was not a one-off where Sunday gave a single talk and moved on. It was a sustained, multi-day revival — a full campaign shared by two evangelists, one a rising unknown working the Iowa “kerosene circuit,” the other a national headliner. For a week and a half, Sunday was in the same services, on the same platform, as Sam Jones, at the exact moment he was still forming his own identity as a preacher.
French Earl Oliver belongs in this picture too. He was a recurring co-worker of Sunday’s in these years — documented again at Stuart in 1898 and Elliott in 1900 — and at Fonda he made three figures of real significance sharing one revival: the future giant of American evangelism, his steady early collaborator, and the southern preacher whose style the whole country was talking about.
Why this changes the story
Here is the part that should interest anyone who has read the Jones literature. Kathleen Minnix, in her scholarly biography Laughter in the Amen Corner, names Jones as a key influence on Sunday and a generation of evangelists. But that claim, as biographers usually make it, rests on resemblance: the two men preached alike, Sunday came afterward, therefore Jones must have shaped him. It is a reasonable inference — and it is circumstantial. What it has generally lacked is a documented occasion of contact.
Fonda supplies exactly that. We no longer have to argue the influence from style alone. We have ten days of shared ministry in June 1897, at the precise window when Sunday’s mature methods were taking shape.
And the contemporaries were already drawing the connection. Even before Fonda, papers were comparing the two men directly — a February 1897 notice out of Tecumseh described Sunday’s preaching as “similar to the Rev. Sam Jones.” So the Fonda revival does double duty in the historical record. It is a personal-collaboration milestone, the first time we can place the two men working side by side. And it is a stylistic-genealogy marker, hard documentary evidence behind a connection that observers were making in print at the time and that scholars have asserted ever since.
The lesson in the archive
None of this survives in the major biographies. They compress Sunday’s 1896–1908 circuit years into a sentence or two and hurry on to New York and Philadelphia. A ten-day joint revival with Sam Jones — the kind of event that would anchor a chapter — slips out of the published record entirely, even though a local paper documented it in detail the morning after.
That is the quiet argument of this blog, and Fonda makes it as well as anything I have found: the real texture of Billy Sunday’s early ministry lives in the regional newspapers, one notice at a time. The biographers gave us “Jones influenced Sunday.” The Sioux City Journal gave us the week and a half they spent preaching together.
Primary source: Sioux City Journal, June 19, 1897, p. 6. Lincoln departure account, June 1897. Additional Oliver documentation: Stuart (1898), Elliott (1900).
How to cite this post
Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “When Billy Sunday Joined Sam Jones: The Fonda Revival of June 1897.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), May 29, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/05/29/when-billy-sunday-joined-sam-jones-the-fonda-revival-of-june-1897/.
MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “When Billy Sunday Joined Sam Jones: The Fonda Revival of June 1897.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 29 May 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/05/29/when-billy-sunday-joined-sam-jones-the-fonda-revival-of-june-1897/.
APA: McNutt, K. (2026, May 29). When Billy Sunday joined Sam Jones: The Fonda revival of June 1897. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/05/29/when-billy-sunday-joined-sam-jones-the-fonda-revival-of-june-1897/
Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “When Billy Sunday Joined Sam Jones: The Fonda Revival of June 1897.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). May 29, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/05/29/when-billy-sunday-joined-sam-jones-the-fonda-revival-of-june-1897/.
Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935) 