Former professional baseball player-turned urban evangelist. Follow this daily blog that chronicles the life and ministry of revivalist preacher William Ashley "Billy" Sunday (1862-1935)
THE YEARS HAVE SHOWN A DEVELOPMENT IN SUNDAY’S METHODS.
Ed., the following is an exact reprint from a 1916 article.
Early Audiences Found Nothing Spectacular in the Sermons of the Revivalist, and Towns of 10,000 Were the Limit Then.
There is nothing “mushroom” in the growth of the Billy Sunday meetings. The gradual development of Sunday’s revival methods was recalled today to Ma Sunday by an old clipping from The Star of July 28, 1902.
The clipping was a reprint from the Brooklyn Eagle and it mentioned the fact that Sunday had made the large sum of $12,000 in a year. It said:
Mr. Sunday is not mercenary and he thinks more of converts than he does of money. He mentioned his Pitts to the interviewer simply because he had been asked if it had not been something in the start of a religious revival from the base salary of an American baseball player to the supreme income of a modern athlete and evangelist.
“God has been truly good to us,” was Mr. Sunday’s reply.
“We started our work in Bellingham at $1,500 for the same length of time. Farmington and other places were small, but they are mostly made up of millionaires, we drew $800 in thirty days.”
Ma Sunday smiled over it.
“We certainly would not have tackled Kansas City or Boston or New York City in those days,” she said.
“We used to think that the town of ten thousand population was our limit. We felt that was as large as we could handle and to get above that would perhaps mean a failure. Then we began including the town of twenty thousand. All the time we were gradually adding to our party and building larger tabernacles, until here we are and New York City is in sight with a tabernacle seating twenty-five thousand.”
Fourteen years have also made changes in other ways, as the following extract from the same clipping shows:
Mr. Sunday’s revival methods are all in fashion distinctive to unique. No Sunday jumping, no frenzy and no hysterics among the converts at his meetings. He talks to his congregation in a sane and reasonable fashion. When he has them convinced that they are a pretty bad lot he asks them to come to the front. There are no mourner’s benches. Instead, there are chairs upon which to invite the penitents to sit while he circulates among them and talks to them individually. He takes the name of each subject and turns him over to the pastor of the denomination for which he expresses a preference and refuses to be longer responsible for his new charge. Sometimes it is estimated with no determination.
His plan is to stay a month in each place. For the first two weeks he does not “give” the invitation. He tells the people funny stories and amuses them with his strange and bizarre methods of preaching. The third week he devotes to the subject of sin as he has found it in the experience of whom he is talking. The fourth week he seeks the souls of the sinners and the penitents.
The singer is a tall, well dressed young chap, 40 years old, with the look of a man much younger. It is helpful he wears such neat clothing, for although he has no pretensions to preaching power, it is his warm, personal, but because he makes him different from other preachers.
Article curated by AI, examining period newspapers, with human oversight.
A City on the Edge: The World Behind Billy Sunday’s Philadelphia Campaign (Jan–Mar 1915)
When Billy Sunday stepped into Philadelphia on January 3, 1915, he didn’t enter a quiet city.
He stepped into a world already under strain.
To understand the power of that campaign—why thousands poured into the tabernacle, why his words landed with such force—you have to look beyond the sawdust trail and into the broader setting. Because what was happening outside the tabernacle made what happened inside feel urgent, even necessary.
A World at War—But Not Yet America’s
By early 1915, Europe was already bleeding.
What had begun in the summer of 1914 as a war of movement had hardened into something far more brutal. The Western Front was frozen in place. Soldiers lived in trenches carved into mud and misery. Artillery thundered day and night. Machine guns cut down advances before they began. The casualty lists grew longer by the week.
And in February 1915, something changed that Americans could not ignore: Germany declared the waters around Great Britain a war zone. Submarines—U-boats—would strike without warning.
For the first time, the war felt like it might reach across the Atlantic.
America was still neutral. But no one felt untouched.
A Nation Holding Its Breath
Under President Woodrow Wilson, the United States tried to maintain distance. Officially, this was not our war.
But neutrality is easier to declare than to feel.
Every day, newspapers carried headlines from Europe. Americans followed the movements of armies, the sinking of ships, the warnings issued to neutral nations. Trade tied the U.S. to the Allies. American goods crossed the ocean. American lives traveled those same routes.
The question lingered, unspoken but persistent:
How long can we stay out of this?
There was no clear answer—only a growing sense that the ground was shifting.
Prosperity with a Shadow
At the same time, the American economy was waking up.
Factories were busy. Orders increased. Production surged. War in Europe meant demand for American goods—steel, machinery, supplies.
Philadelphia, an industrial powerhouse, felt it.
But prosperity came with questions.
Was America simply helping… or quietly profiting from the suffering overseas? Could a nation grow rich while the world burned?
These weren’t always spoken out loud. But they were felt.
And men like Billy Sunday had a way of bringing those quiet tensions into the open.
A Moral Movement Finding Its Voice
This was also a moment when moral reform was cresting.
The temperance movement was no longer a fringe cause. The Anti-Saloon League had become a powerful national force. States were beginning to go dry. The conversation about alcohol, vice, and public morality was moving from pulpits into politics.
Sunday did not arrive in Philadelphia as a lone voice crying in the wilderness.
He arrived as a leading voice in a growing chorus.
His attacks on the saloon, his calls for personal repentance, his insistence on moral clarity—they resonated because the ground had already been prepared.
The Pressure of the Modern City
Philadelphia in 1915 was a city alive with motion—and tension.
Immigrants poured into neighborhoods already crowded. Industry demanded long hours and offered uncertain stability. Streets were full. Lives were busy. The pace was relentless.
And beneath it all was something harder to measure:
A kind of spiritual restlessness.
People were working, striving, building—but many sensed something was missing. The old certainties felt less certain. The future felt unclear.
It is no accident that revival fires so often burn brightest in moments like these.
Why It All Matters
Billy Sunday’s Philadelphia campaign did not happen in isolation.
It unfolded in a world:
unsettled by war
uncertain about the future
prospering, but uneasy
crowded, busy, and spiritually searching
When Sunday preached about sin, judgment, repentance, and decision, he was not introducing new concerns.
He was naming what people were already feeling.
And that is why they came.
A Final Word
If you want to understand the Philadelphia campaign, don’t start with the tabernacle.
Start with the world outside it.
Because Billy Sunday did not create the urgency of that moment—he stepped into it, gave it language, and called a city to respond.
Cited in: The Philadelphia Evening Ledger. January 5, 1915:5. – William Rader
Billy Sunday is not easily defined. Power conceals its secret. Psychologists would call it hypnotism; theologians, the power of the spirit; the ethical teacher, the gift of truth; the dramatist, the art of the player; while others declare:
His strength is as the strength of ten, Because his heart is pure.
Billy Sunday is a good actor. Each sermon is carefully prepared, and some of it read from manuscript. Certain climaxes are illustrated. At one point he slides to a base; at another, kneels, or leaps upon the pulpit desk, or smashes a chair to pieces. Edward Everett did not more carefully prepare a speech with its proper gestures than does this evangelist build his sermons. The local color with which he decorates his main thought is taken from the city in which he speaks.
His imagination interested me. Speaking on “The Grenadier,” the consideration of his theme invited the use of the imagination, and he gave it full play. The sermon was an application of military attributes to practical life, a rebuke to the “wind-jammer” of the prayer meeting, and an appeal to the man who has taken an oath to be good to go out and honor it. He assailed the “saphead” who criticises the Church, and the description he gave of Daniel in the lion’s den and of the head of John the Baptist on a charger will not be forgotten.
I confess to a liking for his so-called slang. Most of it is plain English with a punch in it. It is the punch which preachers and editors and people who use words generally lack. Words are like shot, made to strike, and especially when used to influence great bodies of people. It is refreshing to hear a man say what he thinks and say it as he pleases—a thing most public men signally fail to do.
Cited in: The Evening Public Ledger. January 5, 1915: 5.
“What is a revival? Now listen to me. A revival does two things. First, it returns the church from her backsliding; and, second, it causes the conversion of men and women; and it always includes the conviction of sin on the part of the church. What a spell the devil seems to cast over the church today!
“I suppose the people here are pretty fair representatives of the church of God, and if everybody did what you do there would never be a revival. Suppose I did no more than you do, then no people would ever be converted through my efforts; I would fold my arms and rust out. A revival helps to bring the unsaved to Jesus Christ.
“God Almighty never intended that the devil should triumph over the church. He never intended that the saloons should walk roughshod over Christianity. And if you think that anybody is going to frighten me, you don’t know me yet.
“I will cram it down their throats in this town for the miserable lies they hurl against me up and down the streets of this city. Don’t you forget it. You bet your life. You bet, and they will get it.
“When is a revival needed? When the individuals are careless and unconcerned. If the church was down on her face in prayer they would be more concerned with the fellow outside. The church has degenerated into a third-rate amusement joint with religion left out.
“When is a revival needed? When carelessness and unconcern keep the people asleep. It is must the duty of the church to awaken and work and labor for the men and women of this city as it is the duty of the fire department to arouse when the call sounds. What would you think of the fire department of Philadelphia if it slept while the town burned? You would condemn it and I will condemn you if you sleep and let men and women go to hell. It is just as much your business to be awake. The church of God is asleep today; it is turned into a dormitory, and has taken the devil’s opiates.”
Cited from: The Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. January 2, 1915:3.
Miss Grace Saxe, “Billy” Sunday’s Prayer Meeting Organizer, Tells of Her Conversion.
“Billy” Sunday’s right-hand woman, whose other name is Miss Grace Saxe, is just as much a woman as though she didn’t hold one of the most important positions in the whole Sunday organization, a position which might make even a man forget all else but the responsibilities of his work.
For one of the very first things she did on arriving in Philadelphia several days in advance of the opening of the campaign was to launch forth on an energetic shopping tour.
“I simply had to have some pretty clothes to wear, to conduct my meetings,” she said, smiling nervously, at “Billy” Sunday’s home, 1914 Spring Garden street, happy, but exhausted, at the termination of her first work in Philadelphia.
Miss Saxe is the person whom Mr. Sunday has selected for the very vital work of organizing the neighborhood prayer meetings in the various cities where the revivals are conducted, and it is her particular duty to bring religion into as many of the private homes as she can possibly get into touch with and to make it a permanent factor of those homes.
“Our work would be a very poor thing indeed,” she said earnestly, “if we worked at these people up to a state of high religious fervor only to let them drop back again and cool off soon after the campaign was over.”
TELLS OF HER CONVERSION
“Although the revivals have not yet started, I cannot help feeling that the way Philadelphia has received us has been nothing short of magnificent. Already 5000 homes have been thrown open to these prayer meetings and more than 15,000 volunteers have come forward and signified their intention of fostering these meetings permanently and keeping the spirit of Christ in the home indefinitely.
“One phase of the work that I am particularly interested in is teaching people how to read the Bible. There are many who have a great desire to study the Book of God, but who do not know how to go about it, and organizing teaching, high school girls and women in city houses, into Bible classes is my chief duty.
Miss Saxe’s career has been an interesting one. Born in Iowa, she “entered” St. Louis to accept a position as court stenographer, and it was while she was energetically hitting the keys in the city that something occurred which, to use her own expression, “made her see the light.”
“Up until that time,” she said, a little shamefacedly, “I was rather an unregenerate creature. I used to come to town in Lyons, Dr. A. B. Simpson came to town and I was engaged to go and take down in shorthand a series of his lectures. There were about ten of them, and in addition to having to hear them I also had to go all over them again, transcribing them on the typewriter.
“TURNS DOWN” ROOSEVELT
“They made me think, and soon after I began a very careful study of the Bible. Later on I was engaged to work with the Rev. Dwight L. Moody, of Chicago, and after that I traveled abroad with Torrey and Alexander. By that time the work of making a Christian out of me was completed.
“Later on I happened to be in Egypt taking a little vacation when I received a request to go up the Nile and meet Mr. Roosevelt at Luxor, there to take down some of his lectures, but I found I was spoiled for that sort of thing. I had become so interested in religious work that nothing else seemed to satisfy, and it was soon after this that I accepted Mr. Sunday’s offer to become a member of his organization, and have worked with him ever since.”
Miss Saxe has the calm, placid Madonna-like face of one who is at peace with the world and herself.
“The test of his wonderful work is in the results that he gets. Day after day hundreds of testimonials come in which show the lasting conversions that he is responsible for.
“Only the other day a man sent a letter from Waterloo, Iowa, where a revival was conducted some three years ago, saying that he was thankful for the change that had been brought about in him, that he was willing even to have his name used if other conversions might be effected thereby.
“For 30 years this Johnny Bates had been a confirmed drunkard. His wife got disgusted and divorced him, his children grew away from him and he went down into the very depths. Three years ago he hit the sawdust trail and since then has never touched a drop. He now holds a splendid lucrative position and his wife has remarried him. That is but one of the many cases which testify to the indisputably good work that Mr. Sunday is doing.”
Cited from: The Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. January 2, 1915:3.
Here is the Narrative of How He Lost His Father in the War and Was Raised Then in the Orphans’ Home at Glenwood, a Few Miles from Omaha
I was bred and born (not in old Kentucky, although my grandfather was a Kentuckian), but in old Iowa, November 19, 1862. I am a rube of the rubes. I am a hayseed of the hayseeds, and the malodors of the barnyard are on me yet, and it beats Pinaud and Colgate, too.
I have greased my hair with goose grease and blacked my boots with stove blacking. I have wiped my old proboscis with a gunny sack towel; I have drunk coffee out of my saucer, and I have eaten with my knife; I have said “done it” when I should have said “did it” and I have “saw” when I should have “seen,” and I expect to go to heaven just the same. I have crept and crawled out of the university of poverty and hard knocks, and have taken post graduate courses.
My father, William Sunday, went to the war four months before I was born, in Company E, Twenty-third Iowa. I have butted and fought and struggled since I was 6 years old. That’s one reason why I wear that little red, white and blue button. I know all about the dark and seamy side of life, and if ever a man fought hard, I have fought hard for everything I have ever gained.
The wolf scratched at the cabin door, and finally mother said: “Boys, I am going to send you to the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home!” At Ames, Ia., we had to wait for a train, and we went to a little hotel, and they came about 1 o’clock and said: “Get ready for the train.”
I looked into my mother’s face. Her eyes were red, her hair was disheveled. I said, “What’s the matter, mother?” All the time “Ed” and I slept mother had been praying. We went to the train; she put one arm about me and the other about “Ed” and sobbed as if her heart would break. People walked by and looked at us, but they didn’t say a word. Why? They didn’t know, and if they had they probably wouldn’t have cared. Mother knew. She knew that for years she wouldn’t see her boys. We got into the train and said, “Good-bye, mother,” as the train pulled out.
We reached Council Bluffs. It was cold and we turned up our coats and shivered. We saw a hotel and went up and asked the woman for something to eat. She said, “What’s your name?”
“My name is William Sunday, and this is my brother, ‘Ed.’”
“Where are you going?”
“Going to the Soldiers’ Home at Glenwood.”
She wiped her tears and said, “My husband was a soldier and never came back. He wouldn’t turn anyone away and I wouldn’t turn you boys away.” She drew her arms about us and said, “Come on in.” She gave us our breakfast and dinner, too. There wasn’t any train going out on the “Q” until afternoon. We saw a freight train standing there so we climbed into the caboose.
The conductor came along and said, “Where’s your money or ticket?”
“Ain’t got any.”
“I’ll have to put you off.”
We commenced to cry. My brother handed him a letter of introduction to the superintendent of the Orphans’ Home. The conductor read it and handed it back as the tears rolled down his cheeks. Then he said, “Just sit still, boys. It won’t cost a cent to ride on my train.”
It’s only twenty miles from Council Bluffs to Glenwood, and as we rounded the curve the conductor said, “There it is, on the hill.”
I want to tell you that one of the brightest pictures that hangs upon the walls of my memory is the recollection of the days when as a little boy, out in the log cabin on the frontier of Iowa I knelt by mother’s side.
I went back to the old farm some years ago. The scenes had changed about the place. Faces I had known and loved had long since turned to dust. Fingers that used to turn the pages of the Bible were obliterated and the old trees beneath which we boys used to play and swing had been felled by the woodman’s axe. I stood and thought.
Once more with my gun on my shoulder and my favorite dog trailing at my heels I walked through the pathless wood and sat on the old familiar logs and stumps, and as I sat and listened to the wild, weird harmonies of nature, a vision of the past opened. The squirrel from the limb of the tree barked defiantly and I threw myself into an interrogation point, and when the gun cracked the squirrel fell at my feet. I grabbed him and ran home to throw him down and receive compliments for my skill as a marksman.
And I saw the tapestry of the evening fall. I heard the lowing herds and saw them wind slowly o’er the lea—and I listened to the tinkling bells that lulled the distant fowl. Once more I heard the shouts of childish glee. Once more I climbed the haystack for hens’ eggs. Once more we sat at the threshold and ate our frugal meal. Once more mother drew the trundle bed out from under the larger one, and we boys, kneeling down shut our eyes and clasping our little hands, said, “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to take. And this I ask for Jesus’ sake, amen.”
I stood beneath the old oak tree and it seemed to carry on a conversation with me. It seemed to say:
“Hello, Bill. Is that you?”
“Yes, it’s I, old tree.”
“Well, you’ve got a bald spot on the top of your head.”
“Yes, I know, old tree.”
“Won’t you climb up and sit on my limbs as you used to?”
“No, I haven’t got time now. I’d like to, though, awfully well.”
“Don’t go, Bill. Don’t you remember the old swing you made?”
“Yes, I remember; but I’ve got to go.”
“Say, Bill, don’t you remember when you tried to play George Washington and the cherry tree, and almost cut me down? That’s the scar you made, but it’s almost covered over now.”
“Yes, I remember all, but I haven’t time to stay.”
“Are you coming back, Bill?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll never forget you.”
Then the old apple tree seemed to call me and I said, “I haven’t time to wait, old apple tree.”
When I was about 14 years old, after leaving the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home, I made application for the position of janitor in a school. I used to get up at 2 o’clock and there were fourteen stoves and coal had to be carried for all of them. I had to keep the fires up and keep up my studies and sweep the floors. I got $25 a month salary.
Well, one day I got a check for my salary and I went right down to the bank to get it cashed. Right in front of me was another fellow with a check to be cashed, and he shoved his in, and I came along and shoved my check in, and the teller handed me out $40. My check called for $25.
I went to a friend of mine, who was a lawyer in Kansas City, and told him. I said, “Frank, what do you think, Jay F— handed me $40 and my check only called for $25.” He said, “Bill, if I had your luck I would buy a lottery ticket.” But I said, “The $15 is not mine.” He said, “Don’t be a chump. If you were shy $10 and you went back you would not get it, and if they hand out $15, don’t be a fool—keep it.”
Well, he had some drag with me and influenced me. I was fool enough to keep it, and took it and bought a suit of clothes. I can see that suit now. It was a kind of brown with a little green in it, and I thought I was the goods, I want to tell you, when I got those store clothes on. That was the first suit of store clothes I had ever had, and I bought that suit and I had $25 left after I did it.
Years afterward I said, “I ought to be a Christian,” and I got on my knees to pray, and the Lord seemed to touch me on the back and say, “Bill, you owe that Farmers’ bank $15 with interest,” and I said, “Lord, the bank doesn’t know that I got that $15,” and the Lord said, “I know it.”
So I struggled along for years, probably like some of you, trying to be decent and honest and right some wrong that was in my life, and every time I got down to pray the Lord would say, “Fifteen dollars with interest, Nevada county, Iowa; $15, Bill.” So years afterward I sent that money back, enclosed a check, wrote a letter and acknowledged it, and I have the peace of God from that day to this, and I have never swindled anyone out of a dollar.
In the fall of 1915, Nebraska found itself hosting two of the largest public gatherings in its history.
One was expected. The other was not.
In Lincoln, the Nebraska State Fair was in full swing. Newspaper headlines called it “the greatest ever held.” Despite rain and poor weather early in the week, crowds poured through the gates. By the time it ended, total attendance reached 180,767—a record-setting year. The fairgrounds were packed with machinery exhibits, livestock judging, aerial shows, wrestling matches, and the familiar buzz of a state coming together for its biggest annual spectacle.
It was, by every measure, a success.
But sixty miles away, something far more remarkable was unfolding.
In Omaha, a temporary wooden tabernacle had been erected for evangelist Billy Sunday. There were no rides. No prize livestock. No grandstand attractions. Just sawdust, benches, a pulpit—and a preacher.
Yet by the time Sunday’s campaign ended, the numbers told a different story.
The revival recorded approximately 930,000 total attendees across its six weeks of meetings. Of those, nearly 795,000 passed through the tabernacle itself. More than 13,000 people walked the “sawdust trail,” publicly declaring their decision for Christ.
Let that sink in.
The largest civic event in the state drew just over 180,000 people in a week. Billy Sunday’s revival drew over five times that number (in six weeks total).
The 1915 Omaha Billy Sunday revival, bookstore.
And it wasn’t confined to a single venue or moment. The revival spread throughout the city:
Over 2,100 cottage prayer meetings during the campaign
Tens of thousands attending women’s meetings, Bible classes, and noon gatherings
Business leaders, factory workers, students, and families all pulled into its orbit
This was not simply a series of sermons. It was a citywide movement.
The contrast is striking. The State Fair represented the best of Nebraska’s agriculture, industry, and entertainment. It was planned, promoted, and expected to succeed.
Sunday’s revival, on the other hand, was built on something less tangible but far more powerful—a shared spiritual hunger that transcended social boundaries.
For a brief moment in 1915, Omaha became the epicenter of something larger than spectacle. Larger than tradition. Larger even than the state’s greatest annual event.
The fairgrounds would empty. The tabernacle would be torn down.
But for those who were there, the memory remained:
A season when the crowds came—not for entertainment—but for transformation.
During Billy Sunday’s great revival in Baltimore in the spring of 1916, one evening at the tabernacle took on a distinctly historic tone. The sawdust aisles—normally filled with businessmen, laborers, and curious citizens—were suddenly occupied by a different kind of procession. A body of Union veterans of the Civil War, many gray with age but still proud of their service, marched forward together into the meeting.
1915 Civil War veterans, source unknown
According to the Baltimore Sun, nearly 500 veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) attended the revival that night. The GAR, the powerful national organization of Union veterans, was still an important presence in American civic life in the early twentieth century. Though the war had ended more than fifty years earlier, the men who had fought to preserve the Union remained symbols of sacrifice and national memory.
The veterans were led by James E. Van Sant, commander of the Maryland Department of the GAR, along with E. R. Monfort of Iowa, who at the time served as Commander-in-Chief of the national organization. When they entered the tabernacle they were warmly received, and the crowd greeted them with enthusiastic applause.
The occasion had the character of both a patriotic ceremony and a revival meeting. The veterans arrived with a brass band, and when the musicians began to play familiar airs the audience responded with equal fervor. The strains of “Maryland, My Maryland” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” rang through the building, followed by old martial tunes such as “Yankee Doodle” and “Dixie.” The building reportedly shook with applause as the music echoed beneath the great wooden roof of the tabernacle.
The veterans also presented Billy Sunday with a gift—a ceremonial Old Glory mounted on an elaborately wrought brass standard. It was a gesture that connected the evangelist’s message with the patriotic ideals the veterans had fought to defend half a century earlier.
The evening was opened with prayer by Rev. B. F. Clarkson, chaplain of the Maryland GAR. Both Billy Sunday and his music director Homer Rodeheaver spoke warmly of the veterans and the sacrifices they had made for the nation. Rodeheaver added to the patriotic atmosphere by playing martial music and bugle calls on his trombone.
For the aging soldiers, the gathering was more than a nostalgic reunion. Many of them walked the same sawdust aisles as the younger men and women attending the revival. Their presence reminded the audience that the Civil War generation was rapidly passing from the scene. These men had once marched into battle for the Union; now they marched into a revival meeting in search of spiritual renewal.
By 1916, the Civil War was already receding into history, but its memory still held powerful emotional force. That night in Baltimore, the veterans’ appearance created a striking moment where patriotism, memory, and revival religion met under one roof.
The sight of those aged soldiers marching forward—flags waving, band playing, and the crowd cheering—must have been unforgettable. For one evening at least, the old warriors of the Union once again marched together, not onto a battlefield, but down the sawdust trail of Billy Sunday’s revival.
Curated from: The Philadelphia Evening Ledger. January 6, 1915:3.
You don’t just attend a Billy Sunday meeting—you step into it.
By the time I reached the tabernacle, the place was already alive. Not just crowded—alive. Policemen lined the edges, firemen stood ready, and yet there wasn’t even “the merest hint of disorder.” Whatever this thing was, it had structure. It had gravity. And it was pulling people in.
Colorized image of the Billy Sunday tabernacle in Philadelphia, c.1915.
Inside, the air carried that peculiar mixture of sawdust, sweat, and anticipation. Outside, though—that’s where you heard the real story.
A man near me, confident as a prophet, said to no one in particular:
“Billy Sunday has only started… it’s going to get worse and worse. He arouses more enthusiasm each day. If you don’t believe me, ask Scranton.”
That was the mood—this wasn’t the event. This was the beginning of the event.
The Crowd Watching the Crowd
It struck me quickly: people weren’t just watching Billy Sunday.
They were watching each other.
One visitor said it plainly:
“I was naturally interested in ‘Billy’ Sunday, and perhaps even more so in the crowd.”
And what a crowd it was.
A boy—no more than ten—hobbled in on crutches just to hear him. A sailor from the battleship Kansas had been waiting “for months” to catch a meeting. A woman stood nearby, nervous, almost whispering:
“Oh! no. I cannot give my name… my husband would throw a fit if he knew I had been in here.”
And yet—there she was.
That’s how you knew something was happening. Not just attendance—but risked attendance.
What People Were Saying
If you wanted to understand Billy Sunday, you didn’t start with the sermon.
You started with the talk afterward.
“What do you think of ‘Billy’?” someone asked.
The answers came quick, overlapping:
“Great.” “Some man.” “An ace.” “I like him because he goes after the hypocrites.”
Others reached for bigger words:
“Wonderful… splendid… marvelous.”
But not everyone could quite put their finger on it.
One woman, looking slightly dazed, said:
“I have had so many things fired at me in the last hour that I can’t quite set my bearings.”
That may have been the most honest response of all.
More Than a Sermon
There was something else in the air—something heavier than excitement.
A man, speaking to a small group of women, said what many were thinking:
“I would like to see ‘Billy’ Sunday wake this city up and get the rum out of it… Look how many homes he would make happy.”
And then, almost quietly, another moment:
In the northeast corner of the tabernacle, someone reported hearing a man say:
“This is my last drink.”
No sermon transcript can capture that.
That’s the sawdust trail doing its work.
The Unexpected Details
Not everything was solemn.
Someone joked about the sawdust itself:
“They say Mr. Sunday hates noise, and I know I am going to sneeze. I always do when around sawdust.”
Even the ministers weren’t immune to the moment. One well-known clergyman was said to amuse himself before preaching by reading The Fun of Getting Thin—and now, thanks to the crowds, “occupies two seats.”
And everywhere—evidence of men lingering longer than usual:
“There were enough cigar butts left in the gutters… to start a true second-hand cigar store.”
It wasn’t tidy.
It wasn’t polished.
But it was real.
Order in the Midst of It All
For all its energy, the thing held together.
The crowds were vast, but they moved. The police managed them. The firemen stood watch. The machinery of the city seemed, for a moment, to cooperate with something larger than itself.
One observer summed it up best:
“To get and hold a vast throng like this on a weekday for the purpose of hearing the gospel certainly is a tribute to the man himself.”
And It’s Only the Beginning
If you stood there long enough, listening—not to the sermon, but to the people—you began to realize something:
The revival hadn’t peaked.
It hadn’t even arrived yet.
It was building.
You could hear it in the confidence of the man who said, “ask Scranton.” You could see it in the boy on crutches. You could feel it in the nervous woman who came anyway. You could sense it in the man who muttered, “my last drink.”
Billy Sunday may have been the preacher.
But the city— the crowd— the conversations spilling out onto the streets—
They were becoming the message.
And Philadelphia, whether it knew it yet or not, was just getting started.
Three years after the Carthage meetings, a Mattoon, Illinois newspaper said that 80% of Carthage converts were still “living the new life. While two years after Keokuk, 75% of the converts “are still leading the new life.” – JG-TC: Journal Gazette and Times-Courier (Mattoon, Illinois) · Mon, Mar 19, 1906 · Page 1.
Five years after the Belvidere revival of September 1901, a Belvidere newspaper reported that membership of Belvidere Methodist church in 1901 was 500 persons, and five years later it was 850, showing the ‘stickiness’ of Sunday converts over a long period of time. – Belvidere Daily Republican (Belvidere, Illinois) · Mon, Mar 26, 1906 · Page 2.
Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935) 