Billy Sunday Tabernacle – Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935)

The year the city took Billy Sunday: 1909

A horsewhipping at the pulpit, a governor’s conversion, a record offering at Patterson Springs, and a chance meeting on a Kansas Chautauqua platform that would change the rest of his life.

On Christmas Day of 1908, Billy Sunday and his family stepped off a train at Spokane, Washington. They had been expected five days earlier. The Spokane campaign committee had built an eight-thousand-seat wooden tabernacle for the occasion at a cost of more than four thousand dollars, and the city had been waiting since December 20.

Sunday was about to preach the first revival of his career in an American city of more than one hundred thousand people. Up to that point, every revival he had ever conducted had been in a town of under fifty thousand — usually under twenty thousand, and often under five thousand. Spokane was a real city: railroad terminus, regional commercial center, a population of well over a hundred thousand spread across several rapidly growing residential districts. The question that the Spokane campaign was going to answer was whether the revival method Sunday had built in Iowa river towns and Illinois county seats would actually scale.

By the time he left Spokane in mid-February of 1909, he had his answer. Over five thousand six hundred people had come forward as converts. His purse came in at ten thousand dollars. The local saloons were reporting almost no business. Newspapers across the country were running headlines like “Beer Sales Fall. Bibles in Demand.” Roger Bruns, who would later write the standard scholarly biography of Sunday, summarized the moment this way: Spokane was where “the focus was now on where Billy could reach the masses.”

The Sunday method scaled. The big city wanted what the small town had been getting. 1909 became, almost overnight, the year that turned a Midwestern revivalist into an American institution.

A first city, a first “Tomorrow”

The Spokane campaign produced a number of firsts. The first big-city tabernacle. The first major lobbying operation built around a Sunday revival — one hundred and ten “representative men” sent on a special train to Olympia to lobby the Washington state legislature for a county-unit option bill while Sunday gave his “Booze” sermon back home, twice. The first organized homeless-relief effort attached to a Sunday campaign, during a cold wave that hit Spokane mid-campaign. Sunday personally helped feed and shelter hundreds of homeless men through the local churches.

And, on the final day of the campaign, the first use of “Tomorrow” as a closing sermon. The sermon that would, more than any other Sunday delivered in his entire career, become his signature emotional closing. The text was simple: do not put off until tomorrow what you must decide today. The delivery, by every contemporary description, was relentless. The Spokane Spokesman-Review of February 11 carried the headline that captured what had just happened in their city: “Beer Sales Fall. Bibles in Demand.”

The detailed church-by-church convert tally from Spokane is the kind of thing that makes the modern researcher pause. Emmanuel Baptist took in 45 new members. First Methodist Episcopal, 360. First Methodist, 270. Westminster Congregational, 30. Central Christian, about 60. First Baptist, over 80. Plymouth Congregational, about 50. All Saints Episcopal, 12. Holy Trinity Episcopal and Our Lady of Lourdes, none. The Sunday method had divided Spokane’s churches into those that could metabolize the revival’s converts and those that could not.

Springfield: a governor and an assault

The Spokane campaign closed February 10. Sunday opened his next revival in Springfield, Illinois on February 26 — sixteen days later. The Springfield campaign would run six weeks, draw over six hundred thousand cumulative attendees, and produce forty-seven hundred conversions, including a remarkable seven hundred and seventy-four conversions on the final day. Sunday’s purse came in at ten thousand seven hundred and thirty-four dollars. The total offering for the campaign reached over twenty thousand.

Two moments from Springfield stand out among everything that happened in 1909. The first occurred during the very opening of the campaign. Eight thousand people were in the tabernacle for the first night. As Sunday stood at the pulpit beginning his opening sermon, a man named Sherman Potts — a religious fanatic from near Lexington, Illinois, who had previously been committed to the Jacksonville insane asylum — walked up the center aisle, climbed onto the platform, and began horsewhipping Billy Sunday.

Sunday did what a man who had spent his twenties as a major-league outfielder might be expected to do. He leaped from the platform, knocked Potts to the ground, and held him there. The choir, on the platform behind, kept singing. The tabernacle did not empty. The Britt News of Iowa carried the story on March 4. The Spokane Chronicle, when it picked the piece up months later, ran a lengthy article on Potts himself. The assault did not interrupt the revival. The papers, in fact, treated it as a story about Sunday’s coolness under attack.

The second moment occurred on the final day, April 11. Governor Charles Deneen of Illinois and his family were among the seven hundred and seventy-four conversions that day. Governor Deneen joined First Methodist Episcopal Church in Springfield. A sitting state governor being converted at a Billy Sunday revival was a story that traveled — and a quiet political proof of how thoroughly Sunday had now entered the country’s mainstream civic life.

Sunday himself was unsatisfied with the Springfield numbers. His private take, later reported in the press, was that “personal work was not begun early enough.” Forty-seven hundred conversions, six hundred thousand cumulative attendance, twenty thousand dollars in offerings, the governor of Illinois joining the church on the final day — and Sunday thought he had not done enough. He was, by this point, his own hardest critic.

Marshalltown comes home

After Springfield, Sunday returned to Marshalltown, Iowa — a town of just over thirteen thousand people where he had briefly lived in the early 1890s. It was, in every sense, a homecoming campaign. The five-thousand-seat wooden tabernacle stood at the corner of Third and Main. The campaign ran six weeks, from late April through June 6. Over a hundred and ninety-eight thousand people attended. Two thousand and twenty-six conversions. Five hundred and twenty-eight cottage prayer meetings — small house gatherings, scattered through the town’s neighborhoods, that did much of the slow personal-work that the public revival services could not. Sunday’s purse: a little over six thousand dollars.

The campaign closed, as the Marshalltown Times-Republican put it, in a “blaze of glory” — thirteen thousand two hundred people present on the final day. Sunday had come back to the town where he had once been a young husband trying to make ends meet, and now drew an attendance figure equal to the entire population of the town.

The Marshalltown campaign also produced a recurring data anomaly that would surface in nearly every contemporary press report. The final conversion count appeared as 2,026 in one paper, 1,987 in a decorative stats card that circulated regionally, and 2,000 as a round-number summary in others. The Marshalltown press wars over which number was correct went on for weeks. The truth was probably in the neighborhood of two thousand. The truth was also that nobody really knew, because the Sunday operation by 1909 was generating numbers faster than even friendly reporters could verify them.

Winfield, Kansas: the man at the piano

The summer Chautauqua circuit took Sunday across Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Illinois. He delivered his now-fully-rotated four sermons — “Booze,” “Forces That Win,” “Nuts for Skeptics to Crack,” and the various baseball variants — to crowds of two thousand to ten thousand at a stretch, two or three towns a week.

On July 15, 1909, Sunday spoke at the Winfield, Kansas Chautauqua. His sermon was “Forces That Win.” Season tickets to the Chautauqua cost two dollars. Sunday’s appearance fee came in at five hundred dollars.

Two hours after Sunday finished his afternoon sermon, a Pennsylvania-born musician took the platform. His name was Homer Rodeheaver. He was thirty-three years old, a trombonist and gospel singer, traveling the Chautauqua circuit as a paid performer with his own small musical troupe. He performed for the Winfield crowd at four o’clock that Wednesday afternoon. Sunday was almost certainly in the audience. Roger Bruns, who has reconstructed this moment carefully, treats it as the first documented encounter between the two men.

Within months, Sunday had hired Rodeheaver to lead revival singing and choirs effective the following year. The partnership that began at Winfield, Kansas in July 1909 would last more than two decades. Rodeheaver would become the most recognizable musical figure in American revival ministry — the man whose trombone, choir-leading style, and gospel-song repertoire would carry Sunday’s tabernacle services for the rest of Billy’s preaching life. Without Rodeheaver, there is no big-city Sunday revival of the 1910s. Without Rodeheaver, there is no “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” or “I Walked Today Where Jesus Walked” reaching the audiences they reached.

And it all started on a Wednesday afternoon in a Kansas Chautauqua tent.

Patterson Springs and a record check

Three weeks later, on August 10, 1909, Sunday spoke at the Patterson Springs Chautauqua in central Illinois. He had also spoken there two days earlier on August 8. On the second appearance, the ticket receipts from the Sunday afternoon lecture alone came in at three thousand six hundred dollars.

It was, as a regional newspaper would note a year later, the largest single Chautauqua-lecture take in American history. Williams Jennings Bryan’s previous record had been twenty-four hundred dollars at Carthage, Missouri the year before. Sunday had broken it by a thousand and two hundred dollars. The Patterson Springs receipts traveled. The Hastings (Nebraska) Daily Tribune would still be writing about the record a year later.

Whatever the cumulative arithmetic of Sunday’s Chautauqua career had been — and the 1907 totals of $43,500 across eighty-six lectures were already known — the Patterson Springs receipts crystallized a particular kind of public fact: Billy Sunday, on any given afternoon, was the most commercially valuable single speaker on the American lecture platform.

Boulder and the team budget

In early September, Sunday opened a five-week revival in Boulder, Colorado. Four-thousand-seat tabernacle. About fifteen hundred conversions. Sunday’s purse came in at thirty-five hundred dollars.

The Boulder revival is most useful, in retrospect, for what it reveals about the Sunday operation’s internal financial structure by 1909. A Spokane Chronicle item from September 3 published the team-pay schedule for the Boulder campaign in full. Fisher, the singer, was being paid thirty-five dollars a week. Ackley, the musical director, thirty dollars a week. Mrs. Miller, the pianist, one hundred dollars a month. Siebert, the tabernacle caretaker, three dollars a day. The Sunday operation now had ten people on the payroll. Mr. Gill was directing the tabernacle construction itself. The offerings on the last day of the campaign — by long-established Sunday practice — went to him personally.

Most evangelists working in 1909 were essentially solo operators, working with a song leader and maybe a piano player they paid from their own purse. The Sunday operation was, by Boulder, a small business. Ten salaried positions. A tabernacle-construction supervisor. A musical director. A separate musical director’s deputy. Mrs. Miller on piano. Siebert handling the daily logistics. By 1909 standards, this was a substantial organization, and it was beginning to look much more like the operations of the mature 1910s big-city revivals than like the small-town Iowa tent campaigns of a decade earlier.

Cedar Rapids, a Gazette appreciation, and Sunday’s stamina

The fall return brought Sunday to Cedar Rapids, Iowa for six weeks from October 10 through November 21. The campaign drew 320,000 cumulative attendees, 2,906 conversions, and a purse of $7,080. Ninety-eight general meetings plus eighty special meetings designed for particular groups. Sixteen hundred cottage prayer meetings — three times the number Marshalltown had produced earlier in the year.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette on November 20 ran an editorial titled “Billy Sunday and His Work — An Appreciation” that captured better than almost any other contemporary piece what newspapers had now come to feel about him:

There are many of us who are never going to fully reconcile ourselves to some of Mr. Sunday’s methods, to his dramatic stunts, to his use of slang… After all, why should we greatly concern ourselves about his methods? He gets results… Billy Sunday is a man among men — and men admire him. Thousands of men do not sit spellbound at the feet of a religious sissy.

The line “Thousands of men do not sit spellbound at the feet of a religious sissy” was the line that traveled. Sunday’s audiences across the entire decade had been disproportionately male, and his appeal to men — the baseball stories, the slang, the muscular delivery, the dropped jackets and rolled sleeves — was central to what made him work. The Cedar Rapids editorial put the case for Sunday in language that even his critics could mostly accept. He gets results.

Joplin closes the year

From late November through the first days of 1910, Sunday held a five-week revival at Joplin, Missouri. Six-thousand-seat wooden tabernacle. Two hundred and seventy-three thousand cumulative attendees. Almost three thousand conversions, with 278 in the final service alone. About six thousand people attended each evening meeting; another five hundred attended each afternoon. Thousands were turned away nightly from a tabernacle that was simply not large enough.

The arithmetic of Joplin, like the arithmetic of Marshalltown and Spokane and Springfield and Cedar Rapids and Patterson Springs, was the arithmetic of an American revival operation that had completely outgrown the small-town format it was built on. The tabernacle was full nightly. The town was overwhelmed. Sunday and his ten-person operation closed out 1909 the way they had opened it — with more people wanting in than the building could hold.

What changed in 1909

If 1907 was the year that broke Billy Sunday and 1908 was the year he went east, 1909 is the year he became the public figure he would be for the rest of his life. Five things consolidated.

The big-city tabernacle. Spokane proved the revival method scaled. The format that had made him in Iowa river towns worked just as well in a Pacific Northwest railroad metropolis. Within five years, Sunday would be filling the same kind of purpose-built wooden tabernacles in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York.

Homer Rodeheaver. The Winfield meeting was the most consequential personnel decision Sunday ever made. Rodeheaver’s trombone, baritone, and choir-leading style would carry the musical side of Sunday’s revivals for the next twenty years.

“Tomorrow” enters the repertoire. The Spokane closing sermon premiered the sermon that would become the most-preached closing call of Sunday’s career. The dramatic emotional close that defined every big-city revival of the 1910s started here.

The Sunday operation became a business. Ten salaried team members. Specialized roles. Detailed payroll. Tabernacle construction supervisors. By Boulder, the Sunday camp had the kind of organizational chart that would be perfectly recognizable to anyone managing a touring company today.

The political register completed. The Spokane local-option lobbying. The Springfield Governor-Deneen conversion. The Marshalltown cottage prayer meetings as community organizing. Sunday was, by 1909, simultaneously a religious figure, a temperance crusader, a civic mobilizer, and a public-policy advocate. The categories had merged.

When Sunday closed his Joplin campaign on January 2, 1910, the architecture of the rest of his career was now in place. The big-city tabernacles. Rodeheaver at the music stand. Helen running her own parallel ministry. The “Tomorrow” closing call. The ten-person organization. The political-religious fusion. The Patterson Springs commercial record. The press appreciation. The cottage prayer meetings. The hundreds of thousands in cumulative attendance.

The Billy Sunday of American memory — the one who would fill twenty-thousand-seat tabernacles in Pittsburgh, who would dine with Theodore Roosevelt, who would campaign for prohibition across the country — that Billy Sunday was now fully assembled. The 1910s would scale him. But everything he scaled was put in place in 1909.

He was forty-six years old. He had been an evangelist for thirteen years. He had four hundred sermons in his head and the country in front of him.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year the City Took Billy Sunday: 1909.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 19, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/19/the-year-the-city-took-billy-sunday-1909/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year the City Took Billy Sunday: 1909.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 19 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/19/the-year-the-city-took-billy-sunday-1909/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 19). The year the city took Billy Sunday: 1909. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/19/the-year-the-city-took-billy-sunday-1909/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year the City Took Billy Sunday: 1909.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 19, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/19/the-year-the-city-took-billy-sunday-1909/.

The year Billy Sunday went east: 1908

A Pennsylvania steel-valley revival, a lawsuit over his own sermons, a deaf interpreter, and the summer Billy stopped being just a Midwesterner.

On a Friday in May of 1908, Billy Sunday stepped off a train in Sharon, Pennsylvania — a steel-mill town in the Shenango Valley along the Ohio border, eighty miles north of Pittsburgh. He had never preached this far east before. Every revival of his career up to that point had been in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, or one of the closer western states. The Sharon campaign was something new: a seven-week revival in a Pennsylvania industrial valley, and the first real test of whether the Sunday revival method would translate beyond the small Midwestern county-seat towns where he had built it.

By the time he left Sharon in late June, nearly five thousand people had come forward as converts. The campaign had drawn more than fourteen thousand dollars in offerings. A new mission was pledged for the city. And Sunday had given up the Chautauqua circuit for half the summer to make it work. The New Castle Herald, on the second day of the campaign, had already named the thing that mattered:

He has stirred up enthusiasm that has never before been evidenced in this town.

It was a quiet observation, written by a small-paper reporter who had no way of knowing that Sharon was the first piece of a much larger pivot. But the eastern industrial cities were where Sunday’s mature career would unfold. Sharon was the rehearsal.

Bloomington opens the year

The year began at Bloomington, Illinois — a town of about twenty thousand people in central Illinois. The campaign had been organized so thoroughly that the local committee opened the tabernacle on December 26, 1907, three days before Sunday himself arrived. When he stepped onto the platform on Sunday morning the twenty-ninth, three thousand people were already waiting, and they greeted him with what the Muscatine Journal called “the Chautauqua salute” — a waving of white handkerchiefs across the auditorium. It was the first time the gesture had been used to welcome him at a revival, but it would not be the last.

Colorized version of a 1908 Bloomington image. Billy Sunday in action.

Eleven thousand people attended his three services that opening Sunday. Forty-five hundred came to the morning meeting alone. A five-hundred-voice choir carried the music. By the time the campaign closed five and a half weeks later, more than four thousand of those who had come had walked down the aisle as converts. Sunday’s purse came in at $7,773.19 — by some margin the largest revival purse of his career to date. And Helen, by now a fixture on the road with him, was preaching her own Sunday afternoon meetings to fourteen hundred women at the Second Presbyterian Church.

The closing sermon was titled “Always Be Ready to Give an Answer,” taken from First Peter chapter three. It would, in the months to come, become one of the most-printed sermons of Sunday’s career.

Decatur and the printed sermons

Sunday moved directly from Bloomington to Decatur, Illinois — another central Illinois town, this one with a population of about thirty-one thousand. The campaign ran for five and a half weeks, from early February into mid-March, probably in a temporary tabernacle erected inside Decatur’s Fairview Park. By the end of it, more than six thousand people had come forward as converts. Sunday’s purse came in at over eleven thousand dollars — surpassing the Bloomington record set just weeks earlier.

But the Decatur revival had a wrinkle that the contemporary papers found themselves writing about for months afterward. The Decatur Herald — a local newspaper — had been running Sunday’s sermons in print throughout the campaign. After Sunday left town, a Decatur printing concern collected those newspaper transcriptions and published them as a book. The book sold. Sunday had not authorized it.

He spent the next several months trying to stop the publication and, when he could not, decided to buy the copyright outright. The story finally surfaced publicly in September. According to the Freeport Daily Bulletin of September 5, Sunday paid the Decatur printing concern thirty-five hundred dollars for full possession of the copyright to his own sermons.

It was the kind of transaction that did not exist in the world of itinerant revivalism before 1908. Most evangelists were happy to have their sermons reprinted anywhere they could be reprinted. Sunday had decided, by the middle of his Pennsylvania campaign, that his sermons were worth more controlled than free. By later that year his own publishing operation was issuing sermon manuscripts under titles like “What Shall the End Be,” “The Three Groups,” and “The Moral Leper” — small printed pamphlets carrying the formal byline “William Ashley Sunday.” Sunday had become, alongside everything else, a publishing concern.

A March ticket for the Booze sermon

On Wednesday, March 18, 1908, Sunday made the short trip from Decatur to Clinton, Iowa for a single evening engagement at the local Presbyterian Church. The occasion was a local-option meeting — a temperance vote that DeWitt County voters would soon be asked to weigh in on. Sunday’s contribution was a single sermon, his now-famous “Booze.” The local committee printed numbered tickets in cream paper.

The phrasing made the political stakes plain. The sermon was a campaign event. The audience was specifically registered DeWitt County voters. The doors closed at 7:15 sharp. Sunday’s “Booze” sermon — already by 1908 a fixture of his Chautauqua repertoire — was being deployed as direct political advocacy on the eve of a temperance referendum. The line between revival preacher and political organizer, never very thick in Sunday’s career, had just become almost invisible.

Charleston and the deaf interpreter

After Clinton, Sunday spent the rest of March and most of April at Charleston, Illinois — another central Illinois revival, five weeks in a four-thousand-seat tabernacle that drew twenty-five hundred conversions and around two hundred and twenty thousand cumulative attendees. His purse came in at fifty-five hundred dollars. The Decatur Herald and Review called it “the greatest religious awakening that Charleston has ever known and one of the greatest revivals that has ever taken place in Illinois.” On the final night, the crowd refused to leave the tabernacle even after Sunday had gone home — the Herald reporter watched them stand around the platform “trying to shake the great minister’s hand for the last time.”

The Charleston campaign also produced one of the most quietly moving details in the entire 1908 record, though it would not make it into print until the next year’s Springfield souvenir booklet. A Charleston-based teacher at the State School for the Deaf, Professor Frank Reed Jr., had begun attending Sunday’s services with a delegation of deaf students. Reed stood up in the audience and signed Sunday’s sermons to the deaf attendees in real time. The visual rhythms of Reed’s interpretation became, for the hearing audience around him, almost a parallel performance.

Prof. Reed stood up and repeated to the mutes just what Mr. Sunday said, and it was a very unique and interesting sight to watch the movements and gestures of the interpreter. He would enter into the spirit of Mr. Sunday’s discourse… The expression on the faces of the mutes would brighten up as he said something amusing.

Between thirty and forty deaf attendees converted across that campaign and the Springfield campaign that followed in 1909. At the offering, when the deaf delegation contributed ten dollars, Sunday paused his sermon to address it from the platform: “If men who could not hear a word of what I say were contributing to this extent, what ought some of you fellows down there do who hear it all?”

Sharon, Pennsylvania

The eastward turn began on May 1, 1908. Sunday opened a seven-week revival in Sharon, Pennsylvania — a steel-mill town in the Shenango Valley along the Ohio border. The decision to take the Sharon engagement cost him most of his usual Chautauqua summer income, and the Sunday camp itself flagged this in a margin note: “this revival eliminated Billy’s opportunity to supplement his income from chautauquas; a significant diversion for several years.”

Sunday was forty-five years old. The Chautauqua circuit had been paying him more than forty thousand dollars in summers by now. He had announced the previous August that he was going to cut back on the platform work. And now he was choosing, for the first time, to forgo a major piece of the summer revenue in order to preach a long campaign in a place he had never been. The Sharon decision was the first time Sunday’s revival ambitions clearly outweighed his Chautauqua income. It would not be the last.

The Sharon campaign drew nearly five thousand converts. The freewill offering for Sunday came in at $6,448.45, with total collected offerings reaching over fourteen thousand dollars. A new local mission was pledged. The local New Castle Herald, in its earliest coverage, captured what Sharon was seeing for the first time:

His eccentric methods of delivering the gospel and his homely statements have hit their mark and today everybody in Sharon is talking of Billy Sunday, the old-time baseball player.

Sunday had stepped outside his Midwestern comfort zone and found a Pennsylvania industrial city that responded to him the same way Iowa farm towns did. The early evidence said the Sunday method traveled. The full proof would come in the urban tabernacle campaigns of the 1910s. But the test case was Sharon.

A compressed Chautauqua summer

Sunday returned to the platform circuit at the end of June for a sharply truncated summer. He had less than two months. He still managed to deliver Chautauqua talks at more than twenty different sites across Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. The four-sermon rotation that had crystallized the previous year carried him: “Get on the Water Wagon,” “Forces That Win,” “The Devil’s Boomerang,” and “Nuts for Skeptics to Crack.”

A few stops stood out. On August 9 at Patterson Springs, Illinois — declared “Billy Sunday Day” by the local committee — ten thousand people came to hear his “Booze” sermon. Helen was with him. Sunday was in real physical pain from what he described to reporters as a “carbuncle,” and he and Helen left town on the 7:30 a.m. train the next morning, exhausted. At Coshocton, Ohio on July 31, he was paid two hundred and fifty dollars for a two-hour talk and fifteen hundred people came to hear it. At Clarinda, Iowa on August 6, he spoke at a brand-new ten-thousand-dollar steel auditorium that held over four thousand. He stayed long enough afterward to umpire a baseball game.

Lincoln Chautauqua in Macon County, Illinois on August 15 produced one of the strangest preserved artifacts of Sunday’s middle period: a newspaper advertisement showing him in a head-and-shoulders portrait with his arms crossed, captioned “Meet Me At Lincoln Chautauqua: Saturday Afternoon, Billy Sunday.” It is, as much as anything in the 1908 archive, the moment when the Sunday brand became a commercial graphic asset that booking committees were placing in regional papers to sell admission.

Jacksonville and the G.A.R. veterans

Sunday’s fall return brought him to Jacksonville, Illinois for a six-week revival running from late September through early November. The campaign drew over twenty-five hundred converts and a freewill offering for Sunday of $7,279. By mid-October, more than 131,000 people had already attended services. The campaign was strong enough that multiple regional papers covered the closing service, repeating the same figures back and forth across the state.

From the Jacksonville pulpit Sunday delivered one of the tribute lines that the Freeport Daily Journal would reprint in November and that would become characteristic of his entire later career — a deliberate appeal to Civil War veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic:

If there are any public favors to be shown, are any offices to be filled, I want you young fellows to stand back and make room for the gray-haired veterans of the sixties. I want you to understand that there is but one piece of jewelry to which Billy Sunday takes off his hat, and that is the bronze button worn by the Grand Army of the Republic.

In 1908 the Civil War was still living memory for half the people in Sunday’s audiences. The Civil War veterans were now in their late sixties and early seventies — Sunday himself was forty-five — and were still organized in active local G.A.R. chapters in nearly every Northern town. Sunday’s tribute to them was both deeply felt and shrewdly calculated. The line traveled. The Freeport paper printed it. Other papers picked it up. And it remained one of the signature Sunday quotes for the rest of his life.

Ottumwa and the skin-flint complaint

The year ended at Ottumwa, Iowa. Six weeks in the local opera house, from early November through mid-December. Thirty-five hundred conversions. Sunday’s purse came in at seven thousand dollars.

The Ottumwa campaign also produced a moment of public criticism that the Minnesota New Ulm Review later reprinted, and that captures the kind of opposition Sunday now drew everywhere he went. The complaint, attributed to an unnamed correspondent in Ottumwa before Sunday’s arrival, ran like this:

Sunday’s skin-flint brand of religion is a money-getter to the sorrow of many a town. Let’s make Ottumwa the exception. Sunday uses his religion as his method of hypnotizing people, for he knows that in the heat of religious fervor people will give up money when you can’t get it from them in any other way. So, he uses religion.

It was the kind of complaint that had been following Sunday since the Charles City Herald editorial of 1907 had called him “a sideshow to the Chautauqua.” By 1908 it was a familiar pattern: regional papers running detailed positive coverage of his revivals; other regional papers running pointed editorial criticism that questioned his methods, his motives, and especially his money. Sunday rarely responded publicly to either. He just kept moving.

What 1908 changed

If the easy story of Billy Sunday’s career runs “small-town revivalist becomes big-city evangelist in the 1910s,” 1908 is the year where the move starts. Four things changed.

The eastern pivot. Sharon was the first sustained revival east of Ohio. He gave up half a summer of Chautauqua money to make it work. The Sunday method, transplanted to a Pennsylvania steel valley, performed exactly the way it had performed in the Iowa river towns. The proof of concept was now in hand.

The published sermon library. By the end of 1908, Sunday was operating a small publishing concern that issued sermon manuscripts under his own byline. The Decatur lawsuit had been the catalyst. The lesson was that his sermons had become an intellectual-property asset worth defending, and one that could carry his voice into towns where he himself would never preach.

The Helen Sunday women’s ministry. Helen’s Bloomington women’s meetings — fourteen hundred women, gathered at Second Presbyterian, on Sunday afternoons during the main revival — were now a documented and reportable part of the Sunday operation. She was no longer just on the road with Billy. She had her own platform alongside his.

The political-religious fusion. The Clinton temperance ticket, the G.A.R. veterans tribute, the local-option organizing folded into revival sermons, the integrated approach of revival-as-civic-mobilization — these were all visible in earlier years, but in 1908 they consolidated. Sunday was now a political force in every town he visited, in addition to being a religious one. His sermons sold pamphlets, mobilized voters, and built G.A.R. constituencies all at once.

By the time Sunday left Ottumwa just before Christmas to prepare for the Spokane, Washington campaign opening on December 25 — his first revival in a city of more than a hundred thousand people — the architecture of his mature ministry was effectively in place. Eastern cities. Published sermons. Helen running her own meetings. The platform-and-pulpit double income engine. The four-sermon Chautauqua rotation. The deaf interpreter. The G.A.R. tribute. The political mobilization. The carbuncle.

Spokane was the test of whether the whole thing would scale to a real American city. The answer would arrive within six weeks. But the architecture that would carry that test had been built in 1908.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Billy Sunday Went East: 1908.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 17, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/17/the-year-billy-sunday-went-east-1908/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Billy Sunday Went East: 1908.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 17 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/17/the-year-billy-sunday-went-east-1908/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 17). The year Billy Sunday went east: 1908. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/17/the-year-billy-sunday-went-east-1908/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Billy Sunday Went East: 1908.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 17, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/17/the-year-billy-sunday-went-east-1908/.

The year that broke Billy Sunday: 1907

A brother’s funeral he could not attend. A newborn son. A lawsuit. A carriage wreck. A converted entire police force. And the summer he finally said enough.

On a day in early July of 1907, somewhere in the Gibson City, Illinois tabernacle, Billy Sunday was handed a telegram. His brother had died. The funeral was being arranged in Iowa. The Gibson City revival was three weeks deep and at the height of its drawing power. The local committee had paid for the tabernacle, organized the choir, raised the expenses, and was counting on him to finish.

Sunday did not go to the funeral. He stayed and preached.

Within a few weeks of that decision, his wife Helen would give birth to their son Paul. The baby was born on the opening day of the Gibson City campaign. Sunday had been there for neither the birth of his son nor the death of his brother. He had been on a platform.

By the end of August he would, for the first time in his career, announce that he intended to cut back on the work that had taken him from those two events. He would announce it from a 4,000-seat steel auditorium in Joliet, Illinois at the close of a Chautauqua season that had seen him deliver eighty-six lectures in roughly thirty different towns and earn the equivalent, in 2026 dollars, of about a million and a half dollars. He was forty-four years old. He had been running this schedule for eleven years. He was, by the contemporary newspaper record, the highest-paid evangelist in America. And he was exhausted.

Kankakee in winter

The year began at Kankakee, Illinois — a town of about fifteen thousand people in the Illinois prairie, an hour south of Chicago. The campaign ran from mid-January through the middle of February in a four-thousand-seat tabernacle with a three-hundred-and-fifty-voice choir.

The Streator Times of January 26 published an extended excerpt from one of his sermons under the heading “Rev. Billy Sunday Defines What He Terms Society of the Present Day.” It was an extraordinary piece of Sunday writing, full of the period’s sense that something was slipping in American life. He drew a contrast between the brilliant drawing rooms of society women playing progressive euchre and the back rooms of “stale beer joints” where four “blear-eyed, vermin-covered old soaks” played penny ante. Then he delivered the line that the Times made sure to print:

I fear that cursed gang of society more than I do all the town loafers in that beer joint.

It was a long way from the cheerful baseball-evangelist anecdotes that had filled the Chautauqua dates the summer before. Sunday at Kankakee was in his serious mode — a working revivalist preaching for six weeks straight to crowds of three and four thousand in subzero Illinois cold, naming evils he could see in the towns he was visiting.

Spring in southern Illinois and Iowa

From late February through May, Sunday worked his way through southern Illinois and Iowa. Murphysboro for six weeks. Fairfield, Iowa for five. Knoxville, Iowa for five. Each campaign followed the same pattern: a temporary tabernacle, a choir of two or three hundred voices, a six-week timetable, and a thousand or more conversions by the closing service.

Fairfield produced what may be the most detailed single-day sermon record in Sunday’s pre-1910 career. On Sunday, April 28, he preached three separate sermons in a single day — morning, afternoon, and evening — each anchored on a different text. Earlier that month he had opened the Fairfield campaign with a sermon called “Revive Us Again.” It was the kind of Sunday-disciplined preaching that the Chautauqua circuit never quite asked of him. Four sermons in a row from four different texts. He could still do it.

The Knoxville campaign produced sixty sermons in five weeks and a thousand cards signed. It also produced a small but telling detail in the local paper: someone who had been converted during the campaign was sent to an asylum shortly after. The Sunday revival method, for all its successes, had limits that the campaign committees did not always discuss publicly. The Iowa newspaper noted the case and moved on.

Gibson City

From mid-June through mid-July, Sunday preached at Gibson City, Illinois — a small Ford County town of about twenty-five hundred people. The revival drew over a thousand conversions. Sunday’s purse came in at thirty-six hundred dollars. The economic terms by 1907 were no longer remarkable for him; they were standard.

What made Gibson City unforgettable in the Sunday family record was that it bracketed both ends of life. Paul Sunday was born on the first day of the campaign. Sunday’s brother died near its midpoint. Sunday declined several Chautauqua offers in order to finish the campaign — a sign that the revivals still had first claim on his schedule even as the Chautauqua money grew larger. But his brother’s funeral was the cost of finishing.

There is no surviving record of what Sunday said about it publicly. Two sermons from the Gibson City campaign — one on John 7:17 and one titled simply “Hell” — were transcribed in the regional press over the next month. The papers ran them as significant sermons, the kind worth preserving. Neither sermon mentioned the brother, the baby, or the funeral Sunday had missed. Whatever he was carrying that summer, he was carrying it on the platform.

The lawsuit

On June 28, Sunday was supposed to be in Des Moines, Iowa, opening a slot at the Midland Chautauqua. He did not show. The Iowa Lyceum Bureau, which had booked him, sued him for five thousand dollars for breach of contract. Newspapers picked the story up immediately. Quad-City Times, Des Moines Register, Richmond Item.

Sunday’s defense, when he gave it, was straightforward. His evangelistic work, he said, ought to have preference over Chautauqua dates. If a revival ran long, or a town needed him for an extra week, he was going to honor that. The Chautauqua bureau could sue him if it wanted to.

The case never went anywhere notable in the public record. But the spectacle of it was something new. Sunday was no longer just an itinerant preacher who could be expected to keep his commitments because his name and reputation depended on it. He was now a commercially booked entertainer with contracts that could be litigated. The Iowa Lyceum Bureau had not bought a sermon. It had bought a calendar slot. And when Sunday treated the slot as flexible, the Bureau treated the contract as enforceable.

The lawsuit told you something else about where Sunday’s life had gone. He had become the kind of person who could be sued.

The 86-lecture summer

Once the Gibson City revival ended in mid-July, Sunday’s Chautauqua summer began. By the time it ended at Joliet at the end of August, he had spoken at roughly thirty different towns across Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Missouri. The eighty-six lectures total was reported later, in a July 1910 retrospective, and the figure is so large that it strains belief — until you do the arithmetic. About six weeks of summer Chautauqua. Two or three talks at most stops. A few sites where Sunday spoke five or six times across a week. The number works out.

The bookings paid roughly forty-three thousand dollars in 1907 dollars. In current dollars, perhaps a million and a half. After bureau commissions and travel expenses, perhaps a million two. Most of this came in checks of two hundred to three hundred dollars per lecture, occasionally rising to five hundred or six hundred when the local committee had organized a special gate. By Bryan’s standards as a Chautauqua speaker, the rate was modestly higher. By any other measure, the figure was staggering.

Two of the eighty-six lectures took place on August 14 in Oskaloosa, Iowa. On the way back to his hotel that evening, the carriage Sunday was riding in was in a bad wreck. Sunday was bruised but unhurt. The story went out over the wires anyway, and by the next morning newspapers in five states were running headlines about how Billy Sunday had been “badly injured” in an “overturned carriage.” Sunday kept his schedule. The next morning he was at Aurora, Illinois — where a different paper had announced he had canceled because of hay fever. The two stories crossed in the wires. Either Sunday had been hurt or he had hay fever or both or neither. He was, by his own account, just tired.

A steel auditorium and an announcement

The summer ended at Dellwood Park, just outside Joliet, Illinois, where a brand-new Chautauqua assembly opened on August 30. The venue was something the Chautauqua circuit had never seen: a steel auditorium with four thousand seats and what the builders called “perfect acoustic properties.” Sunday spoke at the opening at 8:15 in the evening. The opening sermon was called “Grounders Hot Off the Bat” — a baseball talk, with a baseball title for the first and only time in the curated record.

The next day the Joliet Daily News published a piece called “Billy Sunday as He Is, Spoke.” The headline was a deliberate pun. The reporter had watched Sunday at close range and was unsparing:

Billy Sunday is like his discourse: unpolished in appearance. He still looks more like a baseball player than a preacher, talks more in the manner of a heavy hitter than a gentleman of the cloth, and, judging from his frenzied utterances, thinks more like one as well. He works as hard on the stage as he ever did on the diamond, and his voice is worn nearly to shreds by long-continued gospel shouting.

The auditorium, the reporter noted, was not packed. Joliet seemed to have been “frightened off by Sunday’s reputation for vigorous execution.” Sunday had hay fever. When a sympathetic listener tossed him a handkerchief during his sermon, he muffed the catch. The retired ballplayer dropped a fly ball in front of four thousand people.

It was during this Joliet engagement that Sunday made his announcement. He was going to cut back on Chautauqua speaking after this season. The constant travel was depriving him of the rest he needed for his evangelistic work. The newspaper of August 30 carried the news as a routine item. Whether Sunday himself believed it at the time is harder to know. The next summer, in 1908, he would deliver Chautauqua lectures again. By 1909 he would be back at full schedule. He would not actually retreat from the platform. But he had said the words. He had reached his limit.

Galesburg and Muscatine

Sunday took a few weeks off after the summer ended. Then in late September he opened a five-week revival at Galesburg, Illinois — eighteen thousand people, a five-thousand-seat tabernacle, two thousand five hundred and eighty conversions, a closing-night crowd of eight thousand plus standing room outside. His purse came in at six thousand three hundred and forty dollars, sixteen hundred of which he turned around and gave back to the local YMCA.

The Galesburg campaign drew attendees from seventy different towns. After it ended, the local newspapers wrote about the “Bible famine” that followed — the Presbyterian church alone took in sixty new members, and the Baptists and Methodists between them took in another two hundred. A Gibson City paper, looking back at the campaign a week after it closed, said one-tenth of Galesburg had professed conversion during Sunday’s stay.

November and the first half of December went to Muscatine, Iowa — five weeks in a purpose-built tabernacle, thirty-six hundred conversions, six thousand seven hundred and eighty-five dollars in Sunday’s pocket, seventy-four sermons preached. The campaign averaged out to a remarkable two dollars and sixty-three cents per soul converted, a number the local paper printed with what seems to be genuine satisfaction. The Muscatine News-Tribune of December 15 used the phrase “the largest revival in our history.” The Muscatine Journal the next day went further — it called it “the greatest revival in the nation’s history.” Both papers were, almost certainly, wrong about the second claim. But they meant what they said, and the readers seemed to agree.

Carrying it al

The 1907 year is the one in which the cumulative weight of Sunday’s choices becomes hard to look away from. The brother’s funeral he could not attend. The newborn son. The lawsuit. The carriage wreck and the false injury rumors. The eighty-six Chautauqua lectures. The five revival campaigns. The pulled voice and the hay fever and the dropped handkerchief in front of four thousand people. The announcement at Joliet that he would cut back, and the everyone-knew-it-wouldn’t-take quality of the announcement when he made it.

He was making more money than any evangelist in American history had ever made. He was preaching to more people in a single summer than most pastors preached to in a lifetime. He was the subject of newspaper feature stories from Idaho to Indiana. The same newspaper that ran his Joliet headline ran his Galesburg revival report a few weeks later. The same press that ran the lawsuit story ran the Muscatine “greatest revival” story. He was everywhere.

And he was, somewhere underneath all of it, a forty-four-year-old man who had not been in Iowa to bury his brother and had not been in Chicago to see his son born. The next two years would bring some of the biggest revivals of his career — Spokane, Springfield, Cedar Rapids, the early relationship with Homer Rodeheaver. They would also bring more of the same exhaustion that the Joliet announcement had named out loud. Whatever broke in Billy Sunday in 1907 did not get put back together. It got worked around.

The Muscatine paper called it the greatest revival in the nation’s history. It was the greatest revival of Sunday’s hardest year.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year That Broke Billy Sunday: 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 15, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/15/the-year-that-broke-billy-sunday-1907/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year That Broke Billy Sunday: 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 15 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/15/the-year-that-broke-billy-sunday-1907/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 15). The year that broke Billy Sunday: 1907. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/15/the-year-that-broke-billy-sunday-1907/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year That Broke Billy Sunday: 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 15, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/15/the-year-that-broke-billy-sunday-1907/.

Competing for the Crowd: What Else Philadelphia Could Do in 1915

When Billy Sunday arrived in Philadelphia in early 1915, he stepped into a city alive with options.

This wasn’t a spiritually quiet moment in American life—it was a crowded marketplace of attention. Every night, Philadelphians could choose where to go, what to watch, and how to spend their time. Entertainment was not scarce; it was everywhere. And much of it was designed to delight, distract, and hold an audience far more comfortably than a hard-hitting revival sermon.

That’s what makes Sunday’s campaign so compelling.

He didn’t draw crowds because there was nothing else to do.
He drew crowds in spite of everything else there was to do.

Let’s step into that world.

The Bright Lights of the Theatre

Philadelphia had a thriving theatre scene—serious plays, comedies, and traveling productions that brought a touch of Broadway to the city. These venues were polished and respectable, often appealing to middle- and upper-class audiences.

An evening at the theatre meant dressing well, sitting in a structured setting, and watching trained actors perform carefully scripted stories. It was entertainment with dignity—refined, cultural, and often expensive.

The theatre still carried prestige in 1915, but it was no longer the only game in town.

Vaudeville: Fast, Funny, and Everywhere

If theatre was refined, vaudeville was electric.

Vaudeville shows were built on variety—comedians, singers, dancers, acrobats, magicians—all packed into a single program. The pace was quick, the tone was lively, and the appeal was broad.

For many working-class and middle-class Philadelphians, vaudeville was the go-to night out. It was affordable, constantly changing, and full of energy. No two shows were exactly alike, and that unpredictability kept audiences coming back.

In 1915, vaudeville was at or near its peak. It wasn’t just popular—it was a cultural force.

The Rise of the Photoplay

And then there were the movies—still new, still evolving, but already reshaping the landscape.

They were called photoplays, and by 1915 they were drawing massive crowds. For just a few cents, people could step into a darkened theater and be transported into another world through silent film.

That same year saw the release of The Birth of a Nation, a film that demonstrated just how powerful and immersive cinema could be.

Movies had three advantages that made them unstoppable:

They were cheap
They were accessible
They were constantly changing

In many ways, they represented the future of entertainment—and people knew it.

Music, Dance, and the Pull of the Nightlife

For younger audiences especially, entertainment wasn’t just about watching—it was about participating.

Dance halls and social clubs offered ragtime music, lively crowds, and a chance to be part of the action. These venues were social, energetic, and often stretched late into the night.

They were also controversial.

Revivalists like Billy Sunday frequently warned against the moral dangers of dance halls, seeing them as places where discipline gave way to impulse. But for many in the city, they were simply where life felt most alive.

Traveling Shows and Big-Tent Spectacle

Even in a major city, the draw of spectacle remained strong.

Circuses, traveling shows, and Chautauqua events brought something different—large-scale experiences that combined entertainment, education, and wonder. Whether it was a circus parade or a lecture under a tent, these events added to the sense that something exciting was always happening just around the corner.

They were part of the cultural fabric, especially for families and those looking for something beyond the everyday.

And Then… There Was the Tabernacle

Into that world stepped Billy Sunday.

No velvet curtains.
No orchestra.
No stagecraft.

Just a rough wooden tabernacle, a sawdust-covered floor, and a preacher who spoke with urgency and conviction.

And yet—night after night—people came.

Why?

Because Sunday offered something none of the others could.

The theatre entertained.
Vaudeville amused.
Movies captivated.
Dance halls energized.

But Sunday confronted.

He spoke about sin, purpose, eternity, and the need for decision. His meetings were not passive experiences. They demanded a response.

The Real Story

The real story of Philadelphia in 1915 is not just that Billy Sunday drew crowds.

It’s that he drew them in the middle of one of the most competitive entertainment environments America had ever seen.

Every night, people made a choice.

They could laugh, watch, dance, or be distracted.
Or they could walk into a wooden tabernacle and be challenged.

And tens of thousands chose the latter.

That’s not just revival.

That’s a man—and a message—breaking through the noise of an entire culture.

His power: what is it?

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.

What a revival does? – Billy Sunday

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.”

HIT TYPEWRITER KEYS FOR PASTOR; THEN “HIT TRAIL”

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.

Sermon: When chickens come home to roost

One of Billy’s favorite sermons was When chickens come home to Roost. He would preach it often and usually in the first 1-2 weeks of a revival.

What was the sermon about?

In “Chickens Come Home to Roost,” Billy Sunday argues that sin is never isolated or harmless—it inevitably returns with consequences that grow over time. What begins as a small compromise develops into habit, then character, and ultimately destruction. He emphasizes that sin corrupts the individual internally before it manifests outwardly, dulling the conscience and weakening the will. Sunday also stresses that sin is not merely personal; it affects families, communities, and even nations. He dismantles common excuses—denial, delay, and comparison—and insists that no one escapes moral accountability. The sermon builds toward an urgent appeal: repentance must happen now, before sin’s consequences fully mature and bring irreversible damage.

Representative Quote:
“Your sin may seem quiet tonight, but it will rise up tomorrow and demand its wages.”

On the Sawdust Trail: A Night at Billy Sunday’s Tabernacle, Philadelphia (Week One)

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.

Did converts of Billy Sunday campaigns ‘stick”?

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.