December 29 Today in OPC History

The Rev. Dr. Paul Wooley, registrar and church history professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, wrote a letter on December 29, 1947 to Miss Marguerite Montgomery concerning her annual gifts to the seminary. Since 1939, Miss Montgomery had generously donated more than $24,000 in support of WTS, on top of her gifts to individual students and to various Orthodox Presbyterian Church needs. Wooley expressed concern that her usual donations had significantly decreased. Miss Montgomery, born in 1861, inherited her affluence from her great-grandfather Nathaniel Rochester, the founding father of Rochester, New York, and also prospered through various real estate ventures.

Miss Montgomery served on the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions with J. Gresham Machen, founder of WTS and what is now as the OPC. There she became acquainted with John DeWaard, with whom she developed a life-long friendship. When Machen was ousted from the Board, Miss Montgomery also resigned. Like Machen, Wooley, and DeWaard, Miss Montgomery was a constituting member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church from its beginning on June 11, 1936.

Miss Montgomery was a member of Covenant OPC in Rochester, New York, across town from Memorial OPC, where John DeWaard served as pastor. Knowing the DeWaards had lost John’s pension when he came into the OPC, Miss Montgomery supplied a manse for his family. Later when her health was failing, Miss Montgomery often stayed for prolonged periods with the DeWaards.

Over the years, Miss Montgomery supported many OPC works, but not without careful consideration of how the money would be spent. Before she loaned money to Gethsemane OPC to buy property for a church building in Philadelphia, she heard their pastor, the Rev. John P. Galbraith, preach. He must have done well because she lent them the money.

Miss Montgomery continued to give scholarships to seminarians in memory of her brother, James H. Montgomery. Upon her death in 1958, Miss Montgomery bequeathed more than half a million dollars to WTS, which was used to build the three-story Montgomery Library in honor of her brother. And to the DeWaards she gave her own home and its contents.

Read more about Marguerite Montgomery in the newly published book, Choosing the Good Portion: Women of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which is available on OPC.ORG here.

Picture: Miss Montgomery (right) with friend.