Chicago Temple: A neo-gothic Skyscraper in the heart of the city

And it began with the "Daniel Boone of Methodism"

Each week, discover an historic Chicago landmark and meet the people who built the Windy City. Includes audio recorded by Jim Goodrich.

At the top of a neo-gothic skyscraper across from Daley Plaza is a steeple. It’s an unusual sight, not really something you expect to see in the heart of the Loop, but inside is a church whose Chicago beginnings date back to before the city was a town and which has stayed on that same corner, in five different buildings, for more than a hundred and eighty years.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Methodist clergy in America traveled the young country on horseback, preaching wherever people congregated. The routes for these circuit riders could be up to five hundred miles. It was a rough life, and nearly half of traveling preachers before 1847 didn’t reach the age of thirty.

In 1825, Jesse Walker visited what would become Chicago for the first time, even though he was fifty-nine years old and had been riding the circuit for nearly a quarter of a century. The old preacher became determined to bring his church to a place whose population consisted mainly of soldiers stationed at Fort Dearborn and a few traders. “Chicago got into Walker's mind and clung to it like a cockle burr,” said Almer Pennewell in A Voice In the Wilderness: Jesse Walker, “the Daniel Boone of Methodism.”