John Spencer was born at Clove Creek, Huntingdon County (later Blair County) on April 17, 1802. In his journal, Spencer wrote of a conversion experience that he had in February 1823, in which he decided to become a Methodist minister. He began to preach in 1826. On February 8, 1832, Spencer married. He and his wife, Julia Ann, lived in western Pennsylvania, western Virginia, and eastern Ohio. John Spencer became Presiding Elder of the Ohio District of the Pittsburgh Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1840s. John and Julia began their family of nine children while living in the Upper Midwest. By the early 1850s Spencer yearned to cross the continent to Oregon Territory and work in his church's missionary district there. Elders, though, denied his request because of his obligations to his wife and children. Spencer eventually resigned his post in Beallsville, Ohio. He and his family and others travelled cross country to Oregon, arriving in Portland on Novmber 10, 1852. John Spencer took up his claim to land in Yamhill County, thirty miles southwest of Portland, in January 1853. There, near Lafayette, he and his boys constructed a log cabin. They sowed and harvested red and white wheat, and oats. They also planted an orchard of apple and peach trees. Spencer built a new home on his claim in 1865. He served a two- year term as superintendent of schools for Yamhill County, beginning in July 1866.
In 1872, after their children had reached adulthood, the Spencers sold their claim to their son-in-law Stephen A. Young. They moved to a new home that they built in nearby McMinnville. There, John Spencer served as postmaster from 1874 to 1880. While John Spencer was not a paid minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church's missionary district of California and Oregon, he did serve the church by occasionally conducting worship services, and performing weddings and baptisms. He was also a regular contributor to the periodical entitled "The Pacific Christian Advocate." In May 1871, John and Julia Spencer travelled by train to Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania to visit friends they had not seen in nearly twenty years. They financed the trip from donations collected during lectures that John gave about life in Oregon. He and his wife returned to the Pacific Northwest in October. It appears that John and Julia Spencer lived into the 1880s. Their dates of death are unknown. Below is a list a vital statistics of the Spencer family as assembled from the daily journals.
John Spencer's daily journals present a chronological record of the events of the lives of an Oregon pioneer and his family. They cover every year from 1857 through 1880. There is also a final entry in in the 1880 volume for New Year's Day 1881. There are a few irregularities in how Spencer arranged his entries. These are noted below in the container list. Spencer included a wide variety of types of information in his daily log. It included farm records describing crops he sowed, when he harvested them, their yields, and his income. He also wrote of his activities as a Methodist minister and his own spirituality as a Christian. He described in detail physical ailments of his family and the quality of his own health. Finally, Spencer wrote of his views on topics such as temperance, slavery, and the successes of the Republican party in the 1860s and 1870s. The remainder of the collection is miscellaneous papers and correspondence. It includes a few sermons that Spencer authored, receipts for expenses, and incoming and outgoing correspondence. In this last category, letters from the 1830s and 1840s become important additions to the journals. Also, a letter from Cose and Cooke, dated June 28, 1852, discussed how and why the Spencer family decided to settle in Oregon. There was no particular filing arrangement for the items in Series 2. These miscellaneous papers were scattered indiscriminately among the leaves of Spencer's journals. The Libraries has foldered them alphabetically by document type.
This collection is open for research use.
[Item Description]. Cage 581, John Spencer Papers. Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.
Washington State University acquired the John Spencer daily journals and miscellaneous papers in November 1990 (MS 90-67). It received the accession from the author's great-grandson, John Spencer, a retired Washington State University faculty member residing at Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
In 1950 the State College of Washington acquired a typescript copy of a journal that Spencer wrote while on his trip from Ohio to Oregon in 1852. It is catalogued separately as Cage 4140.
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the online catalog. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons, or places should search the catalog using these headings.
The following section contains a detailed listing of the materials in the collection.