My family connection to this story is gossamer thin, so this is really more "history" than "family history." But since it's a nice story for the season, and largely unknown, I offer it here.
Genealogy & Family History Community
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Leave the blood feuds at home
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Several years ago, when Rockefeller Center began what has since become a traditional part of Christmas in New York City they paid tribute to what they called "the only two true Christmas carols composed in America," O Little Town of Bethlehem by the Rev. Phillip Brooks, and Far, Far Away on Judea‘s Plains by John M. Macfarlane. Probably no one in the audience had heard of John M. Macfarlane...
John Menzies Macfarlane emigrated from Scotland in the 1850s and settled in a small village in the red rock desert of the American Southwest. Here's the story of his Christmas carol.
St. George, Utah in 1880.
In the words of one old local history, John Macfarlane "was a valuable citizen in a pioneer community. Besides being a district judge, a surveyor, a builder, he was able to play on almost any musical instrument." A (privately published) family biography says this about him:
John M. Macfarlane even dreamed music, and more than once, it is said, he would spring from his bed in the middle of the night to jot down a melody, lest the light of morning should erase it from his memory.
Between the harsh climate, crop failures and a series of flash floods, life in the desert was hard for the early settlers of St. George, Utah (founded in 1861), but 1869 had been especially difficult. John Macfarlane, director of the local choir, was planning the village's Christmas concert that December and wanted to write a carol for the occasion, a joyful anthem to lift the community's dragging spirits.
As Christmas drew near he found himself afflicted with a severe case of writer's block: no words; no music; no ideas would crystallize.
Then one night it came, suddenly, in a dream. John was awake instantly. He shook Ann [his wife] into wakefulness, crying out, "Ann, Ann, I have the words for a song, and I think I have the music too!”
The story goes that he hurried to the keyboard of his small parlor organ, and while Ann worked the bellows he played the tune, writing it down by the flickering light of a bit of flannel floating in a bowl of grease (they lived in a one-room adobe and oil lamps were well beyond their means).
The Christmas concert was held in the basement of the St. George Tabernacle, which was then under construction (as seen in the photo above), and Macfarlane's carol was a big success.
Every year the [St. George] Christmas program committee was urged to include "Brother Mack’s" song and those who moved away wrote asking for a copy and permission to use it on their program.
Far, Far Away on Judea's Plains was first published in a Salt Lake City magazine two decades later, on December 15, 1889.
Members of the St. George choir in the 1870s. John M. Macfarlane is in the center of the last row, hand on lapel.
Far, far away on Judea’s plains,
Shepherds of old heard the joyous strains:
Glory to God, Glory to God,
Glory to God in the highest.
Peace on earth, good will to men!
Peace on earth, good will to men!
Sweet are these strains of redeeming love,
Message of mercy from heaven above,
Glory to God, Glory to God,
Glory to God in the highest.
Peace on earth, good will to men!
Peace on earth, good will to men!
Lord, with the angels we too would rejoice,
Help us to sing with the heart and voice,
Glory to God, Glory to God,
Glory to God in the highest.
Peace on earth, good will to men!
Peace on earth, good will to men!
Hasten the time when, from every clime,
Men shall unite in the strains sublime,
Glory to God, Glory to God,
Glory to God in the highest.
Peace on earth, good will to men!
Peace on earth, good will to men!
The story has a rather nice sequel as well. A few years after that Christmas concert, Macfarlane met Father Lawrence Scanlan, a Catholic priest sent from the Archdiocese of San Francisco to minister to the few hundred Catholics (mostly miners) in the Utah Territory. Somehow the two men, Irish and Scots, priest and polygamist, struck up an improbable friendship.
In 1879, Father Scanlan established the St. John's Catholic Church, the Silver Reef Hospital, and St. Mary's School in Silver Reef.
At the invitation of his friend and housemate, John Macfarlane, a deputy U.S. mineral surveyor at Silver Reef, Father Scanlan offered mass in the newly completed St. George Tabernacle. The St. George Tabernacle choir sang and three thousand people attended the mass. This was the first high mass celebrated in southern Utah.
Macfarlane had rehearsed his choir in the unfamiliar music and Latin text for two or three weeks. Of the thousands in attendance on May 25th, 1879 (some accounts say 2,000), it's said that as few as 30 were Catholic. (In May of 1979 the anniversary of that first Mass was celebrated by a joint Catholic/LDS memorial tribute to Father Scanlan in St. George, which included a Latin Mass sung in the Tabernacle.)
A newspaper account from 1879 noted that Father Scanlan also delivered a two-hour discourse to his largely Mormon audience and quoted the priest as saying, "I think you are wrong and you think I am wrong, but this should not prevent us from treating each other with dignity and respect."
Father Scanlan went on to become the first Catholic Bishop of Salt Lake City and built that city's beautiful Cathedral of the Madeleine; John Macfarlane later helped found the educational institution known today as Dixie State College of Utah.
St. George today, with the Tabernacle's white steeple visible at center.
The Tabernacle today.
Interior of the Tabernacle, looking much the same as in the 1870s.