Where Cornelius Gathered — The Methodist Church and Cemetery
When the first settlers put down roots on the Tualatin Plains, they needed three things before a community could truly call itself a community: a school, a church, and a place to bury their dead. Cornelius got all three in short order. And the stories behind each of them are considerably more remarkable than most people who pass by them today would ever guess.
The Church
Before the Cornelius Methodist Church had walls or a roof, it had a congregation. In the earliest days of the town, services were held at the schoolhouse, with farmers and their families gathering on hard wooden benches and the Rev. William Roberts traveling over from Forest Grove to preach. It was a beginning, but the community wanted something more permanent. Something that announced, in wood and glass and pointed spire, that Cornelius was here to stay. In 1881 they built it. Total cost: $2,700.
The Man Who Designed It
The man who volunteered to serve as architect was a local farmer named John Nestor, and here the story takes a turn that most people in Cornelius would never expect. John Nestor was no well-meaning amateur with a pencil and good intentions. He was one of the most accomplished architects in the Pacific Northwest.
Born in Ireland in 1836, Nestor had practiced architecture in San Francisco before making his way to Portland in the 1860s, where he was credited by architectural historian Richard Ellison Ritz with bringing new ideas of cast-iron design from San Francisco to the Pacific Northwest. He advertised in the Oregonian as early as 1865, offering plans, specifications and working drawings for private and public buildings “according to the Latest, Cheapest and Best Styles.” By 1868 his advertisement listed his specialties: first-class residences, business houses, halls, churches, tenements, cottages, suburban residences, and all descriptions of brick and frame buildings, designed and planned “with accuracy, and scrupulously and faithfully Superintended.” Churches were right there in his own words.
Nestor was also an inventor. In 1867 he patented a combined carpenter’s tool, a weather-board hook, spirit level, graduated rule, marker and gauge all in one instrument, which was featured in Scientific American under Recent American and Foreign Patents and described as “one more added to the very respectable list of useful Oregon inventions.” He traveled to New York to manufacture and sell it, and by 1869 the Oregonian reported he was “succeeding beyond his most sanguine expectations.”
And then life knocked him down. By the mid-1870s, Nestor had retreated to a small farm outside Cornelius. His own words, written years later to the Oregonian editor from Seattle, explain why: “Numerous reverses, repeated knock-downs and an overworked brain caused me ten years ago to seek retirement.” A great architect, battered by circumstance, had come to the Tualatin Plains to rest. The local newspaper welcomed him with the warmth and gentle humor of a tight-knit community that recognized something good had arrived in their midst. “John Nestor, one of Oregon’s best architects,” the paper noted, “having become tired of the vocation he had so faithfully followed for many years, purchased a little farm adjacent our town, and has become a ‘hardy tiller of the soil.’ He has a most fearful trial with the squirrels and crows; he swears that Oregon strychnine is worthless, and too shoot one of the ‘bruets’ only increases their number. John is an honest, hard-working, congenial fellow, and we feel proud of him as a citizen, and only wish there were more ‘retired’ architects to settle amongst us if all are like him.” Cornelius took Nestor in and he gave back in return. He served on the school board as a Director alongside Colonel T.R. Cornelius, signing a letter of recommendation for the town’s schoolteacher in 1876. He joined Cornelius Lodge No. 50 of the Odd Fellows, serving as Noble Grand. He entered his architectural drawings and pencil sketches in competition at the Washington County Fair and won first prizes in both categories. A retired architect, still so proud of his craft that he entered his drawings at the county fair. He ran for Washington County School Superintendent on the Democratic ticket in 1878. He looked for a boy to drive his team and pull weeds, the paper reported, “while he runs with the squirrel tribe.” He was, in every sense, a member of the community. And so when the Cornelius Methodist congregation decided the time had come to build a proper church, they knew exactly who to ask.
The Building
Look at the photographs of the original church and you can see John Nestor’s professional hand in every detail. This was not a plain country building thrown up by willing amateurs. It was a properly designed Gothic Revival structure with genuine architectural ambition: a soaring spire that rose above everything else in Cornelius and could be seen from the surrounding farms, pointed Gothic arch windows, decorative bargeboard trim along the rooflines, a round window in the gable, and an arched entry that announced with confidence that something important was inside. For a congregation that had been meeting in a schoolhouse, it must have been breathtaking.
Colonel T.R. Cornelius and his wife Missouri were deeply involved from the beginning. They helped raise the funds, housed many of the early pastors in their home, and the Colonel, the town’s founder, Oregon Senate veteran and the man the whole town was named for, taught Sunday school. The original trustees were Colonel Thomas Cornelius, Robert McNutt, David Wilcox, and William Smith, who was, as it happens, the Colonel’s own father-in-law.
The church was completed in 1881. That same year, John Nestor sold his fifty-acre farm to Robert Pollock for $2,000 and left Cornelius. He went to Seattle, reestablished his architectural practice, and went on to design the Frye Opera House, Seattle’s first real theatre, along with the Hinckley Block, the Stevens Hotel, and other significant buildings. His 1912 obituary headline read: “JOHN NESTOR, PIONEER ARCHITECT, EXPIRES — Death Calls Man Who Designed Frye Opera House, Seattle’s First Theatre.” The church was the last thing he did in Cornelius. He designed it, saw it built, and then moved on, leaving it standing as his quiet signature on a community that had sheltered him when he needed shelter most.
The Remodel
The church stood with its spire intact for forty years. Then in 1921, under the influence of Albert Sholes, president of the Cornelius State Bank, church member, and the man whose house on Alpine Street we know so well from an earlier story, changes were made. Carpenter Ernest Brimmer removed the spire and the clearstory. Whether the remodel was practical necessity or simply a change in taste, it altered the character of the building in ways that not everyone welcomed. There were tears. Looking at the photographs of the original church and comparing them to what came after, you understand exactly why. That spire gave the building a dignity and a skyward reach that the squat replacement tower, however serviceable, could never quite recapture. Rededication services were held on November 6, 1921. And in June of that same year, in the newly remodeled church, Lester and Margaret Mooberry were married.
The Church Today
The church is still standing. White with red trim, that square tower where the spire once was, the Gothic arch windows still intact, the scalloped belfry louvers still in place after 143 years. Drive past it today and you might not give it a second glance. But now you know what it is. A John Nestor building. A Colonel Cornelius project. The place where Lester Mooberry got married. The first house of worship in Cornelius, still holding services, attended now by a few dozen faithful souls who are, whether they know it or not, the direct continuation of a congregation that first gathered in a schoolhouse on the Tualatin Plains in the 1870s. One hundred and forty-three years is a long thread of community. It deserves more than a passing glance.
The Cemetery
The Cornelius Methodist Cemetery did not begin as a Methodist cemetery at all. The land was originally purchased by the local Odd Fellows Lodge, Wapato Lodge No. 40, IOOF of Oregon, for a single and immediate purpose. One of their members had died. His name was Thomas Francis, and he died on Christmas Day, 1876. One man’s death on one Christmas Day created a cemetery that would eventually hold generations of Cornelius’s founding families.
John Nestor, as Noble Grand of Cornelius Lodge No. 50, was almost certainly among those who gathered when Thomas Francis was buried. The Odd Fellows were a tight fraternal brotherhood, and the burial of a member was a solemn occasion. Nestor may well have stood at that graveside on that cold Christmas Day in 1876, the same year he was serving on the school board with Colonel Cornelius, the same year he was winning prizes at the county fair, the same community he was quietly putting a life back together in.
The Odd Fellows Lodge itself did not survive long after that burial. About ten years later, the local hall burned to the ground. Rather than rebuild, the remaining members folded into the Hillsboro Lodge. And on May 28, 1887, Colonel Cornelius, David Wilcox, and A.K. Miller, Trustees of the Methodist Episcopal Church, purchased the property for one hundred dollars. The Cornelius Methodist Cemetery was born.
Thomas Francis is still there. His headstone lies flat in the clover, the three interlocked links of the Odd Fellows carved at the top, Friendship, Love and Truth, the fraternal symbols of the organization that buried him. The date is still legible: Dec. 25, 1876. His age has worn away with time, but his name and his date remain. He was the first. A man who died on Christmas Day, buried by his lodge brothers in a field that would become the resting place of generations, whose death created the ground where so many of the people in this story would eventually come to rest.
The cemetery sits quietly today under its magnificent old firs and sequoias, the headstones spreading back across the rise in every direction. It is well kept and peaceful, the kind of place that rewards a slow walk and a willingness to stop and read the names. Thomas Francis is in there somewhere, flat in the clover, with his Odd Fellows chain and his Christmas Day. Go find him.
Primary sources: John Nestor’s architectural career is documented in the Pacific Coast Architecture Database. Oregonian references from 1865, 1868, 1869, 1874, 1876, 1878 and 1889 consulted via NewsBank. Washington County Museum photograph collection. Church and cemetery history from Cornelius Historical Society records.
