History of Euclid Ave UB (Mt. Enon Missionary Baptist) Church

I recently wrote about the former firehouse #13 at West Third and Euclid.

That building sits across the street from the Mt. Enon Missionary Baptist Church, which was formerly the Euclid Avenue United Brethren Church.

Milton Wright, father of Orville and Wilbur, was a bishop with the Church of the United Brethren, and he attended the laying of the church’s cornerstone on May 28, 1911.

The new edifice cost $75,000 to construct, and the church’s congregation “included Orville and Katharine Wright and other notable Daytonians such as local historian and former pastor Dr. Augustus W. Drury, food distributor and potato chip maker Daniel Mikesell.”

It was also for many years the home church for faculty and students of Bonebrake Theological Seminary. The church also helped to offer assistance to Daytonians after the Great Flood of 1913.

The Euclid Ave congregation, however, dates back even further to 1871, when the majority of its members joined from the Miami Chapel. Its first church, a smaller-two story structure, was built that year on Summit St (today Paul Laurence Dunbar St) just north of West Third.

Dayton in general had a strong connection to the Church of the United Brethren beyond the Wright family links.

One reference states that “Dayton has been facetiously referred to as, “the Rome of the U. B. Church” referring to the fact that there were “14 churches and three more within a few miles of the corporation line” then. 

Dayton was also the headquarters of the denomination’s publishing house, which built the Centre City Building at 4th and Main downtown and later became the Otterbein Press and occupied what is today Sinclair College’s Building 13.

The UB church’s initial foray into Montgomery County goes all the way back to 1804 when “a colony of 24 German families from Berk’s County Pa. came to Montgomery County, nearly all of whom settled in Germantown” and Andrew Zellar built his house there, he organized a United Brethren class the following year.

Returning to the church at Third and Euclid, it later became the home of the Mount Enon Missionary Baptist Church, which itself dates back to 1925, when a small group under the direction of the Rev. W. E. Jones began meeting at a mission on Home Ave and Hawthorne St, and later on South Summit St. before moving to the church that today still graces the corner of Third and Euclid.