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How a 13-year-old girl preached to thousands in Roanoke for two weeks in 1925.
Uldine Utley had preached the gospel to packed auditoriums in St. Louis, Kansas City, and San Francisco. Her five-week revivals in Florence, SC, and Savannah, GA, had been attended by thousands in the spring of 1925 and that summer she brought her Pentecostal-styled, fundamentalist-flavored preaching to Roanoke.
A main draw was Miss Utley’s age. She was 13.
Born in Oklahoma, Utley embraced the faith while attending a tent revival at the age of nine in Fresno, CA, and heard the fiery sermons of Aimee Semple McPherson. Utley launched her own itinerant preaching ministry two years later, becoming one of a number of child evangelists that toured the country during the Roaring Twenties.
Advertisements for her two-week appearance in Roanoke promoted her “Old Time Revival” that began on a Sunday afternoon in mid-July at the Roanoke Auditorium. She preached twice a day, mid-afternoon and evening, except on Saturdays and held noon revival meetings at the Norfolk & Western Railway Shops. Accompanied by her parents, sister and an entourage of song leaders, musicians, and ushers, Utley drew thousands to the auditorium nightly. “Large Audiences Hear Evangelist” declared a headline in the July 17 edition of the Roanoke World-News. A second headline appeared a few days later, “Personality of Child Evangelist Is Amazing.”
The World-News reported, “Three thousand or more people were at the Roanoke Auditorium last night to hear little Uldine Utley…After the usual preliminaries of singing, prayer and collection, Miss Utley came forward and led the singing with one of her favorite hymns…She used a tambourine quite effectively.”
Her delivery was fast, grammar correct, audience spellbound and message effective. The sermon was regularly punctuated by a chorus of “amens” from the audience and the extended invitation drew a show of hands from the newly-converted and sin-convicted. “God bless you brother (or sister)” was Utley’s personal acknowledgment from the platform of each hand raised. Some came forward and knelt at a mourner’s bench located at the front of the auditorium. “She gave the penitents an exhortation herself, and commanded them to stand up and praise God. They obeyed instantly…,” reported the World-News.
Utley’s revival campaign was supported by the local chapter of the Billy Sunday Club and a mass choir composed of local singers. Conspicuously absent from her services were local clergy. Roanoke’s ministers, like those in other cities, viewed with suspicion what they considered to be more spectacle than substance from the teenager.
At noon each day Utley was given access to the Roanoke Shops where railroad workers listened as they ate lunch. A photographer captured a few images of the men gathered around her at the West End Shops and planing mill. Utley later recalled to a newspaper reporter, “We felt there were some of those earnest railroad converts whom we should meet when the Gospel train pulls into the great station above.”
Before closing her revival, the City League Union invited Utley to speak in Highland Park on a Sunday afternoon to the city’s youth. An estimated 2,000 showed up to listen.
From Roanoke Utley moved further South with her evangelistic campaign. Her celebrity stature grew, and by the following summer when she preached in Madison Square Garden where she drew a crowd of 14,000. She edited a religious magazine and continued a rigorous travel and preaching schedule, usually speaking twice a day wherever she went. She held forth at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, was ordained by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1935, and collapsed in 1936. Exhausted physically and strained financially, Utley abruptly disappeared from public life.
She married William Langkop in 1938, but her mental state was fragile. Biographer Thomas Robinson summarized Utley as being at “the clash between the expectations of revivalism and her desires for a normal life.” Her public meteoric rise had come at such a significant personal cost that her husband had her committed to a mental institution. He later divorced her. She lived out most of her adult life confined to hospitals and group homes before dying in relative anonymity in California in 1995.
For two weeks in 1925, Uldine Utley brought her gospel train to Roanoke and captured the attention of thousands here who listened to a girl many called at the time “the Joan of Arc of the modern religious world” during the zenith of the Flapper Era.
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