The Pastors of Siloam · 1915–1919

J. E. Harper

Founder of Carmel Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, he led Siloam from 1915 to 1919, first as stated supply and then as installed pastor.

Pastor (stated supply 1915–1917, installed 1917–1919)

At Siloam

Rev. Harper came to Siloam in 1915, the year Rev. William Alexander died in office. He served first as stated supply, from 1915 to 1917, and was then installed as pastor, serving until 1919. The Presbyterian Church's yearly General Assembly Minutes list him at Brooklyn, on the same page as Siloam, in 1917, 1918 and 1919. In those years the congregation worshipped at 404–8 Lafayette Avenue, the building Siloam had bought in 1910 and kept until 1944.

He was still listed as a minister in Brooklyn in 1922. Rev. George Shippen Stark followed him as pastor.

Life and ministry

James E. Harper was born in South Carolina in 1878, according to the Cincinnati Preservation Association. The same account says he earned his theology degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania at the age of twenty.

In September 1901 he founded Carmel Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, in a rented hall on Plum Street. The Dayton Daily News called it the first Black congregation of the Presbyterian denomination in Ohio. Carmel still exists today. In October 1906 he held a ticket to a Presbyterian Brotherhood banquet at the city's Business Men's Club, but he was turned away at the door under the club's whites-only rule. The newspapers covered the snub, and a fellow minister protested it. In 1909, after a dispute in the Cincinnati Presbytery over mission money for Black congregations, he was dismissed from Carmel.

According to the Cincinnati Preservation Association, he later served Calvary Presbyterian Church in Asbury Park, New Jersey, until his death in 1951 at the age of 73.

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