Centennial Notes

Year: 1898
Miss Mattie Mallory opened an orphanage in Oklahoma City, which evolved into the Children's Center in Bethany, OK.

1898: Benevolence

Miss Mattie Mallory, an 1889 graduate of Baker University, accepted briefly in 1897 the superintendency of a Fire-Baptized Mission in Winnipeg. Having changed trains in Oklahoma City while encoute to the Canadian assignment and sensing a call to minister to homeless children there, she quickly responded in August to an invitation from Reuben E. Hershey to conduct a school for orphans and children of evangelists in conjunction with the mission and home he recented had opened on Reno Street.

A major setback to Miss Mallory's efforts came with the 1900 surprise resignation of B.H. Irwin and the collapse of Fire-Baptized Holiness Association support. She went through a series of Holiness sponsors and by 1909 moved her orphanage and rescue home from Beulah Heights to Bethany. She was joined in this effort by C.B. Jernigan who shaped the charter of the new town to forbid the sale of liquor and tobacco added to covenants which outlawed motion picture theaters, dance halls and pool halls, public swimming pools and merry-go-rounds, games of chance and the like. This was an obvious attempt to achieve holiness ideas of moral and civic righteousness.

Miss Mallory had 200 acres designed to use agricultural enterprises to unable the orphanage to be self-sustaining. Her efforts at starting a school evolved into what is now Southern Nazarene University, which occupies land dialogically across 39th Expressway. In 1975, the Children's Center of Bethany, successor to the Oklahoma Orphanage, was placed under the custody of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. Miss Mallory's children had returned home.