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A 90 Year Heritage"Heritage" is a good term to describe over 90 years of ministry to the hopeless, the helpless, and the homeless people of the street. Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines Heritage as "Something transmitted by or acquired from a predecessor." Today, the Mission is still faithfully transmitting that which it has received from its founders. Harrisburg's Mission tradition goes back to a Scranton Welshman named Griffith Jones, who started the predecessor of Bethesda at the turn of the century. This early mission was known as the Lafayette Mission, and was located where the State Education Building is in Harrisburg today. On December 22, 1914, James W. Barker founded Bethesda Mission, taking the Biblical word for "mercy" as a name for his mission. He called it a "Christian workshop and workingman's hotel." "Uncle Jim" Barker (1853-1944) was the mission's first president. He was a thin, stately man with a moustache and goatee. It was often said that he looked like a cross between Monty Wooley and Sigmund Freud. Earning his livelihood in the feed and grain business, he lived on Evergreen St. near a political boss of the time, Ed Beidleman, and was Sunday school superintendent at the Stevens Memorial Methodist Church. Barker attracted some of the real "class" of Harrisburg at the time to be directors of Bethesda - men like Eli Hershey, J. Boyd Trostle, John W. Appleby, H. B. Alexander, E.S. Chronister, C. M. Thumma, Gus Steinmitz, O. B. Lank and Gus F. Larson. The only time that they ran into flak was when they considered purchasing the old Biley mansion at Front and Chestnut Streets, because a big controversy arose over the so-called "Front Street for the Front Streeters" movement. That was in the early 1930's when, as they used to say, there weren't any proletarians on Front Street, though John O'Hara knew otherwise. In 1934 the Mission purchased the old Pennsylvania Railroad YMCA at 611 Reilly Street for $10,000. It had been built in 1902, and had housed Harrisburg's first indoor swimming pool. The swimming pool is now filled in and capped over, and the room is currently serving as a dormitory.
In 1975, an over-optimistic investment in what was to be a state-aided and funded alcoholism pilot program put Bethesda Mission in a financial hole of over $30,000, because the State pulled its promised funding after the mission had expended its funds to create the facility. While that isn't much money for most organizations, it was a critical loss for Bethesda, which operated on a $70,000 annual budget. In the process of recovery, the mission reorganized much of its volunteer board, parted ways with an executive director, and adopted a retrenching, survival policy. "The easiest route for most of us would be to resign from the board and get ourselves out of this embarrassing predicament," wrote the Rev. Donald R. Javert, then of the Market Square Presbyterian Church. "Even more embarrassing would be to leave forgotten persons in the streets of Harrisburg unattended and without shelter. The Mission is a friend to those who are genuinely without friends." Agreeing with Rev. Javert were the remaining board members, plus four new members who replaced the six who had left and by 1979 the mission had paid off its debt. The mission at that time had 30 permanent residents and about five transients daily. Today it has no permanent guests but sleeps over 100 men on most nights, provides over 100, 000 meals per year, separately houses 40 women and children, and operates a full-time after-school youth program for neighborhood children that involves 50 or more boys and girls each afternoon. From a staff of one executive director in 1979 the mission has grown to an organization employing 43 dedicated workers. Increasing from the annual $70,000 budget of those years, the mission now requires $1,800,000 to provide for the expanding needs of its many services. There is an historical paradox to the mission tradition in America. Bethesda and others in the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions began well before the American public welfare movement. The public might think that with the ubiquitous welfare check, the "down-and-out," as "Uncle Jim" Barker called them, do have security and don't need lodging, food, or counseling. The truth is the direct opposite, in fact. The boys don't ride boxcars into Harrisburg anymore, and the increased urbanization and impersonalization of society, coupled with alcohol and drugs, bad economics, and declining education, have all replaced the self-reliant, self-esteemed happy "bums" of yesteryear with faceless, alienated lost souls of mass man. Missions have a more vital role to play today than ever before, and it isn't that of middle-class hypocrisy or guilt-cleansing, either. Above all, the Mission's quality board and staff have re-established the Mission's statement of purpose to conform to the original charter, thus assuring a continuation of the Heritage passed to it by its founders and supporters. "Uncle Jim" Barker would be pleased to see his Mission in the hands of those who are guiding it today. (The material for this page was taken from Bethesda's Spring 1994 newsletter, which was in turn taken, verbatim in many places, from the column, "Reporter at Large" by Paul B. Beers. The original article appeared in the Patriot News on 12/11/75, and has been reprinted with the permission of Mr. Beers. It was adapted to reflect the current purpose of that newsletter and this page and also to bring it up-to-date. Our sincere thanks to Mr. Beers.)
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Henry Reinhart (far right), a
self-acknowledged former "booze-soaked, despondent salesman from Cleveland,"
came aboard when the mission was at 107 S. Second Street and moved on to Reily Street for
31 years as mission director. The depression days were the glory days (in that period of
time), when the mission lodged as many as 36,000 men a year, including seamen from the
Morro Castle and ex-bootleggers who wanted to go straight. Today the Mission sleeps more
than that on a routine basis, and that does not include the 
