1890's - Church exterior (Photograph from an archival source: Open SF History, submitted by Jim Stettner/Jim Stettner)
2022-08-01 - This entry represents the installation of a new organ. Identified by M. Edwards from an uncited San Francisco, California newspaper article dated April 09, 1899: *Church Organ Completed A beautiful organ now graces the Emmanuel Baptist Church. It was built by John Bergstrom & Sons and today it will be heard for the first time, with Professor Enequist at the keys. Rev. J. George Gibson, the pastor, has won local fame as a singer and has taken great interest in church music. He has become personally responsible for the payment of the instrument. When the church was built ten years ago, space was left for an organ. The instrument has been constructed to match the interior. The wood is of polished oak like the seats, and the pipes are beautifully decorated to harmonize with the walls. The decorations which were used at Easter will be left up to honor the new organ. * -Jim Stettner
2022-08-01 - The congregation was heavily burdened with scandal. The previous 1878 edifice on Cobb St. had two pastors commit suicide. The third pastor, Rev. Isaac Milton “I.M.” Kalloch, shot 5 times and killed the editor of the Chronicle - Charles de Young - on April 23, 1880 over political slander against Kalloch's father, Rev. I.S. Kalloch who was mayor and who had been shot (but not killed) by de Young on August 23, 1879. The pastor was acquitted in his March 1881 trial. Emmanuel Baptist Church hit a gruesome trifecta with two suicides and a murderer, but even with three deaths in less than three years, the little church somehow endured. The congregation moved to a new building on Bartlett Street between 22nd and 23rd in 1890. On Saturday, April 13, 1895, a group of church ladies was decorating the pulpit for the next day’s lavish Easter Sunday celebrations when one of them found the blood-drenched body of a young woman in a small library storeroom. "The girl had been assaulted and her remains had been cut and hacked,” the Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington, later reported. Another young woman from the church was also missing, and her body was found atop a staircase in the bell tower. The assailant was W.H.T. “Theodore” Durrant, a medical student and superintendent of Emmanuel Baptist’s Sunday school. He was found guilty and hanged. Still, the congregation pressed-on. Even the 1906 earthquake and ensuing fires didn't claim the building. It was finally dismantled in 1915. Disposition of the Bergstrom organ is unknown. -Jim Stettner
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