HOWARD RIDGEWAY VAUGHN (1859-1934), Congregational minister and religious educator, was born July 13, 1859 in New Egypt, New Jersey. He attended Peddie Institute (1882), Weslyan University (1886), and Yale Divinity School (1889). He then served as a home missionary in Red Cliff and Gilman, Colorado, which were silver mining camps, and in Fifield and Butternut, Wisconsin, which were lumber camps. As a home missionary with the Home Missionary Society he built churches with attached public libraries in Red Cliff, Gilman, and Fifield. He was ordained as a Congregationalist minister at Fifield on April 14, 1891. During the period 1893-1911 Reverend Vaughn served nine different Congregational churches in Wisconsin, acting at various times as a home missionary, pastor, church organizer, and financial reconstruction worker. He constructed and was the first pastor of Congregational churches in Truax, Albertville and Elk Mound, Wisconsin. From 1911 to 1916, he was the University Congregational pastor and financial agent at Champaign, Illinois. He then returned to his previous work serving a number of different communities in Wisconsin. He retired in 1922, returning to the family's home in Elk Mound, Wisconsin.
Reverend H. R. Vaughn is credited with founding the religious day school movement, the goals of which were to provide children with religious education in a structured environment similar to that of the public school. Children were placed in different classes according to their grade in public school, and met daily for one or two weeks in the summer. In the 1890s Reverend Vaughn held week-day classes for religious instruction in his missionary parishes. The first session of his Religious Day School was held in the Truax Congregational Church in the summer of 1900; in 1903 the Elk Mound Institute was formed to train religious day school instructors, using a practice school and an articulated methodology. Over the next ten years the movement spread throughout Wisconsin and into neighboring states. Reverend Vaughn was involved in many of the organizations formed to promote the movement, and published A Brief History of the Religious Day School as well as a book of children's stories used in religious teaching.
In 1891, he married Elizabeth K. Bradley, of Connecticut. They had three children: Myra, Howard Flagler, and John Irving. Reverend Vaughn died September 13, 1934.
MYRA VAUGHN (1892-1983) was born in Fifield, and attended school in Elk Mound and Eau Claire, Wisconsin. She obtained a bachelors degree in home economics from the University of Illinois-Urbana and attended graduate school at the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, Iowa State College, and the Hartford Seminary Foundation, among other schools, at various times from 1925 to 1956. Myra Vaughn worked as a home economics teacher for 36 years in Ohio, Oklahoma, and Minnesota, and was active in many professional organizations and community programs. The last ten years of her teaching career, she taught home economics to children and adults on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. She also worked for short times as an assistant chemist and dietician.
Myra's involvement with the religious day school movement began as a student in one of her father's schools. She eventually became a teacher and later director of vacation church schools in various states. After her retirement in 1957, she returned to the family home in Elk Mound to work on a biography of her father and a history of the religious day school movement, neither of which was published. She died on January 4, 1983.
