The First American Believer: Thornton Chase's Passing

In its issue dated the sixteenth of October 1912 the *Star of the West* carried a long obituary notice for Mr. Thornton Chase, *the first American believer,* who had died in Los Angeles on the thirtieth of September after a short illness. He was sixty-five years old.

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Chase had embraced the Bahá'í Faith in Chicago in 1894 — eight years before the next significant cluster of American believers formed around him. He had heard of the Cause from Ibrahim Kheiralla, the Lebanese teacher who had brought the first seeds of the Bahá'í message to the United States. Chase had inquired into the Faith carefully. He had asked the questions a careful nineteenth-century American businessman would have asked. He had become convinced.

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For the first eight years of his believing life he had been almost alone. The Chicago community grew slowly around him. His own life was outwardly unremarkable: he was an insurance executive, a husband, a father, a deacon at the local Universalist church before his Bahá'í years. His Bahá'í life he carried alongside the rest, with no public claim and no particular drama. When others came to inquire he would receive them in his parlour. When the Master sent Tablets He addressed Chase as one of the first beloved of the Cause in America.

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In April 1912, on the Master's first day in Chicago, Chase had been one of the very first to greet Him at Union Station. The two men had spent several days in close conversation. Chase had then, to the regret of those who knew his health was failing, returned to his work, which had taken him to Los Angeles in the early autumn. He had died there, far from the Chicago friends, in the small bedroom of a downtown hotel.

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The *Star of the West* obituary printed the cable that 'Abdu'l-Bahá, then in California, had sent to the family on hearing the news.

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> He is the first American believer, and his name will be > inscribed in the records of the Cause.

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The Master had made the journey to the cemetery Himself. He had walked to the grave. He had chanted the Bahá'í burial prayers. He had sent for a roll of cloth and had laid it across the grave. He had spoken briefly to the small group of believers who had gathered at His side: that this man had been the first; that the Cause in the United States, however far it might in the future spread, would always trace its earliest opening to Thornton Chase.

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The grave at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Los Angeles is still a place of pilgrimage for American Bahá'ís. The Master's brief words at the graveside, in October 1912, set the tone of the honour the Faith continues to give him. *He is the first American believer.* The sentence has not been amended.

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