While it is very common to see married couples buried together, it’s not often that adult brothers share the same gravesite — but then again, the Morrill brothers were anything but common.
Horace and Herbert were identical twins. It was said that they so resembled each other, even their own mother couldn’t tell them apart. To add to the confusion, the brothers wore the same clothing (frock coats and silk hats), trimmed their facial hair in the same manner (long side whiskers) and rode about on a tandem bicycle. But what really made the brothers stand apart was their unique (some would say irreverent) religious partnership. At one time, the Reverends Morrill Twins were known “in almost every city and town in the United States, throughout a large part of Europe, and in Canada.”
The brothers called themselves evangelists, though one newspaper referred to them as “pseudo evangelists.” They reveled in being outrageously different. Their proselytizing catered to waterfront folks, first targeting seafaring sailors on the ocean, and then eventually focusing on sailors who worked the Great Lakes, particularly because these sailors had long winters without work. Best known in Chicago, the brothers built the “Gospel Ship” at 1410 Carroll Ave., an ironclad building constructed to resemble a fully rigged boat complete with sails and portholes. The brothers were infamous for their salty language. They were not above using slang and “stronger” language when they preached. Meetings often turned into bedlam with the preachers tossing pennies to boys and “rowdies” causing havoc. Congregants could be seen leaving because of the chaos, occasionally taunted by the brothers as being “rubber necks,” “pigs,” and “galoots.” The brothers added to the atmosphere of chaos by proudly displaying the Winchester rifles behind the pulpit that were used to defend themselves from a mob attack in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Not surprisingly, the Gospel Ship was robbed and set on fire repeatedly.
The brothers welcomed publicity and made no secret of the fact that they were making a fortune from their partnership. They openly said that they weren’t working for “charity’s sake” and gave back just 10 percent of what they made to the church. A chapter of one of their publications was titled, “We are not the Immoral twins, but the moral twins.”
Death interrupted their unique partnership in 1902 when Horace dropped dead on the street in Tekamah, Nebraska on his way to services.
Single while Horace was alive — “We are bachelors because of our inseparable love for each other,” — Herbert married Hattie Gardner in 1906. Herbert continued to serve as a pastor until the end of his life in Indianapolis, but he no longer garnered anywhere near the notoriety he had as one of the Morrill Twins. The twins are buried together in Forest Home Cemetery, just along the dividing line that used to separate old German Waldheim and Forest Home. The arch that spanned two pillars, each representing one of the preachers, is broken and lies in pieces, but one can still identify an anchor that had been carved on the arch. In gravestone symbolism, an anchor can represent Christianity or indicate that the deceased was a sailor — it is a particularly apt symbol for these brothers.
References: The Blanchardville Blade, The Inter Ocean, The Daily Nonpareil, Indianapolis Star,
Amy Binns-Calvey is a volunteer with the Historical Society of Forest Park and the author of ‘More Dead Than Alive: Stories of Forest Park’s Quietest Neighbors.’