A Note from Michael
My father gives the American Colony Hotel only one sentence in On Wings of Faith. He was twenty-two, had just arrived in Jerusalem, and needed a place to stay that fit the budget he had left for the trip.
He also kept the hotel’s brochure and taped it into his album.
While editing his book, I started looking more closely at that brochure and at the history of the hotel. What I found was a much more interesting story than the one sentence in his manuscript suggests.
— Michael Leach, Matt’s son
One Sentence, and a Brochure
Here is the whole of what my father wrote about the hotel:
“From the airport a car takes you to the American Colony Hotel where, after much deliberation and talking with the man who will be your guide, you arrive at terms that fit your budget. It is expensive and you shudder at the cost, but with time pressing you close you have no other choice. It was Friday noon and we were leaving Monday morning.”
That was it.
My father was twenty-two, traveling on a four-month passport, and the entire trip cost him less than $150. The brochure, however, survived. He taped it into his album at plate 20 A.
The folded cream-colored sheet has halftone photographs of the Bedroom, Main Building, East House, Palm House, Dining Room and Lobby, and Upper Court, along with practical information about meals and transportation.
The House Behind the Hotel
The brochure described the main building this way:
“The main building, an old Moslem Palace with large gracious rooms capped by vaulted or painted ceilings, is built around a court planted with flowers.”
It also described the location:
“The buildings of the Hotel, surrounded by picturesque gardens, stand by the road used in years past by camel caravans from the north on their approach to Jerusalem.”
The building had a history that went back well before the hotel. The house in Sheikh Jarrah had been built for Rabbah al-Husayni, a wealthy Jerusalem landowner. By the time my father stayed there, it had become the American Colony Hotel.
But the story of how the American Colony came to Jerusalem goes back even farther.
Why There Was an American Colony
The story begins with the Spafford family of Chicago.
In 1873, Horatio and Anna Spafford lost their four daughters when the French steamer Ville du Havre sank in the Atlantic. Anna survived. Her husband later sailed to join her, passing over the place where their daughters had died.
The experience became the background to the hymn “It Is Well with My Soul,” written by Horatio Spafford and later set to music by Philip Bliss.
In 1881, the Spaffords moved to Jerusalem. They became part of a small Christian community that came to be known as the American Colony.
The group shared its resources and established charitable work in Jerusalem, including assistance for people who were poor or displaced. Eventually the community moved into the Husayni house in Sheikh Jarrah.
As visitors began coming to Jerusalem, part of the building was used to accommodate them. That eventually developed into the American Colony Hotel.
So when my father arrived there in 1955, he was staying in a building with a history that reached back to the earliest years of the American Colony.
The Photographers of the American Colony
There is another connection I found especially interesting while going through my father’s album.
The American Colony established a photographic department in the late nineteenth century. Elijah Meyers became an important early photographer there, and the department eventually became known for its photographs of Jerusalem and the surrounding Holy Land.
The Matson family became closely associated with the work. G. Eric Matson, who had grown up in the American Colony, worked in its photographic department and later, with his wife Edith, continued the photographic business.
In 1940, the business became known as Matson Photo Service.
The Matsons produced an enormous photographic record of the Holy Land. Their negatives eventually became part of the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection at the Library of Congress.
The Connection in My Father’s Album
This is where the story comes back to my father.
When he assembled his album after returning to Germany, he used photographs and illustrations from books and magazines alongside his own photographs. Several of those printed photographs are credited to Matson Photo Service.
Among them are photographs of places my father had visited himself — including the Pool of Bethesda, the Church of St. Anne, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
So his album contains two kinds of photographs of Jerusalem.
There are the photographs my twenty-two-year-old father took himself in 1955.
And beside them are photographs taken by the photographers associated with the American Colony, the very place where he had stayed when he first arrived in Jerusalem.
There is nothing in my father’s manuscript to indicate that he knew about that connection.
He simply kept the photographs, taped them into his album, and preserved them for the rest of his life.
That is one of the things I have enjoyed discovering while working through On Wings of Faith. Sometimes a detail that seemed insignificant when he was twenty-two turns out, seventy years later, to have another story behind it.
