Myrtle Fillmore: Mother of Unity

Myrtle Fillmore: Mother of Unity by Witherspoon, Thomas E.. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780871591029.

Mary Caroline "Myrtle" Page Fillmore (1845 – 1931) was an American who was co-founder of Unity, a church within the New Thought Christian movement, along with her husband Charles Fillmore. After the births of their first two sons, Lowell Page Fillmore and Waldo Rickert Fillmore, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri. Two years later, in 1886, Charles and Myrtle attended New Thought classes held by Dr. E. B. Weeks. Myrtle subsequently recovered from chronic tuberculosis and attributed her recovery to her use of prayer and other methods learned in Weeks classes. In 1889, Charles and Myrtle began publication of a new periodical, Modern Thought, notable among other things as the first publication to accept for publication the writings of the then 27-year-old New Thought pioneer William Walker Atkinson. In 1890, they announced a prayer group that would later be called Silent Unity. In 1891, Fillmores Unity magazine was first published. Although Charles had no intention of making Unity into a denomination, his students wanted a more organized group. He and his wife were among the first ordained Unity ministers in 1906. Charles and Myrtle Fillmore operated the Unity organizations from a campus near downtown Kansas City.