First Old School Baptist Church of Roxbury
The First Old School Baptist Church of Roxbury is located in the rural hamlet of Vega, New York in the northeast corner of the Town of Roxbury in Delaware County, New York. The church is idyllically situated in the Denver-Vega Valley in a pleasing country setting with stark mountain backdrops.
The First Old School Baptist Church has its roots in a Baptist church organized in the Denver-Vega Valley on May 27, 1796. It was the first church of any denomination to have been formed in the Town of Roxbury. The original society was constituted by Elder William Warren, Shubal Dimmick, David Robinson, Elizabeth Robinson, Abner Bangs, Isaac Hodgkins, Samuel Mosher and John Avery. In the early days the society worshipped in barns, private dwellings, school houses and wherever opportunity offered.
The first church building for the congregation was likely a log structure that was erected circa 1800-1810. Early records show that it was located south of the Vega Cemetery on Cartwright Road, however the exact location remains unidentified.
The current church building, the second one constructed for the congregation, was built in 1856 in the “traditional meeting house form” that was characteristic of the Old School Baptist faith. This style of architecture is “defined by clean and economical form uncluttered by ornament and embellished with restrained detail.”
Interestingly, Old School Baptists, who believe in baptism by immersion, used the creek, the Batavia Kill, that is located behind the church for this purpose by constructing a wooden dam to raise the water level whenever new members were to be baptized. “In Old School Baptist churches, it was preferred to perform baptisms in natural water sources, since this is where John the Baptist immersed Christ.”
By the 1920s, the Old School Baptists of the Catskills were in significant decline. By 1929, the First Old School Baptist Church of Roxbury was one of seven area churches served by a single preacher, Elder Arnold H. Bellows (1884-1957), who rotated monthly around the association which included the two Roxbury churches, the Middletown-Andes Church, the Olive-Hurley Church, the Middleburgh Church, the Clovesville Church and the Lexington Church. Elder Bellows continued to serve the association into the 1950s. The population and energy of the Old School Baptist Church gradually diminished. By 1975 only one member of the church remained.
Today, the fully restored church is home to the Roxbury Arts Group, a non-profit organization who utilize the historic space for a variety of artistic functions.
Elder William Warren
Elder William Warren served as the first pastor of the First Old School Baptist Church of Roxbury. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland and immigrated to the United States. Warren served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. He began his ministry near Carmel, in Putnam County, New York on June 25, 1791, and was ordained in 1793. He came to the Batavia Kill area in 1796.
Elder Warren served the First Old School Baptist Church of Roxbury from 1796 to 1811. He was succeeded by Elder James Mead, who served until 1813. Following elders included John Warren (1813), Orlando Mack (1813-1823) and David Mead (1823-1845). In 1800 Warren established the first store in the upper end of the Batavia Kill Valley.
Elder Warren would also become the first pastor of the Second Old School Baptist Church of Roxbury when it was formed in 1816. At its organization 53 members of the first church served as the new congregation for the new church. At first, the congregation held their meetings in the Scudder school-house. In 1833 they built a church near Stratton’s Falls in Roxbury. Elder Warren served the Second Old School Baptist Church of Roxbury from 1816 to 1821.
After his service at Roxbury, Elder Warren relocated to Olive in Ulster County, New York. He served as the third pastor of the Olive & Hurley Old School Baptist Church from 1821 to 1834.
Elder William Warren passed away at 76 years of age on December 6, 1836 in Olive, York. His body was later brought to the Vega Cemetery for burial. A portion of his epitaph reads, “He came preaching the gospel of Christ in the wilderness – he was a man of God and a father in Israel.”
Elder Warren lost his wife, Synthia, and daughter, Margaret, within three months of each other in 1809. Margaret, who died in May, and Synthia, who died in August, are both buried nearby in the Vega Cemetery.
National Register of Historic Places
The church is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as “a distinctive example of nineteenth-century rural church architecture.”
The church “epitomizes nineteenth-century wood-frame country church architecture in New York, particularly the plain aesthetic that so effectively articulated the world view of the orthodox sects of many rural religions, such as Baptist, Presbyterian, the Shakers, and the Society of Friends. Plainness was achieved by manipulating a number of architectural dimensions. In form, a plain building was precise and geometrical. In churches, wings, apses, dormers, clerestories, and other protrusions were omitted in favor of an austere rectangular solid with a gable (triangular) roof. Ornamental detail was greatly reduced from the perceived norm and used only where necessary to maintain architectural logic or to refer to a critical dialectic.
On the Roxbury church, ornament was limited to corners, roof-lines and the edges of opening where it was important to denote the transition from one element to another. In this case, the choices were greatly simplified and interpreted in a modest, non-worldly vocabulary. Workmanship was usually quite high in plain buildings, lest the austerity and distortion be construed as a lack of awareness or skill. Here is where the critical cultural statement is expressed in the architecture. The Old School Baptists were plain for ideological reasons, not because they lacked anything. The fineness of the Roxbury building, evident both in the handling of its restraint and the signature flourishes nested in design features such as the gallery stairs, is what distinguishes the building as architecture. That the architecture is plain, places this remote, local building in the larger dialectic of the Old School Baptists and their position in the world.” (National Register of Historic Places.)
