Olive and Hurley Old School Baptist Church

About this property

Olive and Hurley Old School Baptist Church is an historic Baptist meeting house on NY Route 28, at the junction with Ulster County Route 30 in Shokan, New York. It was built in 1857 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. On September 2, 1799, the first Baptist church in Ulster County was constituted at Tongore (now in the Town of Olive). Dr. William Connelly, a pioneer physician in the area, served as the first pastor. By 1805, the church was known as the First Baptist Church of Christ in Marbletown and later the First Baptist Church of Olive. The first Meeting House was erected in Olive City in 1808. By the 1830s, the once homogenous Baptist denomination in America was rapidly fracturing over issues of doctrine, salaried ministry, instrumental music, and the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions. The Olive Church, by then one of several Baptist churches in Ulster County (i.e. Lattingtown – 1812, Kingston – 1832), took a stand with the conservative faction, which became known as the Old-School or Primitive Baptists, who sought to maintain the old doctrines and practices. In 1851, the Baptist Church of Olive and the Hurley & Olive Baptist Church (which had been formed after an earlier split with the Olive Church), reunited as the Union Baptist Church of Olive & Hurley. In 1853, the enlarged congregation called for the ordination of Deacon Jacob Winchell to the position of Elder. A Presbytery (attended incidentally by Chauncy Burroughs, father of John Burroughs as a representative from the Second Roxbury Church) determined the candidate's qualifications. Upon examination, Jacob Winchell was ordained and served as pastor until his death in 1867. He was the first native Olive resident to serve in that capacity. By the mid-1850s, the old Meeting House in Olive was found inadequate. Plans were laid for building a larger structure. In 1856, a site was selected on part of the DuBois family holdings, which was on the north side of Plank Road (now State Route 28). This is the present site of the Meeting House, which is now located at Winchell's Corner in the heart of the village of Shokan. In May 1856, the lot was surveyed at the request of Jeremiah Matthews and Samuel H. Elmendorf, both of Olive village, and soon work was begun on the new building. In 1857, the church edifice was completed at a cost of $1,650. In 1888, the Church was incorporated under the name of The Old School Baptist Church of Olive and Hurley. At that time, membership was approximately 120. The congregation remained strong until the turn of the 20th-Century, after which the church began a slow decline. By the Second World War, membership stood at around thirty. Today, the congregation is gone, but the building remains as a testament to its pioneer heritage. Services are held annually in the Fall.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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