Radio Script #562

Little Talks on Common Things

January 27, 1963

Older Waterville people remember that the Getchell Street Baptist Church was originally affiliated with the Free Baptist denomination, once an entirely different group from that to which the older Baptist church on Elm Street belonged. About forty years ago the two denominations merged, and here in Maine the merger became known as the United Baptist Convention of Maine, and though there is another group today called Conservative Baptists, only older persons and the old records testify to the difference that once existed between Baptists and Free Baptists.

The denomination that organized in 1818 as the First Baptist Church of Waterville was deSignated as Calvinist Baptists; that is, they subscribed to the doctrine of predestination pronounced by John Calvin in Geneva more than 300 years earlier.

That belief held that every person was, before birth, predestined to be saved or be damned, and he couldn’t do anything about it. Then along came the Free, or more accurately Free Will, Baptists, proclaiming that man is a free moral agent, able to accept or reject salvation by his own will. So far as I know, there is no Baptist left today who believes in predestination, but in the early years of the 19th century the feeling between those believers of the Calvinist Baptist faith and their Free Will Baptist brethren was intense and often bitter.

Although it was only about 60 years ago that the Free Baptists of Waterville built their church on Getchell Street, members of their faith had been here long before. Only last summer I discovered an old record book, carefully preserved in a wooden case obviously made to hold it. That book turned out to be the records of the Waterville Quarterly Meeting of Free Will Baptists, organized October 20, 1838.

The record tells us that it had been decided to divide the Anson Quarterly Meeting, with its 28 churches, into two groups, with the dividing line set at the Sandy River and the North line of Norridgewock. The churches south of that line were formed into the new Waterville Quarterly Meeting.

At their first session, the record tells us, “Epistles were read from t he several churches, and all were found to be in a low state except the two East Pond Churches and one at Sidney.”

When the Quarterly Meeting observed its first anniversary in 1839, it was composed of eleven churches, the largest of which was at Belgrade, with 110 members. It had two churches in Waterville, one with 46, the other with 35 members.

We are so accustomed today to confuse a church with the building in which it meets, that we need to be reminded that our forefathers made sharp distinction between the two. The church was the body of members; the building where they worshipped was the meeting house. Those who assembled there, members and nonmembers, for the Sunday services, were the congregation.

In fact in 1839 very few of the churches in the Waterville Quarterly Meeting of Free Will Baptists had a meeting house. They were organized much the same as were the early Methodists, with their so-called neighborhood classes, and were therefore slower to build houses of worship than were some of the other denominations.

When reports were gathered in for the annual session in 1840, there were three churches of the denomination in Waterville. The record tells us that two of them had been I’wonderfully blessed with revival, so that the Third Church alone had 88 members, exceeded in size only by the older church at Belgrade.”

That town had during the two years added another church to the Quarterly Meeting, but neither seemed to be prospering. The record described first Belgrade as I’low and tired”, while it labeled the Second Belgrade as “under some trials”. Two churches were designated respectively as First and Second East Pond. Probably one Was at Smithfield Village, but where the other group was located is uncertain.

The church at Sidney was said to be “in a tired, scattered state”. Several of the churches were described as tTin good uniontt, which meant they were free from the theological dissensions that then plagued so many church groups. That was a time when the Orth040x Congregationalists, inheritors of the old established state church of Massachusetts, were very jealous of the inroads into their ranks by Baptists and Methodists on the one hand, and Universalists on the other. Sometimes a whole church changed denominations, as happened in Sedgwick, when the Rev. Daniel Merrill, the Congregationalist minister, became a Baptist and took over the whole membership of his church into the new faith.

In 1840 the Free Will Baptists also had two churches at Canaan, and one each in Clinton, Mercer and Starks.

By 1840 the temperance movement was getting well under way in Maine, and in that year the Waterville Quarterly I”ieeting resolved that “We earnestly entreat our brethren to wholly abstain from the use of ardent spirits and wines as beverages, and not to give our trade to those who deal therein; and that we will not hereafter receive into this ~arterly Meeting any Church whose members deal directly or indirectly in ardent spirits.

That those who controlled the Quarterly Meeting meant business in their opposition to liquor is shown by the records of their annual session held in 1842 at Kendalls Mills. Investigation had revealed that the two Smithfield churches, the First Belgrade and the Second Waterville still had some rum-drinking members, and those churches were commanded to deal with such members by requiring them to sign a teetotal temperance pledge or leave the church.

In 1843 the Quarterly Meeting took a strong stand on the issue of slavery. They voted: “We think the time has come when we should not support any man for office in town, county, state or the United States who shall not be an abolitionist at heart and in practice.”

It is interesting to note that meetings of the organization held between May and September often convened, not in houses, but in barns. I have already referred to the fact that they had very few meeting houses. In August, 1842 the Quarterly Meeting convened in Brother Word’s barn at Starks; in June, 1843 in Mr. Mason’s barn in Clinton.

Among the Free Baptists, whenever dissension arose within a particular church, a committee was often appointed by the Quarterly Meeting to try to settle the difficulty. The individual churches so frequently called for the interposition of such a committee, even over trivial matters, that the practice had become a nuisance by 1844, when the Quarterly Meeting voted: “Hereafter no committee will be sent from this Quarterly Meeting to settle common difficulties in any church unless the request is made in writing and is signed by at least one-third of the active members, and the signers agree to pay reasonable compensation for the committee’s time.”

The late 1830’s and early 1840’s were the time of the notorious anti-masonic movement in Maine, a movement that had started in Central New York state, where Masons were accused of doing away with a member who revealed certain secrets. Though the charge Was later proved false, fear and hatred of Masons and kindred fraternal orders spread into every Maine town. That is why the Quarterly Meeting of Free Baptists voted in 1846:

“Whereas the secret societies called Masons, Odd Fellows, Rebeccas and Sons of Temperance are injurious to the interests of the Church of Christ, we believe it to be wrong for the members of our churches to unite with them or any other secret society.”

The Free Will Baptists themselves were not free from possible split into parts. That the Quarterly Meeting differentiated between rich and poor churches seems to us of a later day rather trivial, but to those church folk of more than a century ago, such matters were important. In 1848 the session solemnly considered the following question propounded by Elder Buker: “Is it right for preachers of this Quarterly Meeting to spend all their time preaching in other quarterly meetings with churches that are wealthy, while there are so many churches destitute of preaching in our own quarterly meeting?” Despite the loaded phrasing of the question, the meeting voted that it was right for the preachers to do so. Perhaps those old time Free Baptists considered in practical fashion: that ministers, like other people, have to eat and wear clothes.

In 1849 one vote read: “If our messenger to the Farmington Quarterly Meeting cannot obtain a horse from some of the brethren without expense, he may hire one and our Quarterly Meeting will pay for the same.

Not infrequently, however devoted they were, the delegations from the several churches could not get to the place of quarterly meeting in the winter. For instance, the record of December 25, 1850 tells us: “Only three churches reported at the meeting in West Waterville, because the heavy snow and blow had made the roads impassable, so that the brethren could not get to the place with horses. ”

Note the date of that meeting — December 25 — Christmas Day. That the meeting was scheduled for what we consider the most important holiday of the year bears out a fact that I have often commented upon during the fifteen years of this program — the fact that Christmas just was not recognized as a holiday in Maine until just before the Civil War.

The Quarterly Meeting continued to show a lively interest in the slavery issue. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act, opening up the territories to slavery, was passed by Congress in 1854, this group of Free Baptists denounced the act and at the same time condemned the attack on Senator Sumner, when he had been given a severe caning in the Senate chamber by a senator from South Carolina.

In the early 1 850′ s dissension became so rife in many of the churches of this Quarterly Meeting that the leaders became discouraged. The Fairfield churches were all reported as having “lost visibility”, that is, disintegrated. It movement to split the meeting into two Quarterly Meetings had placed the dividing line right through the middle of the town of Waterville. In the adjoining towns the members of Free Baptist Churches were in anything but harmony. So in 1853 the clerk of Quarterly Meeting put in the old record book these words: “With all that is unpleasant connected with the condition of this Quarterly Meeting, and with all that may seem disheartening to the friends of Bible Religion, we are happy in the assurance that God is yet in the midst of Zion, and that there will yet be prosperous days for this branch of his tried people.”

And with that splendid assurance of faith by a devoted people in time of trouble, we must say Good Night for Old Times’ Sake.

Year: 1963