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Old Bethel records preserved in 1939
Thanks to the forward-thinking Mrs. Clarice Andrews of Fredericktown, Missouri, and Allen L. Oliver of Cape Girardeau, a transcript of the the early records of Old Bethel Baptist Church were preserved in 1939.
Andrews had copied the records for her own collection of historic documents. And in September 1939, she allowed Oliver to have his office staff copy the Bethel history. Benefiting from the pair's generosity was the Cape Girardeau County Historical Society, which received the 61-page transcript on Sept. 25, 1939.
Although Old Bethel was organized in 1806, the records copied in by Oliver's staff dated to May 7, 1821. They covered a 46-year period, ending in August 1867.
The congregation built a small log church in 1806 a mile or so south of Jackson. It was replaced in 1813 by a larger structure made of poplar logs. In one of his histories, Louis Houck preserved Judge W.C. Ranney's description of the church from 1825: "He saw a rather low building -- 8 or 9 feet from plank floor to ceiling -- with a clapboard roof and a rock chimney at one end. Inside, opposite the fireplace, were some planks nailed up to form a pulpit. Backless benches were made of slabs with legs put through auger holes. The two or three windows had small glass panes. Entrance was on the east side 'between the pulpit and fireplace.'"
The structure served the congregation until 1861, when worship was transferred to Mt. Pleasant on Byrd's Creek, northwest of Jackson. The church itself stood until the early 1900s, when it was sold to a farmer for the wood. In 1906 a marker (shown above) was erected to memorialize the site of the log church. The grounds also hold a reconstructed church, made by volunteers from the salvaged logs of the 1813 structure. Their two-year effort culminated in the dedication of the replica church in 2007.
Part of Andrews' records preserved in 1939 were reproduced in the Southeast Missourian. They offer a unique glimpse of this historic Baptist congregation.
What Andrews and Oliver preserved in 1939 appears to be a duplicate of the original Old Bethel Church minute book. Two copies of the minute book were kept, in order to ensure the survival of the record in case of fire or some other disaster. One of those books, considerably degraded, is housed at the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center in Jackson.
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