Easthampton Congregational Church
"The big white church in the center of town"
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Easthampton Congregational Church
"The big white church in the center of town" |
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The History of Easthampton Congregational Church
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| The early settlers of Easthampton, MA grew tired of walking the long trail to Northampton and Southampton for worship on Sundays. In 1785 local residents won approval of the two neighboring towns and the state legislature to become a separate town with the right to its own church.
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| The first meeting house erected on the town common served the town as its only house of worship for 50 years. Payson Williston, a young Yale graduate and veteran of the Revolutionary War, labored among the Clapps, the Lymans, the Wrights, the Janes, and others for 44 of those years.
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| The town and the church both grew. A second, larger building called First Church was built in 1836 to replace the original meetinghouse. Sixteen years later the church divided, with the present church building constructed to house the Payson Congregational Church.
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| First Church and Payson Church merged in 1918, forming the present Easthampton Congregational Church. Today that church continues to play an important role in the life of the community and its members.
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| The story of this local church has been one of buildings and programs, membership rolls and attendance, worship and music, religious education, and fellowship groups, mission outreach and financial support. But that is not the whole story.
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| One cannot begin to record the effects that the life of this church has had on its individual members, nor the effect those members in turn have had upon this community and the world at large. Lives were blessed in baptisms and weddings; children and adults grew in understanding in classes and one-to-one relationships; ministers and lay people found, in struggle and personal encounter, the way to forgiveness and new growth; tears of sadness have mingled with words of comfort and hope at countless funerals.
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| The next millennium will surely bring more of the same: and praise God, there will be changes too, as God encounters this living community of faith with new challenges and new opportunities.
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| With courage and faith gathered from the record of our forebears, this pilgrim band moves on, with the light of God burning in our hearts and shining in the darkness before us.
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| Taken from: A Burning and Shining Light |
| Published by the Congregational Church in Easthampton, Massachusetts |
| 1785-1985 |