Old School Baptist Meeting, Browntown, Sunday, August 6, 1939.
Source:
Tim Clem
Information about this photo:
We don’t know a great deal about this photo, other than that it captures the Old School Baptists meeting in Browntown on Sunday, August 6,1939. These “Union” meetings apparently took place in August over a period of several years. The church in the background is the Union Church that was built in 1882.
This attribution is based on a report in the Warren Sentinel, Volume 71, Number 19, 10 August 1939, p.3:
“H. Lyndon Mauck of Washington, D, C., was with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. W. B. Mauck, over the weekend and attended the Old School Baptist meeting in Browntown on Sunday.”
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Warren Sentinel, Volume 65, Number 13, 29 June 1933, page 3:
“The Old School Baptists will hold their Union meeting in Browntown June 30th, July 1st and 2nd. “
The Union Church in Browntown originally served Methodist, Lutheran, and Old and New School Baptist congregations on a rotating basis, hence the term “Union church.” Either of the denominations could also use the church for special meetings of up to three weeks at a time as long as the meetings did not conflict with the regular appointments of the other three. Less than a decade after the four congregations constructed this building the Lutherans erected their own church in 1897 and had no more need of the Union Church building.
The Union Church building continued to be the home of the Browntown Baptists for more than forty years. At first, they used it for worship services on the 3rd Sunday of each month. After the Lutherans built their own church in 1897 and the Methodists no longer used the building, the Baptists used the Union Church for Sunday School on three of the four Sundays of each month.
In the years that followed the Methodists found alternative places to worship in Warren County and stopped using the church (date unknown). The building continued to be the home of the Browntown Baptists for more than forty years, untiI, in 1943 with only a handful of Lutherans left, the Browntown Baptist Church (the “New School Baptists” of the deed) purchased the Lutheran Church Property for $1,200. The South River Primitive Baptists (and the Agape Love Baptist Church?) continued to worship in the Union Church until February 2018.