Records of the First Congregational Church and Daughter Churches of Windham

Collection — Box: LOB 2

Identifier: MSS 2020.0013

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

This collection comprises three books containing primarily minutes of the meetings of Trustees of what was initially a single Congregational Meeting located along the Batavia Kill in the vicinity of Pleasant Valley. This Meeting, which drew congregants from the modern Townships of Windham, Ashland, and Jewett, persisited from roughly 1803 for about a decade when the old Meeting began to fracture into individual Presbyterian Churches. It is from this original Congregational Meeting that the Windham Presbyterian [Centre Presbyterian], Jewett Presbyterian [Jewett Heights] and the Presbyterian Church in Ashland all stem from, and these divisions are reflected in the minutes.

As such, these earliest minutes books contain the names of congregants, baptisms, marriages, and registers of membership and dismissal alternately kept within the minutes or separately within the volumes as registers. The books relate primarily to the First Congregational Church which met at Pleasant Valley, and the Presbyterian Church at Ashland which was formed by removal of the Pleasant Valley Congregation following the separation of the Windham and Jewett Congregations.

Dates

1803-1896

Biographical / Historical

In 1799 work was commenced on a Meeting House for the protestant settlers scattered far along the valley of the Batavia Kill in Old Windham Township. In those earliest years Windham comprised the modern Towns of Windham, Ashland, Jewett, Lexington, Prattsville, and Hunter, and as such the First Congregational Church of Windham was organized in 1803 within the walls of the yet-completed Meeting House located in Pleasant Valley where the Ashland Cemetery now exists. The Congregants of this Meeting hailed from the vicinity of Jewett, Ashland, and Windham, and used the old Meeting House for roughly a decade as one body.

In 1813, bowing to the obvious difficulty of travelling from Jewett to the Meeting House in Pleasant Valley, the congregants of the former place organized a meeting of their own in Jewett Heights along the traditions of the Presbyterian faith. The old Congregational Meeting at Pleasant Valley was likewise reorganized as a Presbyterian Church sometime prior to 1826, and in 1834 the portion of those congregants from Windham separated from the Pleasant Valley Meeting to form the Presbyterian Church at Windham which worshipped at the Centre Presbyterian Church in Windham Hamlet.

The old Meeting House at Pleasant Valley remained active until 1842, when the residents of Scienceville, soon to be reorganized into the Town of Ashland, decided to relocate the congregation three miles West to the hamlet where they all hailed - leaving the Pleasant Valley Meeting House site abandoned altogether except for the burial ground. This Congregation allegedly remained active until it was disbanded in 1896.