First Baptist Church of Penn Township — constituted 11 February 1837, extinct by 1880

1837–before 1880

The county's first Baptist church was organized in a farmhouse. Chapman tells it whole: "Feb. 11, 1837, a meeting was held in the house of Eli B. Mead, for the purpose of constituting a Baptist Church in Penn township." The Rev. Price, of Edwardsburg, sat as moderator and Elan S. Colby, of Lockport, as clerk; a Mr. Alger, of Mishawaka, was present. The charter members presented their letters and were pronounced a church — "The First Baptist Church of Penn Township" — and Chapman prints the roll entire: Isaiah Ferris, Jacob M. Galor, Jonathan Buck, John Barton, Lucinda Ferris Sr., Elizabeth Ferris, Azubah Galor, Anna Buck, Belinda Barton, and Parmelia Ferris. John Barton was chosen the church's first clerk and B. J. Ferris its first treasurer; Galor and Buck were elected trustees "to select a site and erect a house of worship." In 1838 the society built — "a small log house" — and after worshiping some time without a minister, the church took the Rev. Adam Miller as its first pastor.

In 1849 the congregation replaced the log house with "a large frame building," set, in Chapman's words, some miles south of Mishawaka — the numeral in the digitized text is damaged, and this section prints no figure for it; the page image is the settler. The church's course after 1849 is a decline Chapman records in one sentence: "The Church grew weaker by deaths, emigration and removals to Mishawaka, until it is now extinct." The county atlas's church tally of 1875 already shows the end coming: counting the county's Baptist churches at five — South Bend, Walkerton, Sumption's Prairie, Mishawaka, and Pleasant Valley — it does not name the Penn church among them, five years before Chapman pronounced it gone. Writing in 1880 he could still name its survivors: "Jacob M. and Azubah Galor, of Mishawaka; Parmelia Ferris, now Mrs. Moore, of Pleasant Valley; and Delinda Barton, of Kansas" — the charter roll's Belinda Barton appearing in the survivor line under the spelling Delinda, a variance inside Chapman's own text that this section prints as found rather than regularizing. His judgment of the extinct church stands as this section's own: "It was the first Baptist Church organized in the county."

The church belongs to Osceola's history by township, not by village: its houses stood on the township's southern farm ground, its families — the Ferrises above all — run through the People leg's settler roll, and the town's own site did not yet carry a plat when it was constituted. Where its 1849 frame house stood, and whether any burying ground went with it, the record reached does not say; both stand as named gaps below. The congregation left no successor body. When Baptist worship reappears in the township's record, it is the separate Pleasant Valley organization of about 1852, told next in the township sequence this section keeps.

Sources

1. Chapman (1880), pp.
2. Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County (1875), churches chapter (the county's five Baptist churches; the Penn church not among them).
3. People leg (Chapman/Howard sketches of the Ferris, Galor, and Barton households).