Pleasant Valley Baptist Church — organized about 1852

about 1852–

The township's second Baptist church was a neighborhood church, and Chapman gives it three sentences. "Pleasant Valley Baptist Church was organized about 1852. They have a neat little frame house of worship in the northeastern part of Penn township; Elder H. J. Finch is the pastor. Number of communicants, 20." J. Finch, who simultaneously served the Baptist church at Mishawaka, where Chapman counts a hundred and one communicants under the same man's preaching — the shared pastorate being the period's ordinary arithmetic for small churches. Pleasant Valley itself survives in the county's record as one of Penn Township's named unincorporated communities, and the neighborhood's burying ground, Pleasant Valley Cemetery on Jefferson Boulevard, is carried whole in the Cemeteries leg, where the question of the ground's keeping belongs. The atlas corroborates the church's standing a half-decade before Chapman: the county's Baptists in 1875 hold five churches, and Pleasant Valley is named among them.

The congregation's course after 1880 is not carried by any record: no later history, no denominational minute, no present-day listing under the name presented itself. That thinness is printed as the finding it is, with its settler named below — the minutes and yearbooks of the Baptist association to which the township's Baptist churches belonged — rather than inflated. What can be said is what Chapman fixes: by 1880 the extinct First Baptist's remnant and this living twenty-member church were the township's Baptist presence, and one of the extinct church's own charter survivors, Parmelia Ferris, by then Mrs. Moore, was living at Pleasant Valley.

Sources

1. Chapman (1880), p.
2. Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County (1875), churches chapter (Pleasant Valley among the county's five Baptist churches).
3. St. Joseph County INGenWeb place list (Pleasant Valley among the township's unincorporated communities).