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THE WAY IT WAS: The Old School Baptist Meeting on Broad Street in Hopewell was the subject of a painting done in 1869.
By Anne Levin
When Hopewell Public Library Director Barbara Merry was planning the library’s December Speaker Series, formerly known as Wednesday Night Out, she asked some past participants if they had any ideas for a presentation.
Among them was archaeologist Ian Burrow, who suggested doing a talk on the history of the Old School Baptist Meeting on Broad Street in Hopewell Borough. Since then, what started out as a single lecture has grown into an evening program with six presentations on different aspects of ongoing efforts to preserve the key historic site.
“The Old School Baptist Meeting of Hopewell: New Research, Investigations, and Plans,” will take place at Hopewell Presbyterian Church on Wednesday, December 13 from 7-8:30 p.m. Burrow, who will talk about the 1747 graveyard associated with the church, is also the moderator.
“After Barbara asked me to talk, I started thinking it would be better to pull together everyone who has been working on this,” said Burrow. “There is really quite a lot going on.”
Burrow’s research has been focused on the cemetery, especially an area where there are no headstones. This past fall, ground-penetrating radar was used to try to identify any graves and remains of the original structure. He plans to reveal some of the findings at the presentation.
Joining him will be Christie Alderman, who is preparing a nomination of the building for the National Register of Historic Places; local historian Cynthia O’Connor, who will reveal her findings in researching related historic documents; architect Michael Mills, who will talk about preserving the building for the future; and Elaine Buck and Beverly Mills, authors of If These Stones Could Talk, who will focus on the African American connections to the Old School Baptist Meeting, and why it is an important African American site.
In the last few years, local historical researchers and preservation experts have been finding out more about the history of the building and its congregation, which was founded in the early 18th century.
“The meeting house in Hopewell Borough was one of the first structures to be built,” said Burrow. “It formed the core of what became Hopewell. The present building dates to 1822 and was a rebuild of the first, which was from the 1740s. The congregation was established in 1715 and met at first in people’s houses.”
In the late 1740s, the congregation was given a piece of land for a cemetery by John Hart, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The meeting house was built at that site. The present-day graveyard has been expanded several times and includes several old stones, the earliest of which is from 1749.
“They were a very interesting group, called the old school Baptists,” Burrow said of the congregants. “They were very traditional and conservative.”
The building has not been used since the 1970s, when the last male member of the congregation died. Since then, it has been run by a small board of trustees with a certain amount of endowment funds for maintenance.
“That source of revenue is coming to an end, so there has been a lot of interest in the last few years in preserving it for the future,” Burrow said. “The board has been looking for ways to get more interest in revenue. A few years ago, the mayor managed to get a grant from the State of New Jersey for $150,000, so that made it possible to do a range of studies of different aspects of the building. The records are in the Hopewell Museum.”
The building is also worth preserving because of its interior. “It has magnificent woodwork,” said Burrow. “It is a very well-preserved example of early 19th-century style. It was the only game in town as far as churches, until 1872 when another Baptist church appeared in town. They were very influential in the early history of the village of Hopewell.”
A major point of interest is the association of the African American community with the congregation. Friday Truehart, who was brought from South Carolina at age 13 as a slave to the Rev. Oliver Hart, is memorialized at the meeting house with a plaque that says he worshipped there from 1780 to 1845. Buck, and Mills, who is among his descendants, will talk about Truehart, who was eventually freed and became a landowner on Sourland Mountain.
“There will hopefully be a nice range of people at the presentation, which will give people a sense of the place and what we’re doing to preserve it,” said Burrow. “We’re very fortunate in this area that there are so many people who are good at history, and have the skills. All of the strands came together.”
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