Outagamie County, WI - "Hortonville Community Baptist Church"
       
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Contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives
Subject: newspaper article "Hortonville Community Baptist Church"
Submitted by: county coordinator 
EMAIL: jmmarasch@aol.com
Date Submitted: 15 March 2000
       
Source: New London Press newspaper article from Bicentennial issue, undated.

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             Hortonville Community Baptist Church
     A whale skeleton provided an organ for the Hortonville Community Baptist Church in the 1860's or '70's.
     An enterprising congregation member James Douglas found a dead whale washed ashore near his former
home in New Brunswick.  Douglas shipped the whale skeleton back to Hortonville and prepared a lecture on
whales.
     He traveled with the skeleton to area towns and lectured school children, church and community groups.
     Admissions money and collections from people who came to see Douglas' whale raised enough money to
buy an organ.
     The Community Baptist Church history reaches back to the earliest days of settlement in the village of
Hortonville.  Settlers met in homes and the school house before a church building was available.
     At first, members of the Congregational and Baptist churches shared a building.  An old deed says the
two congregations agreed to use the building on alternate Sundays.
     The deed to the church property shows it was purchased from William and Mary Briggs on Nov. 18 1863
for $50.
     It was a rectangular building, with the pulpit in the north end and the entrance under the belfry at the
south end.  The building stood on stilts, without a basement. One congregation member remembers pigs and sheep
roving under the building and bumping against the floor during church services.
     On June 25, 1906, only two members of the Congregational church were alive.  Hugh Hagen and
Margaret Dow gave a quit claim deed of their interests in the building to the Baptist Church.