Mullica Hill Historic Walking Tour

First Baptist Church

1845 · 18 South Main Street

Stop 6 of 13 · Core Loop · Old Town Hall Museum 6 min · Map · About 2 min read

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Eighteen people. That was the entire congregation at the founding in 1845, and no Baptist church had ever been established in Gloucester County before this one.

The congregation crowded before the church door, women in white seated in the front rows. — The First Baptist congregation gathered for a photograph around 1895.

Baptist preachers had worked Mullica Hill for years before the church took shape, and the organizing generation left a paper trail. All eighteen founders are listed by name in the 1883 county history, husbands and wives of the Mulford, Ashton, Rowand, Lloyd, Chattin, Dubois, and Gibson families among them. The same record keeps the articles of faith they adopted that May, and sets the recognition service outdoors on June 5, 1845, "in the grove at the south end of the town."

Deacon John Mulford and his wife Abigail gave the land. The sanctuary rose almost at once, and Charles Kain arrived as the first pastor. Kain gave the pulpit the better part of two decades, went away, and later returned for a second pastorate. In all, his service there came to twenty-seven years.

The building has grown with its congregation, but its original face still fronts South Main Street much as it always has.

The white clapboard church face-on with tall arched windows, a man and child by the sign at the sidewalk. — First Baptist Church. Deacon John Mulford and his wife Abigail gave the ground it stands on.

Around 1900, a photographer caught the town at its Decoration Day observances in the cemetery behind this church, the flowers-on-graves remembrance born of the Civil War that grew into Memorial Day. The morning belonged to children gathering wildflowers; the afternoon brought the speeches and the picnic. These grounds have hosted a Civil War reenactment encampment each fall in recent years.

People standing among the gravestones along a path through the cemetery, trees overhead. — Decoration Day in the cemetery behind First Baptist Church, around 1900.

The cemetery behind the church deepens the story. Union soldiers rest in that cemetery, among them Captain Edward L. Stratton and his brother James, one of whom came home from the war and one of whom did not. Their story is told at the Stratton House stop, just up the street from where they rest. And that chapter of county history naming this church's founders? Captain Stratton wrote it.

Did You Know

Decoration Day here was a village-wide production, with the Mullica Hill Concert Band playing the procession over the creek to the graves at the village's south end.

Around You Now

Serendipity XIX and Annie's Cranny keep shop across the street at 19 and 21 South Main.