Elias Gilbert was a Minuteman from Brookfield, Massachusetts, who in 1790 bought a lot in what is now the northwesternmost lot in the town of Potter. Then it was raw wilderness, crossed only by Indian trails and the paths made by wolves and their prey. A few others settled nearby, and the first store was opened in 1812, more than 20 years after the first cabin was raised.
The settlers in and around the area were nearly all from Massachusetts. The strong tradition of Federalist politics led to Rushville's first name, "Federal Hollow," and the background of Congregationalist religious traditions led in the same way to the founding of the first religious community in the new settlement.
The first church organization in Federal Hollow was the First Congregational Church of
Augusta and
The original charter of 1802 still exists, and is one of the documents scanned for this project. The first book of records, however, is gone; the church record books that we have today begin in 1829, with the exception of a Sunday School book from 1820-21.
An actual meeting house was authorized in 1811. A dispute
over location ensued, but eventually it was built near the Green cabin. The lot
on which it stood was leased from Captain Green, and a frame building 30 by 40
feet erected. The frame was later moved to
The old frame church was moved after a new brick building was erected in 1818, just south of the (now) county line, on a lot purchased from Solomon Gilbert for $120. The congregation had grown through steady increase, plus the excitement caused by a number of revivals held during the previous decade. In 1816 more than two thousand people gathered for baptism and preaching, and 60 new members were added to the Congregational Church. Interestingly, there is some evidence that at least some of these outbursts of religious fervor were related to the "year without a summer," 1816, which many people felt was a harbinger of the Apocolypse; it was in fact the result of the tremendous explosion of the volcano Tambora in Indonesia.
An excerpt from Robert Moody’s book America’s First Rushville describes the plan and the materials used in the new church building: “
There was a single wide front door, and along each side and across each end was a double row of windows. In the vestibule were two stairways leading to the galleries that extended along each side and across the west end. The pulpit was a high one midway between the two sanctuary doors that opened into the vestibule. Thus all late comers entered in full view of the whole congregation. There was no center aisle, but instead two rows of pews in the center and a single row on each side of the sanctuary. The materials in the building were almost wholly local. The bricks were made in the Gilbert brickyard by Elias Gilbert and his sons; the great timbers of oak and chestnut were undoubtedly from the farms of parishioners; the foundation stones were not ordinary field stone, but mainly pieces of flagstone from one of our nearby gullies, and the white pine boards were also local, from those areas of white pine that occurred here and there in the valley.”
Though the floor plan changed radically over the years, the foundation and walls of the 1818 church stood until 1971, when a terrible fire razed the old landmark. The church silver, the china, the old bell and the Angel Gabriel weathervane were able to be salvaged, and the congregation itself still lives on in a new building.
All the records included here are associated with the 1818 brick church.
