Amanuensis Monday - Worship in the Community - Baptist Church - Part One

Mayfield: Then & Now – Worship in the Community Chapter - Copyright 2003; compiled and written by Elaine Clark and Sherry Kline

Baptist Church – p. 91

Although we didn’t locate any records, this note was in the January 10, 188, “Mayfield Musings” column of the Sumner County Press.

A Baptist church of twenty odd members was organized at Mayfield recently.

I truly debated whether to add anything to that comment and decided I didn’t want to touch it “with a 10-foot pole,” as folks used to say. However, for the sake of younger readers who might not know, perhaps I should add than an older definition of “odd” is “with some extra.” So, it means there were more than twenty people involved in organizing the Baptist church, not twenty strange people. Okay, now I can move on.

In an interview with Lizzie Miller, we learned that the original church burned, and that church was located where the tennis courts and east parking lot are now.  The second church was built on the same location.

On January 1, 1972, Dorene Applegate interviewed Isham Williams, age 101, when she wrote a college paper entitled “The History of Mayfield, Kansas.” Dorene learned that Isham had helped dig the basement and build the second Baptist church to replace the one that had burned; Isham remembered that the congregation met in the Presbyterian building until it was completed.

The Baptist congregation did not have a parsonage in Mayfield because most pastors lived in Wellington. Lizzie Miller remembered that families in the congregation had a schedule and took turns feeding the pastor and his family at Sunday noon and Sunday evening.

Lizzie recalled that there was a sewing circle at the church when her mother, Lucy Stayton Clark, was a young lady and that her mother “did beautiful hand work.”

Differences among the congregation caused a split, and the small congregation was forced to close its doors. Mrs. Miller recalled that her father’s funeral was the last funeral to be held in the church on December 5, 1932.