From log cabins to schoolhouses: one church celebrates 200 years of worship

From log cabins to schoolhouses: one church celebrates 200 years of worship

BATESVILLE, Ark. (KAIT) - A church in Batesville marked 200 years of worship on Oct. 3, tracing its history from a log cabin to its home in a renovated schoolhouse.

Over 70 people crowded the church grass with foldable chairs to worship, play games, and feast on catfish.

Members say the Rehobeth Baptist Church was founded around 1826 in the clapboard shingled Vance Schoolhouse, several miles east of Batesville near Blue Creek. The church moved buildings again before renovating and moving into its current location in the early 1960s.

The space where the Rehobeth Baptist Church meets today was constructed by the Works Progress Administration around 1938. That program was a product of President Frankin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, and according to Arkansas state records, it built over 600 schools in Arkansas in eight years.

Church member Johnney Rounds recalled the building underwent several renovations before it was filled with singing.

“It had terribly high ceilings,” Rounds said. “We’ve lowered portions of the ceiling to make for classrooms, but the auditorium and everything is kind of almost the same as it was when it was a school building.”

That building with the too-high ceilings reaches back into the church’s memory before it was a church. Member Jim Leggett has attended Rehobeth Baptist since the early 50’s and said his parents and their friends remember watching workers lug materials for the building.

“A friend of mine’s father remembers going to school in that schoolhouse and watching wagons — mules and wagons — pulling gravel to build this,” Leggett said.

He hopes younger member’s will carry on his church’s legacy.

“I’m 79, so my years here are numbered,” Leggett said. “But hopefully there will be some younger ones here to carry it on.”

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