Springfield township

Springfield: the first congregations

From the county histories, on Springfield township. The passage below is printed exactly as it appears in 1913, including the spelling of the day and the errors the scanner made. It has not been rewritten, summarised or added to.

A small log house was built, but was abandoned in a few years, the members going to strengthen another congregation on Licking creek, near the old forge. An Old School Baptist congregation was organized in Springfield township, Huntingdon county, in 1800, but little can be learned of its history. A number of Welsh Baptists organized a church at an early date near the present borough of Dudley, but it has long been extinct. The church at Birmingham was organized in 1822 by Rev, Richard Proudfoot, who had been holding meetings in that section for some time before that date. About 1826 a church was erected and it prospered for a number of years. After the completion of the railroad the business that formerly came to Birmingham was diverted to other places, and as the town declined the church went down until it was finally abandoned in 1862. Rev. Samuel Lane, a Baptist minister "of more than ordinary energ>- and public spirit," established a church at Saltillo early in the nineteenth century, but it appears that no record of the congregation has been preserved, either as to the date of its organization or its abandonment. The Shaver's Creek Baptist church was organized in 1833, with fourteen members, as a result of the labors of Rev. Richard Proudfoot, who was the first pastor.John W. Jordan, ed., History of the Juniata Valley and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1913) · character 894,573 of the scanned text

Checked against the record. DATES PUT BACK, and they were this site's own doing rather than the scanner's. The passage below promises to print the record exactly as it appears, and it was doing so apart from one thing: sentences kept losing their year. “In an imposing brick church” for “In 1877 an imposing brick church”, “organized in by Rev. Richard Allen” for “organized in 1816 by”. The cause was a rule meant to strip page numbers where a running head had run into the text. It removed any two to four digit number standing between two lowercase words, which is what a page number looks like there, and also what a year looks like in a sentence. Measured against the 1883 county history, the rule fired 2,260 times and 1,896 of those were four-digit years: eight dates deleted for every page number caught. The rule now refuses to touch a number between 1600 and 1999, and it still removes page numbers, which was checked both ways. The dates on this page were restored one at a time from the full text of the book itself.

Sources

John W. Jordan, ed., History of the Juniata Valley and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1913)

Checked 2026-09-10 · Quoted from the county histories

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