Bridgewater’s Second Advent Church

by Elisha Lee

Some buildings announce themselves, telling their story at a glance, while others stand quietly, inviting us to figure them out on our own. I’ve driven and walked past the Oak Chapel in Bridgewater Center, Vermont, for at least five decades, recognizing it as a church, but giving it little more thought. The little white building deserves a closer look.

Bridgewater has only three churches. In addition to the Oak Chapel, built in 1868, there’s a Congregational Church on Route 4, built in 1879, and a Mennonite Church on Route 100A, converted from an historic mid 19th-century home in 1952. The lack of churches doesn’t reflect a lack of faith – there was a healthy population of Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists, but it was easier for farmers to attend services in nearby homes and schoolhouses than to make the often lengthy trips to town.

Vermonters of the 19^th Century took their faith seriously. The religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840) produced a number of charismatic evangelists with their own interpretations of the Scriptures, some of whom attracted regional, and occasionally even national, interest. One, William Miller, had a significant following here in Bridgewater. Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1782, Miller had settled in Poultney, Vermont, by 1803. Initially abandoning his family’s Baptist roots in favor of Deism (the recognition of God’s existence without acceptance of the supernatural), a near miss by a British cannonball at the Battle of Plattsburgh led him to reconsider his belief in a detached divinity. Rigorous scriptural study led him to believe that Christ’s return to earth, the Second Advent, had been prophesied quite precisely in the Old Testament’s Book of Daniel: “And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.”¹

The Second Advent, of course, is Judgment Day, when Christ will return to earth and resurrect both the living and the dead, with the righteous rising to join Him in heaven, and the wicked cast into the fires of eternal damnation. The basis for his theological prognostications is complicated, but Miller became convinced that the Second Advent would occur sometime in 1843 or 1844. Sharing the word as a traveling preacher, he took his message to pulpits and camp meetings throughout New England and Eastern Canada, attracting a significant following that included Millerite newspapers Signs of the Times and The Advent Herald.

An 1892 story in The Vermont Standard reported:

There were many in Bridgewater and the neighboring towns, who believed that the second coming of Christ would occur on the 15^th of November 1843, and meetings were held in the Mendell district, at the village and at the Center, sometimes at private residences, and often in the open air. The churches were opened to them in some places at first, but usually they did not agree.²

They most certainly did not agree. Miller’s followers were viewed with considerable skepticism by both their mainstream Christian brethren and the press. On March 28, 1840, Montpelier’s Green Mountain Evangelist and Universalist Watchman wryly observed:

We could name individuals who contend strongly that the day of judgment is at hand, who have just completed very elegant and durable dwelling houses. They appear just as anxious to accumulate property as ever, and to hold on to their real estate.” ³

A Philadelphia printer, Thomas Sinclair, produced the satirical image below, showing a Millerite preparing for the Second Coming by hiding in a fireproof safe (salamanders were believed able to survive fire) with a liberal supply of food, brandy, and cigars.

Millerites supposedly had special white garments known as “Ascension Robes” to wear on the Advent, but this may have been a myth invented by an irreverent reporter. What is indisputable is that they gathered on October 22, 1844, on rooftops and in open spaces, and, when that day proved no different than any other, it became known as The Great Disappointment. Profoundly disillusioned, some returned to their mainstream beliefs, while a second group theorized that the prophecy itself was sound, but the calculations had (obviously) been wrong. At the Albany Convention of 1845, Miller’s followers struggled unsuccessfully to reorganize and redefine the movement, which ultimately fragmented into Seventh-day Adventist, Evangelical Adventist, and Advent Christian denominations. Bridgewater’s Millerites followed the third path, continuing to meet and hold services at the District 8 school in Bridgewater Center until 1868, when they built a church of their own.

Known as the Oak Chapel because of the acorn atop the cupola (possibly symbolic of spiritual growth), the church was probably built by William Comyn Bugbee, a member of their congregation, and later the builder of the town’s Congregational Church. “The Great Disappointment” seems to have done little to deter their faith in Christ’s imminent return, as, even in the 1890s, sermons were dire warnings of hellfire and brimstone. Everett V. Perkins, son of one of the Society’s founders, reminisced at a reunion in the early 1930s, telling friends and family of Elder Herman Gustavus Davis, who preached three times on Sunday: morning, afternoon, and evening, with a Sunday School taught by Mrs. Davis between the afternoon and evening services. Members of the congregation typically attended all three. Perkins said of Elder Davis:

It was his duty to proclaim the Gospel message, especially to warn the people to prepare for the Second Coming of the Lord. He said that he thought that Christ would return about 1894. As a small boy I wondered if my colt would get old enough to break before the end of the world came. Well do I remember the fear that would overwhelm me when Elder Davis would read a passage like the first verse of the last chapter of the Old Testament: “For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. ⁴

Perkins’ memories weren’t wholly terrifying. He writes lovingly of the sound of hymns coming through the windows of the church and filling the valley, and of a congregation and community tightly bound by kinship and geography. At the time of its incorporation in 1886, the Advent Christian Society of Bridgewater numbered roughly 100 people. Baptism was done by immersion in the North Branch, even in the dead of winter, and spectators are said to have climbed on the roof of what was then the covered bridge beside the chapel, adding commentary such as “dip him again – he needs it!”⁵

By 1911, many of the founding members had died and, as often happened in Vermont farming communities, their families were scattered across the country. With its membership dwindling to 40, the Society formally disbanded. Its former members continued to run a Sunday school and to hold services in the church whenever preachers could be obtained. They also held annual reunions with picnics and the singing of their old hymns well into the 1970s.

Between 1954 and 1970, the Oak Chapel was home to an Assemblies of God church, followed by the Church of Christ from 1971 to 1975. Today, it’s home to a small non-denominational congregation – an aging outpost of community in a town being repopulated by people whose families aren’t buried up the road in Baker Hill Cemetery. Perhaps the question that the little white church on Bridgewater Center Road asks of us today isn’t what, or even if we believe, but how much community is left here and elsewhere in Vermont, and what will hold us together in an increasingly disconnected society?

1 The Holy Bible, King James Version (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Marketing, LLC, 2011), 426.

2 The Vermont Standard, September 29, 1892, 2.

3 The Universalist Watchman, March 28, 1840, 3.

4 Reminiscences of Everett V. Perkins, unpublished account in the collection of the Bridgewater Historical Society.

5 Gladys S. Adams, Bridgewater Vermont 1779-1976 (Bridgewater: Bridgewater Cemetery Commission, 2005), 68.