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Subject: [NJHUNTER] BAPTISTS IN KINGWOOD
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 09:53:58 EST

Dear Listers,
I am quoting from a small book (paperback) called Baptists in
Kingwoood, New Jersey, A History of the Kingwood Baptist Chruch at Baptistown
and Locktown and the Present Baptistown Baptist Church, by Stephen Zdepski,
Printed by Harmony Printing Company, Phillipsburg, NJ, 1974, Copyright 1974
by Stephen Zdepski [who is a long time member of the church].

"The history of the Baptistown Baptist Church began in 1720, when the
first Baptists arrived in what is now the Baptistown area which was then part
of Bethlehem Township. The first meeting house was built soon afterward and
named the Bethlehem Baptist Church. A church usually took the name of the
township in which it was located.
Those interested in tracing the church's history should be forewarned
that a great many of the place names have changed. The area called Bethlehem
was divided into Bethelem, Alexandria and Kingwood Townships in 1746, so the
second name of the church and area became Kingwood. it acquired its third
and current name in 1748, for reasons we'll come to later.
The original Baptists in Baptistown (then Bethehem) reflected a
southward trend in colonization. Nearly a century before, in 1639, Roger
Williams had founded what is considered to be the first Baptist Church in
America, in Providence, Rhode Island. When the first Baptists arrived in New
Jersey there were only four or five Baptist churches in all of the colonies.
Among the early churches founded in New Jersey were these: Middletown, 1688,
in what was then called the Monmouth Land Patent (granted by the Duke of York
in 1665, under Charles II of England); Piscataway, 1689; Cohansey, 1690; Cape
May, 1712; Hopewell, 1715; and Kingwood in 1742. Baptists met informally in
Burlington as early as 1689, but the group was slow in growing so that they
then merged with Pennypeck organizing themselves into a church in 1801.
Dr. Norman Maring, in his Baptists in New Jersey, tells us that in
1740 there were only five Baptist Churches in New Jersey. By 1752 there were
nine Baptist churches in all of New England, eight in New Jersey, one in
Pennsylvania, and one in Delaware as well as one in South Carolina. It is
safe to assume that the Kingwood church numbers among the first fifteen
Baptist churches founded in the United States. Baptists from both Hopewell
and Middletown were to play an evantual part in the growth of the Baptistown
Church."

Later today I will type out two more sections entitled EARLY
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SETTLERS and KINGWOOD BAPTIST CHURCH FOUNDED.
I hope that this information will prove helpful to those tracking
their early Baptist ancestors.

Kay Larsen

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