A church built in 1881 was strapped to a truck Wednesday night for a 20-mile trip down U.S. 63 from Sturgeon to the historical village in Nifong Park.
Locust Grove Baptist Church started the journey at around 9 p.m. and was expected to exit at Grindstone Parkway just before midnight, arriving at its destination shortly after.
Beginning Thursday, the church will be restored by the Boone County History and Culture Center in south Columbia, joining a collection of four other preserved buildings in the Boone History Village. All were built between 1820 and 1910 and include a general store, a log cabin and shotgun-style and late-Victorian homes.
The church is the first addition to the Boone History Village in more than 15 years. It was a spiritual and social center for the community in northern Boone County for more than 72 years, holding services, revivals and dinners that drew families from miles around.
The small, white-painted church closed in 1953 and has been empty ever since. A cemetery near the church, with markers for nearly 300 graves, will remain on the site to be cared for by the Locust Grove Baptist Cemetery Association.
When completed in spring 2027, the renovated Locust Grove Baptist Church will sit next to the Ryland House, a late-Victorian style house from the 1890s.
The process of preparing a foundation for the 145-year-old church and moving it 20 miles down a busy highway has taken at least four months.
To situate it on the new site, a basement was excavated that will also serve as storage for the History and Culture Center. It will hold some of the more than 22,000 three-dimensional artifacts, 516,000 photographs, 1,000 artworks and 1,000 textiles in the center’s collection.
Once in place, the restored church will include electrical lighting and air conditioning, allowing it to be used as a small wedding venue. The land west of the church will be left open to support any wedding receptions outside of the church.
Historical ties
Nancy Thomas has spent months unearthing and compiling the history of the church. The senior registrar for the History and Culture Center tracked names, dates and information through newspaper clippings, documents and a book that documented the years from 1906 to the church closure in 1953.
The book was donated by Dennis Kent, whose family has been entwined with the church and cemetery since its founding. The deed granting land to build the church was signed by Kent’s great-great-grandfather.
“And every legal document that has been signed since then had one or more of my ancestors and other relatives,” Kent said.
He was the president of the Locust Grove Baptist Cemetery Association for more than two decades, which he said is not necessarily a great achievement.
“The association really has consisted, for the last 20-odd years, of just me and a bunch of my cousins,” Kent said. “At some point, I’m the oldest. And so I was the president for a long time.”
Among the highlights of the church’s history is the fact that Harriett Woods, Missouri’s lieutenant governor in the 1980s, belonged to the family that donated the land for the church in 1881.
Her son, Pete Woods, was a quarterback for the Mizzou Tigers in the 1970s. Larry Woods was the Boone County prosecuting attorney in the 1960s and 70s, and set up the nonprofit organization for the cemetery.
Chris Campbell, executive director of Boone County History and Culture Center, said he hopes to keep focus on the historical and communal relevance of the church.
“It was built not just for Sunday services,” Campbell said. “It’s a place where you got to see your friends on Sundays, when you weren’t in the one-room schoolhouse. It’s a place where you had picnics.”
It was a place where relationships formed, he said. “You’re looking forward to going to that church picnic that weekend to see that boy or girl.”
A meeting place
Rural churches often functioned as a religious and secular meeting place for their communities. Town halls, weddings and funerals would take place in what served as a community’s only third space.
“It can be drilled down to that, to just human connections and relationships and the things that would happen in a place like that,” he said.
Campbell said no religious pictures will be hung in the space, and any iconography will not be a focal point. Churches of all denominations were important structures in rural life, he said, the church’s specific Baptist affiliation is not vital to teachings.
“I don’t want the Muslim kid or the Jewish kid that’s on a fifth-grade field trip to be weirded out because we’re going deep into what a Baptist was,” Campbell said.
“That’s not our job,” he said. “Our job is to interpret our history in a way that’s inclusive for everybody.”
