“...men before whose sturdy strokes the forest fell...”

A little church history for a Sunday morning.

While in the history of that church there may be incidents which will cause a smile from their quaintness, or a sigh and a tear from their illiberality, there is one feature of its past that stands out prominent and bold, and entitles it to unqualified respect: [the] church has never shrunk from the performance of disagreeable duties. Mistaken, unjust, cruel, it may sometimes have been; weak and vacillating it has never been. People respect and admire strength of principle and purpose, and this church grew strong in numbers from strong adherence to the rigid morality of the Bible. The men who formed the church, were men before whose sturdy strokes the forest fell; who braved the dangers of pioneer life with steady persistence, and who put into their church relationship the same earnestness that characterized them in their secular affairs...

The Tanner family came from this strong religious heritage and has kept many elements of the culture through many generations.

This passage is from a history of Bottskill Baptist Church in Greenwich, New York, where the Tanner and Stewart families worshipped before the Tanners moved to Warren County and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and moved west.


The picture of Greenwich in eastern New York is from Flickr, used as is under a Creative Commons license.