Click here for a video feature about the West Baden Church Renewal Project.
Liz Mitchell derives a little inspiration knowing a successful precedent sits just up the road.
Liz Mitchell derives a little inspiration knowing a successful precedent sits just up the road.
A couple times a week, Mitchell and a small army of
volunteers make the trek from Bloomington to West Baden Springs in the name of
restoring a building that’s known as the First Baptist (Colored) Church.
Dormant for decades and modest in its Gothic Revival style, the church’s story
has some congruence with the arc of the most prominent building in town. That’d
be the West Baden Springs Hotel, which was teetering on the verge of collapse
and disrepair until some folks stepped in with the energy and resources to restore
it to its original glory.
Mitchell has a sense for the before-and-after of a rebuild.
Years ago she saw the pre-renovation West Baden Springs Hotel when it looked
like it had been in a fistfight.
“I walked inside the West Baden hotel, and there were
pigeons. It was in bad shape. So I knew what that looked like. Pretty much like
this (church) building did.”
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| Liz Mitchell and Pastor Bruce Rose are helping lead the charge in the church renewal project. The circular design behind them was donated from a church in Terre Haute that was being torn down. |
Before the church project was even on her radar, Mitchell
was coming down from Bloomington to the French Lick/West Baden area to work on
a documentary about the African American community here in the early and mid 20th
Century. Many of them were drawn to the area by finding work at the French Lick
and West Baden Springs Hotels. Back in the segregation era, though, the African
American townspeople had their separate structures — separate churches,
separate schools, separate restaurants. There were even separate hotels to accommodate black guests
when other area hotels did not.
Lee Sinclair, the owner of West Baden Springs Hotel back in
that day, donated the African American community the land where their First
Baptist Church was built in 1920. (But only the land above ground — Sinclair’s
agreement was if any subterranean mineral springs were discovered, he would
still have ownership of those.) The area’s black population gradually dwindled
over subsequent decades and the church eventually closed. Yet the structure
remained a lone survivor.
“We’ve all fallen in love with this church,” Mitchell said
recently while standing in the middle of the church with construction going on
all around her, as work on the church has been going for about a year. “And
there’s a reason why it’s still standing when anything else that was connected
to the African American community has been demolished. There’s a reason. We’re
just putting a breath of life back in. Because it was begging for it.”
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| These original swinging doors on the exterior will be moved further inside the church when it reopens, with new doors installed at the main entrance. |
Mitchell jumped on board along with Bruce Rose, the pastor
from her Second Baptist Church in Bloomington. A couple times a week, they’ve
been coming down to put in work on the church along with a half-dozen or so
volunteers from their congregation (mainly retirees) who heard about the
project and wanted to lend their expertise to lend with masonry, carpentry and
the like.
The church has required all sorts of TLC, because it
appeared on the list of the 10 most endangered historic buildings in the state
a few years ago when Indiana Landmarks also put it on the National Register of
Historic Places. The walls of the church were bowing out, and many of the beams
had been burned and weakened from a fire. Mitchell, Rose and their crew
essentially started from scratch, stripping the church’s interior down to
2-by-4s. They kept the original sandstone in rebuilding the exterior marquee,
and the swinging doors that acted as the original entrance to the building will
be repurposed and moved a few feet inside to the foyer that leads into the
sanctuary.
Other original features from the church will remain, such as
the wood floor, elevated pulpit area and baptistery area in front, and pews
that are being restored. When the church reopens, Mitchell envisions regular
Sunday services there for folks of any background — and she also hopes the
local museum will get involved to host other events at the church such as
storytelling, re-enactments or lecture series.
The goal, Mitchell says, is to have the church open to
worshippers in June. That’s mostly just a date to shoot for, and Mitchell
realizes there’s still work to be done and more progress to be made with fundraising
efforts that are ongoing and needed to push the project to the finish line.
(They’ve set up a GoFundMe account to make tax-deductible donations, and checks can also be written and sent to the address at the end of this video.)
“The community has been awesome,” Mitchell said. “People
stopping through when they see us in here working, they donate what little bit
they can, and we appreciate any donations, and we’re desperately in need of
some now. We’re about halfway through, so it’s down to the little stuff.”
The little stuff that will add up to another big save in
West Baden by the time the church is finished.
“We didn’t want it to sit like it was any longer,” Mitchell
said. “I’m just blown away by the progress of it.”