Volume 9 , Issue 25

1926 - Britton Church Members

"It's folks from the Britton Christian Church. I have the other parts of that 'yard-long' photo attached here! In the 'left center' picture (on the right), I think that's Erma Ford (her maiden name might have been 'Brown') just above the word 'First' and then just above the 'tian' of the word 'Christian,' I think is my mom. The Fords lived just a block south of my grandparents Lewis.

My great-grandparents Lewis appear in both of the right-hand photos. In the right-center photo you will see at the far right, standing in the front row, my great-grandmother Mary Ann "Molly" (Mills) Lewis (wearing the fashionable black straw hat) and next to her is my great-grandfather William Michael Lewis (he's bareheaded here).

You also see them in the center of the front row of the far-right end picture. There are other folks who I think I may know but keep in mind that this photo was from 1926 (several years before I was born) and altho I have an excellent memory, even I cannot remember things or people that were here on this earth before I was.

If some of you DO recognize a few of these folks I would certainly love to hear from you. That's a good picture of the church in the background and that's before the basement and classrooms were added to the east, and before the back of the church was cut off and extended to add the new baptistry, office and choir room (even I got to help on that one). I was probably about 15 or 16 at the time and I climbed through the maze of 2x4's that held the two sections together and hammered and sawed to rejoin the back end to the rest of the building after we had moved it about six feet. It was similar to the "barn-raisings" you've seen in the movies, and I suspect that most of the idea as to how to do it was probably from my grandfather's past experiences. I believe that it was shortly after that when my grandfather wrote the play that was performed in the church showing just how the people had come together to form the Britton church in the first place, and if I remember correctly, the actors included my aunt Margaret Basey, along with Naomi (McCollum) Clausing, and a teen-aged Joyce Rosecrans (in a "granny-bonnet" and apron). as a couple of the lead actors.

My mom's family (her grandfather William Michael Lewis and his sons, Herbert and Orville [and perhaps their younger brother J.L.], and about 2 dozen others (including the Martin family) built that first wood-frame church with their own hands (my grandfather, Wm. Orville Lewis was a carpenter all his life). That same grandfather was the last surviving charter member for several years. My mom had been born in 1911, the year after that first church building was dedicated. The first house she remembered living in (after they moved in from the farm) was the house where the Floyd Loves lived just east of the church. Later my grandfather bought the corner lots to the east and across the street from the church, and then bought a large wooden farm house and had it moved into town and put on two of those lots. He spent the rest of his life (at least 50 years) constantly remodeling and adding to the inside of that big old house. He and my uncle (whom you possibly knew as "Billy" Lewis) continued to dig out rooms underneath the house and pouring more concrete until there was a full basement with a concrete floor, complete with a shower and a toilet that flushed up into the Britton sewer system. This was the home they had at 900 NW 90th (my brother Ray, and I were both born, 3 years apart, in the front bedroom of that house). My dad's parents, the Ernest Kendrick's lived on the west end of that same block until the late '30s." -- Roy
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