Budleigh Past and Present

Image credit:   www.firstchurchinsalem.org This was the Sermon written and presented to those gathered for the Founders’ Day Service at the First Church in Salem on 7 August 2022 by Diane Smith, Chair, Archives Committee:   Founders Day is a very special day. The coming together of this church is a significant moment in the history of this country, but equally important is what our founders accomplished for us. Here we are today, you and me, together to play our part in the continuation of what people like Roger Conant, Captain Trask, Thomas Gardner and others began 393 years ago. Today, we’ll focus on just a few things. For example, one of our members, one who took his lovely bride in marriage right here in this church, just published a history focused on our Founders, we had visitors from Tennessee who trace their family tree back to one of our Founding Pastors, a film crew from California spent some time here in our meetinghouse reflecting on the role of The F...

Wolfgang Koch, the church member who delivered a greeting about Roger Conant from the latter’s home village of East Budleigh    Founders’ Day Service at The First Church in Salem on 7 August 2022. The First Reading was presented by church member Wolfgang Koch: Most of us are familiar with the fact that in the fall of 1626, Roger Conant led a band of people, a fishing company known as the Dorchester Adventurers, from Gloucester to Naumkeag. He and others from that group are among our founders. Of the 30 or so people listed in our Records Book who gathered on August 6, 1629 to sign and declare our covenant, the names we call out today are: • William Allen, • Peter Palfray, • Captain Trask, • John Balch, • Thomas Gardner, • John Woodbery • And again, Roger Conant At Naumkeag, historians have found evidence that these colonists were among those who built houses, interacted with the indigenous people of the area, and cleared and prepared the land for the plantin...

The First Church in Salem  Image credit:  www.firstchurchinsalem.org  Over the last few years members of the Roger Conant Club have been researching the life and times of the founder of the American city of Salem. The Club’s interest in East Budleigh’s ‘other hero’ has been enthusiastically welcomed by his descendants and by Salem residents on the other side of ‘the pond’. Among the latter are members of the First Church in Salem, founded by Roger and his West Country friends nearly 400 years ago, on 6 August 1629. As you can read from the Order of Service below, it is one of the oldest Protestant churches founded in North America. It embraced Unitarianism in the early 1800s, and today the Church remains a self-governing congregation that follows its own by-laws and democratically elects its own officers. Diane Smith, Chair of the Archives Committee of the First Church in Salem, invited the Roger Conant Club to contribute to the Founders’ Day service held last month...