The Amity Church
Dr. James Matthew Alley
The Amity Church of Christ was born in a pioneer log cabin about two miles north of present-day Amity in March of 1846. This makes it the oldest Christian Church of the Disciples of Christ, west of the Rocky Mountains.
Elder Amos Harvey, a pioneer of 1845, was the organizer of this congregation of thirteen charter members. In a letter to an Eastern religious journal, he tells of the humble beginning of this congregation in these simple words: “We met, as the disciples anciently did, upon the first day of the week, to break the loaf, to implore the assistance of the Heavenly Father, and to encourage each other in the heavenly way.”
Amos Harvey was born of Pennsylvania Quaker stock. The Revolutionary Battle of Brandywine was fought on his kinsman’s land. When a young man, he married Miss Jane Ramage, a member of the Christian Church, and after their marriage he became a member of the same church. He was the organizer of Bethel College in Polk County, chartered in 1856. He had one of the first fruit nurseries in the Oregon Territory and was one of the first officers of the state horticulture society. He was one of the founders of the Republican party in the state.
The second minister of the Amity Church of Christ was Glen O. Burnett, a pioneer of 1846. Soon after his arrival in the Amity area, we find him busy preaching, baptizing, marrying, and burying the citizens of this area. He performed his first marriage, shortly after his arrival in 1846, in the cabin of Joseph Watt, another pioneer of the Amity community. Elder Burnett was a hard-working circuit rider. He was a close friend of Amos Harvey, and the two of them kept the Amity church alive in its infancy. A great amount of credit goes to the laymen of the Amity church of this period. They were the real leaders of the community, and they in turn supported Harvey and Burnett with all that they had to offer in a material way, which was very little. But what they lacked in material help they made up in their faithfulness to this pioneer church.
The congregation met in the homes of the members until 1849, when a log school house was built in the north end of present-day Amity. A young schoolmaster by the name of Ahio S. Watt named it Amity. And we find that Elder Glen O. Burnett “delivered the principal address when the first school in Amity was opened in the spring of 1849.” The California gold rush took some of the members to the goldfields for a few years. The Indian and Civil wars retarded the progress of the little church. It was not until 1869 or 1870 that it had its first building.
The ground for this building was given by Enos Williams, who also gave the village square in front of the church to the children of Amity in perpetuity. The building was erected by a pioneer carpenter, Charles Burch. This building served the congregation until 1912, when the present church building was erected seventy-five feet west of the original structure. The old building was moved to another part of town and is still used for church purposes by another religious communion.
Enos Williams, William Buffum, and Robert Lancefield were charter members of this church. They were leaders in the community, school, and church life of this period. These laymen did not confine their good work to the Amity area alone. When circuit riders Harvey and Burnett founded Bethel College in Polk County, they sent their children to its high school department and college classes, or supported it with financial help. The pioneer Amity Church of Christ is not a story about a wooden building as much as it is a story of great men, both its ministers and its laymen—men who were willing to sacrifice for their faith.
The church at one time was in grave financial difficulty. There was a possibility of losing its building. A member, Heber Martin, then past seventy years of age, went to the bank and offered to mortgage his farm to save the church building from a mortgage foreclosure. Happily, this man’s faith aroused the community and the property was saved.