At the junction of Highway 6 and Hastings Crossing Road, Warren Baptist was built well out in the country around 1862, with nothing more than the little community of Hastings nearby, which consists primarily of houses strewn along Highway 6. A meeting style building typical of many early rural churches of Nova Scotia, Warren Baptist, also typically, has a cemetery in its yard. The church and cemetery were designated a Cumberland County Heritage Place on February 13, 2009.
There are now a couple of hundred interments in the cemetery, with older headstones nearest the church and the front and contemporary stones toward the back of the cemetery. It appears to be still in use, with fairly new headstones to be found.
Three sides of the church are quite plain, with three rectangular windows, lacking arches, on each side and clad in horizontal shiplap wood siding. The rear wall still wears wood shingles. The front elevation, however, is a slightly different story. It sports a pair of recessed and panelled entry doors with suggestions of porticos and scalloped bargeboards over each. Across the front are six mock pilasters, six with capitals and the two corner ones also having bases. The front gable is vaguely styled as a Greek portico and has a triangle shaped window in the centre with a scalloped bargeboard hood.
Warren Baptist Church
DESCRIPTION OF HISTORIC PLACE
The Warren Baptist Church, built circa 1862, is a modest, wooden, one-storey country church built in the form of a traditional meeting house. The church sits on its original site at a bend in Route 6 on the rural east side of Amherst, Nova Scotia, and overlooks trees, farms and fields. The municipal designation includes the building, property and cemetery.
HERITAGE VALUE
The value of the Warren Baptist Church is found in its being representative of a typical Baptist country church built in Cumberland County during the mid to late nineteenth century. The symmetrical, wooden church has a medium-pitched roof and a pedimented front gable. The characteristic symmetry is evident in the church’s three-bay façade and the three large rectangular windows that line each side of the boxy church. It was built in the meeting house tradition, and it is modestly and simply decorated with Classical Revival and Gothic Revival elements. Its Classical Revival temple-like architecture is adorned with a wide frieze, and heavy, prominent pilasters framing the two entries and acting as corner boards. Of note are the Gothic Revival subtle labels crowning every window, and the diamond-shaped tracery decorating the triangular window in pedimented front gable. The triangular shape of this window is echoed in the pointed arch above the two front entries, and the upper edges of the three triangles are accentuated with scalloped bargeboard.
CHARACTER-DEFINING ELEMENTS
Character-defining elements of the Warren Baptist Church include:
- original site, form and massing;
- wood construction;
- original clapboard siding;
- one-storey;
- two wide-set entries in gable end;
- traditional meeting house elements such as simple, symmetric form and little ornamentation;
- cemetery containing historic markers to the side and rear of building.
Character-defining Classical Revival elements of the Warren Baptist Church include:
- medium-pitched gable roof and pedimented front gable;
- return eave on back gable;
- wide frieze;
- bold, simple frames accenting large rectangular windows;
- prominent pilasters framing entries and acting as corner boards;
- wide frieze.
Character-defining Gothic Revival elements of the Warren Baptist Church include:
- symmetric three-bay façade;
- triangle-shaped window in front pediment;
- bargeboard decorating the upper lines of the triangle window and the door frames;
- labels decorating windows.
From Historic Places Canada