A new Presbyterian church was built in Victoria West in 1887. Prior to this, many people walked from Victoria West to attend worship service in Lot 14. They would carry their good shoes with them, putting them on when they arrived at the church. This entailed a walk of some 35 kilometres round trip, meaning that "going to church" for these people was a full day's excursion. It is that selfsame church which serves the community today, standing beside its large cemetery.
Today a very plain and relatively unadorned church, in 1925, with
Church Union in Canada this became a United Church and remains so to this day. Given that the area was never heavily populated, we expect that this church has, in all these years, seldom been filled to overflowing, in spite of its small size.
The community has, though, managed to supply the church's cemetery with an abundance of residents,
Find A Grave listing a total of 619 headstones. It appears that the church was built at the site of the preexisting cemetery, as the earliest headstone listed at Find A Grave is that of William Enman, born March 28, 1815, died December 6, 1872. There are many more headstones here dated prior to the 1887 construction of the church.
The small bit of information we have found concerning this church was gleaned from the book "
Roots & Branches - A Story of Bideford and Surrounding Communities", digitized at
Island Lives.