Six Principle Baptist Church - North Kingstown, Rhode Island - This Old Church on Waymarking.com

The original core of the Six Principle Baptist Church in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, dates from 1703-1710. This Greek Revival style house of worship also known as the Old Baptist Meeting House was rebuilt in 1842. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. The nomination form describes it in part:

The Six Principle Baptist Church, also known as the Stony Lane Baptist Church and the Old Baptist Meeting House, stands on Old Baptist Road a little south of its intersection with Stony Lane, in rural area of North Kingstown, northwest of the village of Wickford. This small one-room house of worship -- only twenty-six by thirty-eight feet -- was built in the Greek Revival style in 1842, but its core is said to date from between 1703 and 1710. References in eighteenth-century letters and deeds support this early date, although no physical exploration of the underlying fabric of the building has been undertaken to corroborate it.

Of timber construction, the church is a one-storey, gable roofed, clapboarded building with a central front entrance located on the east gable end. Windows, two on each long side, have twelve-over-twelve sash; two smaller and shorter windows are placed high at the west end. Within recent years a cement-walled basement has been inserted in place of the original low, stone foundation, and there has also been made a very shallow gabled extension across the west end containing a lavatory and a stair to the new basement. This extension has been kept architecturally compatible, and subordinate to, the older structure: it is narrower and lower, and within it are still seen the original exterior clapboarding and high windows of the meetinghouse's rear elevation.

Exterior trim is kept to a minimum: there are plain panelled corner pilasters; a flat fascia-board runs beneath the eaves; and the side windows, set high so that this fascia runs directly across their tops, have very plain enframements with only a slim suggestion of moulding at their outer edges. The main doorway has flat, unfluted Doric pilasters supporting a frieze board with a simple flat "cornice" member topping it; the door itself has two tall vertical panels -- typical of the Greek Revival style in use when the building required renovation.

The meeting-house is set close to the roadway on a slightly raised site nearly completely surrounded by dry-laid stone walls which function in part as retaining-walls; beside and behind it are cemetery areas which have large old trees, lilac bushes and orderly rows and groupings of very plain stone grave markers, some of which have weathered, in two hundred years or more, to mere stubs in the grass.

Internally, the church is exceedingly plain...

Its first, 17th-century congregants were settlers from Europe following the messages promoted in the sermons of Roger Williams, Rhode Island's founder. The sermons focused on "the doctrine of Christ that were mentioned in the Book of Hebrews: repentance, faith, baptism, laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment." [1] Those ideas were the basis for founding the Six-Principle Baptist Church – and the congregation now known as the Stony Lane Baptist Church.

1. The Independent

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