From the Reference Desk…
As a librarian, I get satisfaction from finding answers, and the questions that I cannot answer can stick in my mind for years. Today I found the answer to a question I received a couple of years ago: What was the first Baptist church congregation founded in Ohio?
I have bookmarked a collection of sources of online digitized books and one of them is Digital Book Index. The Index is rich in university press material, but also includes some government documents, commercial publishing and nonprofit publications. I hadn’t looked at the Index in a while and tried a search on Ohio history. In my search results I noticed the Baptist histories home page. Generally, indexes are designed to lead users to other websites, but in some cases the actual text is freely available.
So what is the oldest Baptist congregation in Ohio? According to some transcribed recollections in American Baptist Memorial, 1856, the Columbia Baptist Church, founded near Cincinnati in 1790, was the first Baptist congregation in the Northwest Territory.
Cheryl Lubow, Librarian
State Library of Ohio
