Liz Mitchell derives a little inspiration knowing a successful precedent sits just up the road.
A couple times a week, Mitchell and a small army of volunteers make the trek from Bloomington to West Baden Springs in the name of restoring a local house of worship named the First Baptist (Colored) Church. Dormant for decades and modest in its Gothic Revival style, the church’s story has some congruence with the arc of the most prominent building in town. That’d be the West Baden Springs Hotel, which was teetering on the verge of collapse and disrepair until some folks stepped in with the energy and resources to restore it to its original glory.
Mitchell has a sense for the before-and-after of a rebuild. Years ago she saw the pre-renovation West Baden Springs Hotel when it looked like it had been in a fistfight.
“I walked inside the West Baden hotel, and there were pigeons. It was in bad shape. So I knew what that looked like. Pretty much like this (church) building did.”
Liz Mitchell and Pastor Bruce Rose are helping lead the charge in the church renewal project. The circular design behind them was donated from a church in Terre Haute that was being torn down.
The First Baptist Church in West Baden isn’t affiliated in any way with West Baden Springs Hotel or French Lick Resort other than being neighbors across the highway, but there’s no doubt something special is simmering with another preservation effort right next door in the Springs Valley. The church is among the last African American-heritage structures still standing in this area, and Mitchell is helping to rally the task of restoring it.
Before the church project was even on her radar, Mitchell was coming down from Bloomington to the French Lick/West Baden area to work on a documentary about the African American community here in the early and mid 20th Century. Many of them were drawn to the area by finding work at the French Lick and West Baden Springs Hotels. Back in the segregation era, though, the African American townspeople had their separate structures — separate churches, separate schools, separate restaurants. There were even separate hotels to accommodate black guests when other area hotels did not.
Lee Sinclair, the owner of West Baden Springs Hotel back in that day, donated the African American community the land where their First Baptist Church was built in 1920. (But only the land above ground — Sinclair’s agreement was if any subterranean mineral springs were discovered, he would still have ownership of those.) The area’s black population gradually dwindled over subsequent decades and the church eventually closed. Yet the structure remained a lone survivor.
“We’ve all fallen in love with this church,” Mitchell said recently while standing in the middle of the church with construction going on all around her, as work on the church has been going for about a year. “And there’s a reason why it’s still standing when anything else that was connected to the African American community has been demolished. There’s a reason. We’re just putting a breath of life back in. Because it was begging for it.”
These original swinging doors on the exterior will be moved further inside the church when it reopens, with new doors installed at the main entrance.
The modest church shares something in common with the hulking West Baden Springs Hotel, too: Just as the hotel was sold for $1 to the Society of the Jesuits in 1934 after closing to the public, the First Baptist Church moved for the same $1 transaction formality fee when the West Baden Historical Society relinquished ownership of it. Then it fell into the hands of the Southeastern District Association of Indiana Missionary Baptist State Convention, which has gotten the ball rolling on the church’s revival.
Mitchell jumped on board along with Bruce Rose, the pastor from her Second Baptist Church in Bloomington. A couple times a week, they’ve been coming down to put in work on the church along with a half-dozen or so volunteers from their congregation (mainly retirees) who heard about the project and wanted to lend their expertise to lend with masonry, carpentry and the like.
The church has required all sorts of TLC, because it appeared on the list of the 10 most endangered historic buildings in the state a few years ago when Indiana Landmarks also put it on the National Register of Historic Places. The walls of the church were bowing out, and many of the beams had been burned and weakened from a fire. Mitchell, Rose and their crew essentially started from scratch, stripping the church’s interior down to 2-by-4s. They kept the original sandstone in rebuilding the exterior marquee, and the swinging doors that acted as the original entrance to the building will be repurposed and moved a few feet inside to the foyer that leads into the sanctuary.
Other original features from the church will remain, such as the wood floor, elevated pulpit area and baptistery area in front, and pews that are being restored. When the church reopens, Mitchell envisions regular Sunday services there for folks of any background — and she also hopes the local museum will get involved to host other events at the church such as storytelling, re-enactments or lecture series.
The goal, Mitchell says, is to have the church open to worshippers in June. That’s mostly just a date to shoot for, and Mitchell realizes there’s still work to be done and more progress to be made with fundraising efforts that are ongoing and needed to push the project to the finish line.
“The community has been awesome,” Mitchell said. “People stopping through when they see us in here working, they donate what little bit they can, and we appreciate any donations, and we’re desperately in need of some now. We’re about halfway through, so it’s down to the little stuff.”
The little stuff that will add up to another big save in West Baden by the time the church is finished.
“We didn’t want it to sit like it was any longer,” Mitchell said. “I’m just blown away by the progress of it.”
