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Above: Ebenezer Welsh Baptist Church and Welsh Yard, Freedom, Cattaraugus Co., New York, by unknown artist, on oil cloth cemetery lot map, circa 1900. Original size 6 inches x 12 inches. Shows the third house of worship erected in 1899. The steeple was later shortened to a bell tower after a lightning strike. Photograph and digital restoration by Barbara Henry using Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0.

Ebenezer Welsh Baptist Church

The Ebenezer Welsh Baptist Church had a long and successful history in this part of western New York. Welsh Baptists from Oneida County first came west into Cattaraugus County in the 1840s. In 1844 they built their first chapel in the town of Freedom. By the 1880s the Freedom church had become the largest of the Welsh Baptist congregations in New York State, out stripping even the Oneida churches. Great preaching gymanfas, eisteddfodau, and revivals were held there during the nineteenth century.

The Ebenezer Welsh Baptists erected three houses of worship on the same site (corner of present-day Freedom and Osmun Roads). Each structure was larger and more ornate than the one before. The first in 1844 was a small simple meetinghouse; this was removed when the second church, designed by Welsh-American architect, Aneurin Jones, of Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, was constructed in 1870; and the third structure, which has now fallen, was erected in 1899.

In 1895 a group of English-speaking Welsh broke off from the Ebenezer Church to form their own church, The Bethel Baptist. In 1920, after several decades of disagreement, the two congregations finally merged as the Freedom Baptist Church. By the 1950s services were discontinued at the Ebenezer church, but an annual Welsh Day was held in the church from the 1920s to the late 1960s. Later the stained glass windows and other items were sold off, the pews were removed, and the sanctuary was converted for youth basketball and other activities. As the decades passed, the church fell into disrepair leading those associated with the dilapidated church to concede in the summer of 2000 that perhaps the church should be taken down before it fell down. It had become a safety hazard. On January 31, 2001 the old church finally fell. The main section of the building collapsed backwards falling onto a section of the Welsh Yard, a burial ground containing early Welsh gravestones.

Click here to see Kari Leonard's photograph of the fallen church.