Seventh Day Baptist Church (Milton, Wisconsin)

The Seventh Day Baptist Church is a Gothic Revival-style church built in 1934 in Milton, Wisconsin. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2016. In the 1500s and 1600s, one of the issues driving Anabaptists to split from the Catholic Church and the early Protestant denominations was infant baptism. But the Anabaptists themselves divided over various issues. The Seventh Day Baptist Church was founded in 1650 in London, holding that the Sabbath should be observed on Saturday instead of Sunday - an interpretation of the Fourth Commandment. In the late 1600s some of these Baptists from England migrated to the new world, and in the summer of 1838 some of their descendants arrived on the frontier of southern Wisconsin, staking claims near Prairie du Lac, which is now Milton. Henry Crandall and Joseph Goodrich went back east to bring their families while James Pierce stayed behind to watch their claims. After they returned, the families held their first Seventh Day Baptist meeting in 1839. They agreed to meet on Saturdays so that none would be tempted to Sunday worship by other Protestant settlers in the neighborhood. In 1852 they constructed a church on the site of the current building, on land donated by Goodrich. The congregation grew and expanded the church building several times by 1882, and again in 1902. But in November 1932 their church burned, a total los

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