Westhampton Congregational Church (Westhampton, Mass.) Records

Background on Westhampton

The Congregational Church in the small western Massachusetts town of Westhampton was formally organized on Sept. 1, 1779, with the assistance of ministers from two adjoining towns. Jonathan Judd of Southampton and Solomon Williams of Northampton. The first pastor chosen for the pulpit at Westhampton was the young Enoch Hale, a 1773 graduate of Yale and brother of the patriot Nathan Hale. Ordained on Sept. 29, 1779, Hale served his community for fifty years, during which time he was an active presence in the religious life of the Commonwealth, serving as Secretary of the General Association of the Congregational Churches and Ministers of Massachusetts (1804-1824) and as Secretary of the Hampshire Missionary Society for many years.

During the summer 1829, with the aging Hale nearing retirement, Westhampton called Horace B. Chapin to settle as colleague pastor. His installation in July initiated a period of sharp crisis. Several members of the church petitioned to form themselves into a Union Society and after being denied, forty-six seceded and called a charismatic evangelical preacher, John Truair, as their pastor. Ordained in Cambridge, Vt., in 1810, Truair had served as pastor in the Oneida, N.Y., on the eastern edge of the Burned Over District, and as corresponding secretary for the American Seamen's Friend Society, before arriving in Westhampton. Truair's role in the controversy precipitated the Hampshire Central Association to withdraw him from fellowship, and the Presbytery of New York deposed him from the ministry two years later, but his evangelical zeal held the secessionists together. After Truair returned to New York State in 1837, however, the "meteoric light began to wane," as Josiah Holland noted, and most of the Union Church membership voted to return into the fold in September 1841, with the remnant formally disbanding in August 1850.