Historic Paxton, her days and her ways, 1722-1913

In these years, too, have come the erection of the Memorial Gate to the old graveyard by the Harrisburg Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, in 1906; the first meeting of Presbytery held at Paxton in forty years on September 28-29, 1909, and the unveiling and dedicatory services of the James and Louisa Yeomans Boyd memorial tablet in 1911. Truly, Paxton, aged in years, is as vital and earnest in her Christian activities under this, her last, pastor as in the days when Parsons Anderson, Bertram and Elder were laying this stronghold of Presbyterianism in central Pennsylvania, nearly two hundred years ago. Q O OLD DERRY-OUR SISTER CHURCH The story of Paxton would be incomplete without touching on the separate life of Old Derry, our sister church, to whom we were linked by the closest ties for more than a century and a half. Derry, to-day, in her modern garb, stands alone, but her early history and ours were so nearly one that her records were lost in the fire that destroyed ours; and the monographs on our ministry up to the close of Mr. Mitchell's regime is the story of her pastorate as well. The church-building, intrepid Scotch-Irish, whose infestment of the frontiers was the bane of the Penn government in Philadelphia, were shrewd as well as religious; they never built a church closer than ten miles to the next one, and they did not start that building until sure of subscriptions and maintenance. Thus we see a group of churches starting up in all this part of Pennsylvania, with no definite date for the actual beginning of any. Derry, Donegal and Paxton seemingly started near the same time, at least coming into organized form with Donegal Presbytery in 1732, all have their early days semi-traditional for lack of curate records in the Newcastle Presbytery, to which they belonged. Donegal, less intimately connected with us, was the most prominent in those days. Her first pastor. Rev. James Anderson, the only one the three churches had in common, gave to Derry a fifth and to Paxton a sixth of his time after 1726. The date of its church building is uncertain. There seems to have been a small log structure first. The deed of the glebe, 200 acres, is dated June 4, 1740, and the present church is supposed to have been erected after that, and was remodelled in 1772. When Conrad Weiser came up the Swatara in 1723 he found that stream so thickly occupied by the Scotch-Irish that he went further into the wilds for his German settlement. And there was in 1720 a settlement of sufficient size around Spring Creek to make possible a "missionating'' tour in the "barrens of Derry.'' The traditional start of Derry was in a meeting held in the latter part of April, 1724, near the head of Spring Creek. Here those eminent Calvinists, George Gillespie, David Evans and Robert Cross preached to the men of the countryside with vigor and power. Gathered under the trees that day were such men of Derry as the Clarks, Campbells, Blacks and Boyds, Roland Chambers, James Hamilton, James Harris, William McCord, John Mitchell and Malcolm Kar. There must have been women there too, for the name of one of them has come down to us, though only as the sister of John McCosh. Whether the first church of Derry, a small log structure about a mile and a half from the