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How Widow Lillibridge Got Her Church

This article was written by J. Earl Clauson and published January 1935, in the Evening Bulletin newspaper of Providence, Rhode Island, under the heading “These Plantations.” This untitled piece tells the story of how a church was built in Exeter.

Improvement of Ten Rod Road in Exeter, from Millville to the Connecticut line at Beach Pond, will open to the motoring public a lot of scenery and a practically untapped reservoir of fine, earthy Rhode Island stories. Like the one about how the Widow Lillibridge got a church, which we propose to tell, anticipating the road building job.

That undertaking has progressed through the survey stage to the point where bids will be asked. Actual construction ought to get under way with settled weather in the coming spring.

Millville, the starting point for the proposed new road, lies along that stretch of black highway which debouches from the Nooseneck Hill Road at Cordwood Corner in Exeter and, swinging down through Arcadia, crosses Wood River and rejoins the cement at Hope Valley. Once a thriving manufacturing community, it consists now of a couple of houses, a mill pond and a seductive brook. Robert T. Downs of the Hospital Trust Company owns the pond and thereabouts.

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From Millville west the road has been unbelievably bad pretty nearly ever since cattle and sheep used to be driven down from the back country to Wickford for shipping to market. In the spring it was a bog. In the winter drifted deep with snow, and the rest of the time automobiles simply bounced over it, like a child’s rubber ball.

A couple or so miles beyond Millville the Widow Lillibridge lived when that countryside was considerably more populous than at present. She was fat, comfortable and religious.

As she advanced in years she found these qualities incompatible. She loved going to church and hearing a good doctrinal sermon in which the grand old principles of the Baptist Church were explained and exalted. But working against this more and more was her love of the Boston rocker beside the kitchen stove, handy to the woodbox so that she had only to hitch over to get a stick and keep the fire going.

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Church was at Hope Valley, and getting there was a chore any time of the year. Winters it was cold, summers dusty, and in between there were only odd spells when a body would really feel the urge to hitch up and drive stronger than the temptations to stick to the Boston rocker.

The widow owned a considerable bit of land up and down the Wood River, her holdings including the triangular bit where the road branches off to Woody Hill, and the Ten Rod keeps along westward to Escoheag and Beach Pond, though with many a twist and jog. One day she received a call from the committeemen of the Bates school district, who had a proposition.

They pointed out that a new schoolhouse was needed, and her corner seemed just the place. She agreed that it was indeed a likely spot and education was in general a good idea. The upshot of the conference was that the committeemen went ahead with the plans, got out the lumber and piled it on the lot at the corner of the Woody Hill and Ten Rod Roads.

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Precisely when the Widow Lillibridge got her big idea is not clear. It may be that it came to her full-fledged while she was talking with the committeemen, or it may have been the product of slow ruminations as she sat rocking back and forth while the district fathers were assembling their lumber.

In any event, after they had everything in readiness to go ahead with construction of a schoolhouse which should be and everlasting credit to the town of Exeter they came around one day to find the lot they had selected fenced in, no gate, and every indication that the owner proposed to take steps against trespassing.

At that instant it dawned on the committeemen that they had no deed to the property. They hadn’t even a contract of sale, and thinking back over their conversation with the widow they weren’t entirely clear she had committed herself even verbally to sell.

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They hot-footed it to the Lillibridge house. There they found the widow calmly rocking as usual in the kitchen.

She listened unperturbed to their representations, and when they had finished offered her side of the case. Yes, she remembered they had talked about a schoolhouse on that corner. No, she didn’t think it was a bad idea. But what that section needed more than a schoolhouse was a church – a Baptist church. Look how far the neighbors had to travel now to get the pure, undiluted Baptist gospel. Look how the young people were growing up without ever getting close enough to doctrine to recognize it.

She confessed to being strong for secular education, but religious education came first. She had decided to give that corner site free gratis for a church and it was out of the market for school purposes.

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If that was the way she felt about it, the committeemen admitted, there was nothing more to be said on their side, but they’d like to leave on the widow’s lot the lumber they had piled there until they could find another site. She expressed a little surprise at this statement, saying the lumber would do fine for the church she had in mind.

But they protested they had accumulated it for a school. Mrs. Lillibridge said she couldn’t help it if someone had piled lumber on her lot when she wasn’t looking; the corner was fenced now and anything there was hers to do with as she liked.

The committeemen saw she held all the trumps and honors. There was nothing more to be said. In due time the lumber went into the little white church which still stands, deserted now and lonely, on its corner, and the committeemen planted their schoolhouse beside the black hard road midway between Millville and Arcadia, where it is doing service.

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There are plenty of fine, earthy tales in that countryside back of Arcadia which the improved Ten Rod will open up. There’s a lot of first class landscape, too, heretofore left chiefly to hunters and fishermen.

And when you drive the new macadam some months from now you should look at the church and reflect on the devious ways in which the Christian religion has been promoted.

Original story by J. Earl Clauson, originally published in the Providence Evening Bulletin under the heading "These Plantations". Later collected into a book of the same name that was printed in 1937 by The Roger Williams Press (E. A. Johnson Company).