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Note #8017 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

Historic Colorado chapel reduced to ashes
03499
November 19, 2003

Historic Colorado chapel reduced to ashes

Arson suspected in blaze in former Presbyterian mission church

by John Filiatreau

LOUISVILLE - A tiny white frame church on a knoll along a historic Western
stagecoach line burned to the ground on Nov. 16.

Colorado officials suspect that an arsonist torched Virginia Dale Community
Church, which by tradition was always kept unlocked as a haven for travelers
along a lonely stretch of U.S. 287 between Fort Collins, CO, and Cheyenne,
WY.

The church was founded as a Presbyterian institution around 1880, possibly by
Sheldon Jackson, the indefatigable missionary who established more than 100
Presbyterian congregations in states stretching from Wisconsin to Nevada
before moving on to Alaska.

The old church was part of a designated historical site, the Virginia Dale
Stage Stop on the Overland Trail.

Virginia Dale was a vital, bustling way station from 1862 until 1867, when
the Union Pacific Railroad was completed to Cheyenne. The notorious gunman
Jack Slade, an agent for the stagecoach line, built the old hewn-log station
- which you can see today, about a mile east of the highway. Slade gave the
nascent settlement his wife's maiden name. The station is described in Mark
Twain's novel, Roughing It.

In the 1870s, emigrants from back East were lured to the area by its fertile
land and good water, and Virginia Dale became a typical prairie small town.
Its first school was built in 1874. Five years later, Virginia Dale
Presbyterian Church was built; in 1885 it was moved to its current site, on a
hill overlooking Deadman Creek.

Today Virginia Dale is barely a wide spot in the road, known mostly for its
history. The only thing about it that was likely to make an impression on
someone driving past  was the little white church on a hill.

A passer-by called in the fire just after midnight on Nov. 16, a Sunday. The
Larimer County Sheriff's Department and the fire departments from Livermore
and Wellington responded quickly, but by the time they arrived there was
little to do but watch the wooden church finish burning.

Non-denominational Virginia Dale Community Church hosted worship services
once a month, on the second Sunday, when a volunteer minister drove the 100
miles from Prospect Valley, near Boulder. A typical service was attended by
six or eight worshippers; on special occasions there might be as many as 30.

The last service was held on Nov. 9.

Now little remains but a concrete foundation crowned by a blackened
wood-burning stove and strewn with charred timbers and the ashes of hymnals.
The building was not insured. An organ and a piano were among the casualties.

Shirlie Moen, a lifelong Presbyterian from Virginia Dale, says she has
attended what she described as "a simple, little, pretty church" since she
was 3 years old; that was 70 years ago. Her husband, 79-year-old rancher
Forrest Moen, is also a lifelong member, as his father was before him.

Shirlie said people found their way to the inviting, always-open little
church when they needed a rest or a moment of prayer. Sometimes they played
the piano. Sometimes they looked at the weathered headstones in the cemetery
in the churchyard, where about 50 believers are buried. Most visitors left
appreciative notes in the church's guest book, which also was destroyed in
the fire. "We had some things stolen," she said, "but most people were
respectful, and appreciative."

Virginia Bunning, the stated clerk of Plains and Peaks Presbytery, said the
Virginia Dale church sometimes was a blessing to people caught in the
frequent sudden snowstorms on U.S. 287, which she said can be a "death road."

Bunning said the congregation has struggled in recent years to secure
pastoral leadership, with "different pulpit supplies and retired ministers."

She said the Presbytery of Boulder deeded the property to the town, having
decided that it "made more sense to let it belong to the community" than to
watch it decline, shut its doors, or give it to another denominational
church. The property's usefulness was limited by the fact that it has no
water supply.

According to the Rev. Vicki Fogel Mykles, a Presbyterian who works in nearby
Fort Collins, CO, it was about a dozen years ago that the presbytery sold the
building to the town for $1.

Beth A. Bensmen, manager of public services and outreach for the Presbyterian
Historical Society in Philadelphia, said its records indicate only that the
church was chartered in 1896 in the Presbytery of Boulder and dissolved in
1905, then reopened in 1910 and dissolved again in 1918.

The PHS has no records indicating whether Sheldon Jackson "planted" the
Virginia Dale church, but Jackson is known to have traced the route of the
Union Pacific in his evangelistic endeavors, and seems to have been in the
West for at least part of 1880.

The church's original records were destroyed in 1962 in a fire at a
caretaker's home.

Shirlie Moen said she and her husband have been buoyed by "all the response
we've gotten" from people who know and love the church, as well as from
people who "just go by" on the highway and had grown used to seeing its
picturesque steeple when they topped a little rise south of town.

Moen said the members will continue meeting for worship, "either in one of
our homes or in the community clubhouse."

"We are going to rebuild," she said. "They can't defeat us."

Among the callers, Moen said, have been architects and contractors offering
to help build a little wooden church just like the one that burned. "That's
our plan," she said.

Moen said it's likely that a new church also would be left unlocked to
continue serving as a traveler's rest.

"I don't think we were wrong in leaving it open all these years," she said.
"Most people are good."

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