Sean C. Morgan
Sweet Home Evangelical Church celebrated its 120th anniversary on Sunday.
Rev. Rod Vermillion, pastor of the church from 1971 to 1989, delivered the morning sermon. A potluck followed with an open house at Little Promises, now located at the former Pleasant Valley Kindergarten.
In the activities center, visitors and church members viewed church history through photos and articles. Photos from The New Era showed Rev. Vermillion and crews moving his home from Long Street to 14th and Kalmia.
Sweet Home Evangelical Church was formed during a missions effort to the west.
The Evangelical Association sent a missionary to Salem in 1864, Rev. John Sills said. The church met in the original courthouse. Its first church building was located where the Cinnabon is located within Salem Centre.
That church started sending out pastors to other communities, including Corvallis and south Polk County, Rev. Sills said. In 1884, Rev. Josiah Bowersox came to Sweet Home from Pennsylvania where the Evangelical Association was located. Rev. Bowersox established the church in Sweet Home.
Sweet Home Evangelical met first in the Traxler Grange Hall just east of the School District 55 Central Office.
Three model buildings represented the three previous buildings used by the church. Sweet Home Evangelical erected its first building on land donated by “Uncle” Joe Ames on an unknown location in 1890.
The church suffered a split at about this time in an Evangelical Association church, called the upper church, and a United Evangelicals, called the lower church. The upper church constructed the building at 18th and Long streets, and the lower church met at Foster, Waterloo and Sodaville schools.
The churches were reunited at the 18th and Long location in 1919. In the 1920s or 1930s, the church constructed a new building on its current Long Street site.
The church demolished that building in 1961 and began working on the existing building. The new building was dedicated in 1962.
Rev. Sills has been pastor at the church since July 2002. He was a general superintendent for the Evangelical Association. He moved to Salem, where he grew up, from Minneapolis, Minn., to pastor the church.
Also present Sunday were descendants of Rev. Bowersox. They included Joe Bowersox and his wife, June Bowersox; Berneice (Bowersox) Franz; and Nina Dejmal and her husband, Ked Dejmal.
Rev. Bowersox is Mrs. Dejmal’s great, great grandfather. Mr. Bowersox is his great grandson. Mr. Bowersox’s father and Mrs. Dejmal’s grandmother were the children of Arthur Bowersox, the son of Rev. Bowersox.
Mrs. Dejmal was unaware when she moved to Sweet Home in 1961 of Rev. Bowersox’s involvement in Sweet Home Evangelical.
The church was just finishing construction of its new building when the Dejmals joined the church.
“Milton Hopper had asked me to do some wok in the church office,” Mrs. Dejmal said. She was reading through some church history when she came across the name of Rev. Bowersox.
She recalled that was her grandmother’s maiden name. She found out that Rev. Bowersox was her great, great grandfather.
She had no idea about her own family connection to the church when she joined it, Mrs. Dejmal said. “We came simply because we felt this is where God wanted us to be. I was overwhelmed that God had led us back to where Josiah had been a pastor.”
Mrs. Dejmal enjoyed visiting Sunday. She and her family moved away in 1966, but “this was a very special place for us.”
Her two daughters were born in Lebanon while the Dejmals lived in Sweet Home. Mr. Dejmal was a teacher at Sweet Home Junior High. Mrs. Dejmal was a substitute elementary and junior high teacher.
Her discovery of Rev. Bowersox while in Sweet Home sparked her interest in her own genealogy, something she has explored since.