Yes, There Are Cowboy Churches in the Northeast | Post 11 | New York

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Across the USA

6 min readJun 21, 2016

I didn’t think the opportunity to discuss horse trough baptisms would come till a later (and more midwestern) point in my virtual cross-country trip, but arise it did where Saunders and Williams Streets meet in Whitehall, New York.

I clicked out of Vermont via Rutland and Fair Haven, crossing into upstate New York over the Poultney River, whose horseshoe flow in these northeastern nooks demarcates Vermont’s western, southern, and even eastern border with the Empire State. My final snapshots of Vermont captured idyll and recreation, farmhouses and young hikers resting at a trail’s end, perhaps waiting for the summer camp bus to pick them up.

In New York, a glorious Google Street View day awaited. I traveled in high summer 2012 and chose county roads along fields of rolled hay bales and narrow lanes where oncoming pick-up trucks must pull over to pass one another. In search of more of the quintessential I spotted a small town with a waterway running through. I clicked towards Whitehall.

The waterway bisecting Whitehall — population barely 4,000 — is the Champlain Canal, which since 1823 has connected Lake Champlain to the north with the Hudson River to the south. My guidebook, Wikipedia, tells me commercial traffic plied the canal until the 1970s, which in the case of Whitehall probably included silk, the town’s primary 19th-century industry when the population pushed 6,000.

The cluster of buildings on one side of town today appeared largely vacant, so I steered towards a bridge to explore the other side. As I did so, a place name caught my eye in the Street View inset map: Cowboy Church of the North. I spun around in the intersection. Where was it exactly? A Google search landed me on CowboyChurch.Net and informed: “Saturday 6pm, at the corner of Saunders and Williams St. Look for Cowboy Church sign in the window.”

I peered in all the windows. No such sign was obvious. Having never heard of the Cowboy Church, I Googled for more. It’s what it sounds like. My guidebook again: “Cowboy churches are local Christian churches within the cowboy culture that are distinctively Western heritage in character.”

An early founder of the movement — it’s not a denomination, though many cowboy churches are branches of Baptist churches — was Glenn Smith, a Texan and rodeo cowboy and clown who in 1973 wrote Apostle, Cowboy Style in hopes of reaching the unchurched and the touring tough guys on rodeo circuits around the U.S. Accessibility the aim, cowboy churches urged (and today urge) informality. No stingy Sunday dress code; jeans, boots, and cowboy hat are just fine. Sermons are kept simple and there’s no offering plate shakedown, just a discreet boot or cowboy hat at the door. One Louisiana chaplain says the movement is about “the need to develop an alternative church experience. The cowboy church speaks to a specific subculture within a larger Christian culture.”

Sources suggest there are several hundred to one thousand cowboy churches across America, and actual cowboys are far from the primary attendees. And, yes, baptisms are often done in a horse trough (see, e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A1GCbtUV9Y at 1:57).

Unable to put eyes on Whitehall’s Cowboy Church of the North, I paused and reflected that just a few miles back I had passed ground zero of another religious movement, one pre-dating cowboy churches by 150 years: Millerism. Along Country Road 11, near a stone outcropping called Ascension Rock, sits the chapel where William Miller began floating the idea that “Jesus Christ will come again to this earth, cleanse, purify, and take possession of the same, with all the saints, sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844”.

Back in the 1820s, Miller did some math on the mention of a 2300-day prophecy in the Book of Daniel and figured the 1843–44 window, Jewish year 5604, was the likely time for Jesus Christ’s second coming. By 1844, Boston pastor Joshua Vaughan Himes had helped disseminate over 5 million copies of Miller’s publications nationwide and many Millerites had disposed of all their possessions in anticipation. As successive uneventful days passed and each revised date let down the believers, Millerites and their churches endured taunting, mob violence, and tarring and feathering. The fallout from Miller’s failed prediction is known as the Great Disappointment.

At least two contemporary faiths, however, still give William Miller credit. Seventh-day Adventists believe that the cleansing event Miller predicted for Earth in 1844 turned out instead to be Christ’s entrance into the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary — 1844 marked not the second coming, but an important moment in heaven. For their part, members of the Bahá’í Faith point out that 1844 saw one of its central figures, the Báb, make his claim as the Promised One and begin his teachings in Persia.

On my way out of Whitehall, I saw more of the earthly tribulations I had originally anticipated here: Blocks pockmarked by vacant buildings or homes in disrepair. But there were a few more surprises. As I arrow-keyed a glance at a minor Amtrak station I spotted the strikingly Victorian Gothic Skene Manor atop the hill back across town. Built in the 1870s by a New York State Supreme Court judge, the home has had many owners — a silk mill manager, a jeweler for railroad men’s watches, a state trooper — and was a fancy restaurant for much of the second half of the 20th century. The first restaurateurs, in a marketing ploy, made up a story that they had discovered in the mansion’s cellar the long-interred body of Katherine Skene, the wife of the founder of Whitehall, originally called Skenesborough.

I also saw a horse and buggy in Whitehall. Was it an Amish man?