Jewell County Churches
Oak Creek Society of Friends
From an article in the "Jewell County Record," August 29, 1963:
Oak Creek Friends Meeting
Discontinued After 90 Years
On the last Sunday in August,
the Oak Creek Friends Meeting
held its last church services.
The first services were held in
1873 in the Kelly Mendenhall
home, a dugout, near where the
Oak Creek Church later was built.
About 1875 Oak Creek Church, a
sod house, was built on the Southeast Quarter of Section 1 in Whitemound Township in Jewell county,
4 miles west and 2 miles north
of Burr Oak.
In 1885, Thomas L. Peirce received the United States patent for
the land and by a previous arrangement conveyed the church
tract to Kansas Yearly Meeting of
Friends and the Oak Creek Preparative Meeting. They had been
holding ohurrh here for about ten
years.
The first frame church was constructed in 1885 and a new one
was built in 1909. By 1916 the
church had 182 members, all living
in the country in that community,
and then a parsonage was built.
By 1958 the population had shifted so severely from this area and
the congregation was so small that
services were discontinued at Oak
Creek and started in Burr Oak and
a church building rented from the
Calvary Independent Church. Here
services were held for nearly five
years with no gain in membership
due to the general population shift.
So the remnant of Oak Creek decided to join with Northbranch
Friends at Northbranch, about ten
miles northwest of Burr Oak,
where a thriving congregation holds regular services.
Return to Jewell Co. KHHP
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This website created Oct. 24, 2011 by Sheryl McClure.
� 2011 Kansas History and Heritage Project
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