Baptist Chapel, South Side of High Street

Baptist Chapel, South Side of High Street

In 1808 a Baptist chapel was founded in Newburgh. The congregation was established by Archibald McLean, who was leading figure in the Scotch Baptists (a group which developed in Edinburgh in the eighteenth-century and was rather more hardline than the English Baptist tradition). The congregation initially worshipped in a chapel on the south side of the High Street in a wynd known as Mr Ramsay’s Close. The first pastor of the congregation was a linen manufacturer called James Wilkie. He was succeeded in around 1840 by Alexander Craighead – who also served as school-master and post-master of Newburgh. Craighead was a skilled Hebrew scholar and apparently ‘revelled in the Book of God in the original language’. One of the last pastors of what became known as the ‘Old Chapel’ was James Wood, who was converted to Baptist beliefs by his wife Christian Wilkie. Wood was baptised in the River Tay and, together with his spouse, helped expand the Baptist congregation in Newburgh. In the 1880s the Baptists moved to a larger church on the north side of the High Street. The fate of the original chapel on Ramsay’s Close is uncertain.

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Bess Rhodes

Site

243

24/11/2022

09/26/2023 05:07:27 pm

T.A. McQuiston and R.F. Conway, A Short Historical Outline of Newburgh Baptist Church (1920). T. Cooper and D. Murray, ‘McLean, Archibald (1733-1812), Scotch Baptist Minister’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/17648 [Accessed 10 November 2021].

cm x cm x cm

current,56.350704099952154,-3.2359940358399713;

Baptist Chapel, South Side of High Street

TEXT

Building

513

Baptist

Newburgh