The passage of more than twelve decades has obscured the origins of the Laurel Presbyterian church and made its founding something of a lost event. The records left to us tell a great deal, but the telling does not answer the question of why the church was founded in 1860 near Laurel Factory, Maryland . Nor do the earliest records concerning the Laurel Church reflect as clearly as we might wish the sense of crisis abroad in the United States in 1860 as the nation sank slowly towards the Civil War, the most traumatic event in its history.

On an even larger scale, those same records fail to reveal the deep traumas of vast social change which Americans experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century. The women and men who established the Laurel Church in April 1860 had grown up in a world where the industrialization of the economy, the urbanization of society, the rapid growth of Catholicism, the primitivism of life on the western frontier, and the rise of competing religious and secular ideologies appeared to threaten the purity of their American Protestant civilization. The old order in which the lower classes gave deference to the higher, families produced all that they needed at home, and orthodox Calvinism gave meaning to life disintegrated around them stage by stage.

Laurel , Maryland , has a modest and still largely ignored history going back to the family of Richard Snowden. Snowden received a grant of land in the area in the mid-seventeenth century. In the next century, Richard Snowden, Jr. discovered iron ore on the banks of the Patuxent River and with other men established an iron works, which attracted more settlers into the area. Over the course of the decades, the community grew into a manufacturing and transportation center and became known as 'Laurel Factory.' However, only in the 1840s did Laurel Factory achieve sufficient size to warrant the establishment of churches. In that decade, the Methodists, Episcopalians, and Catholics all founded congregations still in existence today. The community has now forgotten that the Presbyterians also founded a congregation in Laurel in that decade because that church survived for only a brief period.

Presbyterianism established itself early in colonial Maryland with active churches in the late seventeenth century, and Maryland remained a center for colonial Presbyterians for some decades thereafter. The particular story of Presbyterians in Laurel , however, actually began in 1837 when the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America divided into 'Old School' and 'New School' camps over issues of theology and church politics. The Old School faction represented the more traditional, Calvinistic side of Presbyterianism and viewed the New School group as johnny-come-lately innovators. Most Maryland churches stayed with the Old School denomination, The New School Church, however, established the Presbytery of the District of Columbia in Washington, and, in 1843, that presbytery received reports that prospects in Laurel Factory favored the establishment of a Presbyterian Church. The presbytery sent Charles F. Diver, a licensed preacher, to Laurel Factory. In November 1843, Diver founded a church with nine members. For unrecorded reasons, the small Laurel Factory Church disappeared from presbytery records after 1845. The New School denomination lacked strength throughout the larger region and most likely could not provide the church with pastoral leadership or with encouragement. Quite possibly Laurel Factory Presbyterians also reacted negatively to the strong anti-slavery stand taken by the New School General Assembly beginning in 1846 and found it difficult. to sustain a church representing an anti-slavery denomination in an area sympathetic to the South.

In the years following, slavery and the growing tensions between North and South increasingly dominated national life. Maryland , as a border state, felt the national distress with particular force because the geographical regions of the state reproduced within the state the same divisions found in the nation. Over the course of several decades, western Maryland developed close ties with the Northern economy and culture, while southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore remained inherently Southern in culture, economy, and sympathy, This same regional cultural geography situated Laurel Factory on the northern edge of the southern region, and the majority of its people sympathized with the South.

In the midst of the growing tensions and national divisions, the Presbyterians initiated yet another attempt to establish a church at Laurel Factory. According to the historical supplement of The Presbyterian Observer (published in Baltimore ) for its October 28, 1886, issue, the Revs. J.E. Nourse and E. Bosworth of the Old School's Potomac Presbytery established churches at Beltsville and Laurel Factory, apparently in 1859. The Beltsville Church laid the cornerstone for a building in August 1860. The relationship between these two clergymen of the Potomac Presbytery to the Presbyterians in Laurel Factory remains unclear. Apparently, however, most of those with whom they had contact and who showed interest in founding a Presbyterian Church there lived north of Laurel Factory itself and within the bounds of Baltimore Presbytery. In any event, a small group of Presbyterians did establish a church just north of Laurel Factory in Howard County . At that time, Prince George 's County fell within the bounds of Potomac Presbytery and Howard County within the bounds of Baltimore Presbytery. In the absence of any direct records, it seems reasonable to speculate that the initiative of Potomac Presbytery led to the establishment of the church founded just beyond Laurel Factory.

The only record remaining of the founding of this new congregation appears in the minutes of Baltimore Presbytery, the parent body of the church. The minutes for April 4, 1860, reports:

Mr. [Gustavus] Ober presented a petition from sundry persons in Prince George , Anne Arundel & Howard Counties, asking to be organized into a church. Messrs. Hamner, Dickson, & J. N. Brown were appointed to organize a church if the way be clear in the neighborhood of Laurel Factory...'

Those same minutes recorded that the presbytery also appointed a regular schedule of preachers for the church on an every-other-Sunday basis beginning April 15, 1860, with the Rev. Dr. James G. Hamner. A second entry, dated June 12, 1860, reads, 'The committee for the purpose reported that they had organized a church at Laurel Factory consisting of eleven members & that Edward Snowden & Benjamin L. Holt had been elected Ruling Elders.' Baltimore Presbytery then enrolled the new church as the Oak Grove Church . It may safely be assumed that Snowden, a member of the highly influential old Snowden family, played a prominent part in the founding of the congregation as did other Snowdens in the establishment of the Methodist and Episcopal churches in Laurel .

The above mentioned minutes, unfortunately, do not provide an exact date for the founding of the Oak Grove Church . They do seem to imply that the church began officially on April 15 since the first preacher, Hamner, was also a member of the committee appointed to establish the church. William Snowden, one of the eleven original members, remembered forty years later that the church began on April 14, 1860, but in his account of the founding of the church Snowden either misremembered or omitted several significant facts so that his statement that the church began on April 14th is not entirely reliable. In short, the founding date of the Oak Grove Church is probably April 14th, might be April 15th, and most certainly is one of those two days.

In his brief sketch of the history of the Laurel Presbyterian Church just mentioned, William Snowden also remembered that the Oak Grove Church met for worship in its first years at the All Saints Methodist Church, just two miles outside of Laurel Factory in Howard County (on what is now a wooded lot on Whiskey Bottom Road just beyond the sharp curve at the intersection with Stephens Road). The All Saints Church, which no longer exists, itself had an interesting past. It started as a Protestant Episcopal Church. In the years after 1821, that denomination suffered a split in Maryland between 'high church' and 'low church' factions. At this same time, the Methodist Episcopal Church underwent a major split that resulted in the formation of the Methodist Protestant Church . In 1828, that newly formed Methodist denomination established a 'class' at Savage Factory, which soon moved to the nearby All Saints Church and eventually took it over as a Methodist Church. Evidently, the Methodist congregation at All Saints was a small one, since the Presbyterians alternated Sundays with them in using the building for worship. The available records give no insight into the relationship of the All Saints Church to the Oak Grove Church . The Presbyterians may have used the All Saints building only because it was available. Or, the All Saints Church may have been more of a parent to the Presbyterians. We do not know.

Although the process by which the church was founded seems relatively clear, nothing in the records available explains why the Oak Grove Church began when it did. It may have been that it took until 1860 for enough Presbyterians to move into the area and express interest in starting a church. Snowden's brief sketch implies this. Or, it may have been that in this area of Southern sympathies the increasingly anti-slavery conflicts in most of the major Protestant denominations caused them to join the Old School Presbyterians, who had suppressed the conflict in their denomination. Whether national or purely local events led to the founding of the Oak Grove Church , we do know that the church grew from its original eleven to twenty members in its first year. Presbytery supplied its pulpit, and the church had neither a pastor nor a stated Supply. The new congregation established a large Sunday School of some 60 pupils, and its total expenditures in that first year amounted to $150, probably mostly used to pay the preachers.

After the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860, national events quickly enveloped the subsequent history of the Oak Grove Church . The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Old School) could no longer ignore the deep split in the nation. In May 1861, the General Assembly resolved its support for the Union in a hotly contested debate. Border state delegates, including those from Maryland , opposed any statement of Union support because they still hoped to avoid a split with southern Presbyterians. Most of the southern presbyteries, however, did not even send delegates to the General Assembly. They met instead, in Augusta , Georgia , in December 1861 and formed the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America .

We know very little about the Oak Grove Church during the Civil War. In its second year the church reported a membership of 21 with an addition of six new members but a net growth of only one. The Sunday School remained at 60 pupils. Baltimore Presbytery continued to see to the supply of the Oak Grove pulpit by various preachers until April 1863, when it appointed the church's first stated supply, Dr. Hamner, who had been on the commission that established the church and had preached the first sermon in it. Hamner also preached regularly at Beltsville while supplying Oak Grove. Notably, Hamner had belonged to the New School Presbytery of the District of Columbia at the time that presbytery established a church in Laurel Factory in the 1840s. Hamner must have left the anti-slavery New School denomination because of his own Southern sympathies just as he later left the Northern Presbyterian Church (Old School) because of its anti-slavery pronouncements, and one cannot help but speculate whether or not Hamner had connections with and influence among the Presbyterians around Laurel Factory even prior to 1860.

Naturally, national events continued to dominate the history of the Oak Grove Church . As the Civil War progressed, the General Assembly of the Northern Church (Old School) made increasingly sharp pronouncements against slavery. At the same time, Baltimore Presbytery began to debate more localized issues arising from the war. Factions developed. Matters turned for the worse in June 1863 when the Rev. Dr. J. J. Bullock, pastor of the Franklin Street Church in Baltimore and the leader of the Southern-leaning group, read a paper before presbytery. In it he criticized the General Assembly and Baltimore Synod for making pronouncements on civil matters; that is, by voting support of the Union and condemnation of slavery. Bullock wanted the presbytery to take a stand against such pronouncements, but it instead voted (18 to 12) to table the issues raised by Bullock. The Oak Grove Church 's stated supply, Hamner, and its representative, Elder Edward Snowden, both voted with Bullock against tabling the matter, and in later votes Hamner consistently aligned himself with the Bullock faction. It is not clear how much Hamner influenced the vote of Snowden and the subsequent relationship of the church to the presbytery, but after June 1863, the Oak Grove Church , after three years of faithful attendance, never again sent a delegate to Baltimore Presbytery.

The end of the Civil War did not improve the church's relationship to its denomination. The General Assembly of 1865 met in an atmosphere of national anger just after the assassination of President Lincoln, and it took actions which virtually declared slave-holding and rebellion sinful. Thus, the General Assembly killed any hopes of a reconciliation with southern Presbyterians. After the General Assembly, Louisville Presbytery issued a 'Declaration and Testimony' which found the General Assembly's actions heretical and refused to be governed by them. Eventually over 100 Border State Presbyterians, including a few from Maryland , signed this document. The Northern Presbyterian Church could not ignore the challenge of Louisville Presbytery's 'Declaration and Testimony,' and in a bitterly fought battle on the floor the northern General Assembly of 1866 adopted resolutions condemning Louisville Presbytery's 'Declaration and Testimony.' It also refused to seat that presbytery's delegates and suspended all signers of its document from sitting on higher church courts. In the meantime, the former Confederate Presbyterians met in December 1865 and voted to remain a separate denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS),

All of this maneuvering had serious consequences for a handful of Maryland Presbyterian churches including the Oak Grove Church . A few days after the close of the 1866 General Assembly, Bullock addressed his congregation, the Franklin Street Church . He attacked the General Assembly for taking stands on political matters and allowing itself to be swayed by public opinion. The General Assembly, he charged, had denied the headship of Christ over the Church. With this address, the Franklin Street Church withdrew itself from the Northern Presbyterian Church, and the Franklin Square (Fourth Presbyterian) Church, led by the Rev. Jacob A. Lefevre, a staunch ally of Bullock, quickly followed. Baltimore Presbytery attempted a reconciliation, but Bullock and Lefevre refused to change their stand, and in September 1866, the presbytery ordered their names stricken from its rolls.

On November 23, 1866, these two churches and the tiny West River Church met formally to create the independent Presbytery of Patapsco. The presbytery justified its formation on three grounds: first of all, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. had acted unconstitutionally; secondly, the General Assembly had turned the denomination into a political organization; and, thirdly, the Northern Church had shunned southern Presbyterians. The new presbytery immediately displayed strong sympathy for the Southern Church, still suffering in the aftermath of the Civil War, and its churches raised funds to help rebuild PCUS church buildings and pay pastors' salaries,

At the first stated meeting of Patapsco Presbytery, held April 18-19, 1867, the Oak Grove Church requested that it be admitted to the presbytery. Patapsco Presbytery received the church and seated its representative, Elder Edward Snowden, as a voting delegate. During that same meeting, the presbytery elected commissioners to attend the PCUS General Assembly and seek admission to that denomination, a policy it confirmed at its Fall 1867 meeting by passing a formal resolution for union with the Presbyterian Church in the United States . Patapsco Presbytery and the Oak Grove congregation completed their union with the PCUS when that denomination's General Assembly, meeting in Nashville , voted on November 21, 1867, to receive Patapsco Presbytery into full membership in the Assembly, and seated its representatives. In June of the next year, Baltimore Presbytery dropped the Franklin Street , Fourth (Franklin Square), West River , and Oak Grove Churches from its rolls. Their brief moment on center stage now ended, but all of these events marked a momentous beginning for the small Oak Grove Church , and even though it was the most minor of minor actors in those events, the congregation won for itself a place in the footnotes of Presbyterian Church history.

In the midst of these complex events and issues surrounding the first decade of the Oak Grove Church 's history, one clear pattern emerges. The Oak Grove Church lived culturally and denominationally on the borders between North and South and chose, as only a very few Maryland Presbyterian churches did, to be a 'southern' church. In doing so, it allied itself with a regional denomination distinguished by its conservative theology and seriously weakened by the Civil War. The choices the Oak Grove Church made in 1867 to join first Patapsco Presbytery and then the Southern Presbyterian Church profoundly influenced the pastoral leadership it could obtain, the role of its women played in its life, its relationship to other Presbyterian churches, and the type of theology it believed in and preached. Those choices, noted but not explained in the available historical record, set the course of the church's experience for a century, Seldom do local Presbyterian churches so clearly choose for themselves the path of their own future.

With vast events on the national stage no longer influencing the small Oak Grove Church as forcefully as they did during and after the Civil War, the history of the congregation focuses more narrowly on the flow of events in Laurel itself. General Assembly statistics for the Southern Presbyterian Church for 1868 show that the Oak Grove Church had only seven members. It listed the Rev. John B. Ross, one of the founders of Patapsco Presbytery, as stated supply of both the Oak Grove and Bladensburg Churches . He lived in Bladensburg. In October 1868, the Oak Grove Church acquired its first piece of property (on what is now the southeast corner of Fifth and Main Streets in Laurel ). In a deed dated October 24th, George and Mary Hall sold the property for $305.79 to the Trustees of the 'Presbyterian congregation worshiping in [the] village of Laurel Factory .'

Those trustees were Edward Snowden, William Snowden, James Nicols, John W. Whiteside, and Ephraim Plowman.

The year 1869 opened with the congregation dedicating its first church building, on January 7. In recognition of the church's now permanent relocation from Howard County to Laurel Factory, Chesapeake Presbytery (formed in 1868 when Patapsco Presbytery merged with another presbytery) officially changed the name of the church on April 21, 1869, to the 'Presbyterian Church at Laurel .' While these events made 1869 a significant year for the Laurel Church, the year also proved less auspicious in another way. The church moved to call its first full-time pastor, and in April Chesapeake Presbytery approved the call of John Ross by the Oak Grove Church . Ross, however, fell ill and could not be installed at Oak Grove. In spite of that disappointment, the congregation showed modest growth from seven to twelve members and reported a huge Sunday School of ninety pupils and teachers in its first full church year (April 1 to March 31) as a part of the Presbyterian Church in the United States .

During the next church year, 1869-1870, the church continued to have only twelve members in spite of taking in three new individuals, and the Sunday School dropped off drastically to only 40 pupils and teachers. Ross' illness quite possibly prevented him from carrying out even the duties of stated supply. If so, the church went without pastoral leadership of any sort for the year.

The next year, 1870, however, offered new opportunities. In April, the presbytery received the Rev. W. W. Reese of the Methodist Protestant Church and approved his call to the Laurel Church. After presbytery installed Reese in May, the congregation showed an immediate resurgence. Membership grew to 11 and the size of the Sunday School climbed back up to 65. It should be noted that the presbytery paid the full amount of Reese's salary, $250, for the church. Unfortunately, Reese's ministry as the Laurel Church's first full-time pastor remains undocumented except for William Snowden's statement of thirty years later that, "During his pastorate there were many manifestations of Divine Grace,—congregations were larger and membership increased." For whatever reason, this happy period of ministry did not last long, and Reese moved to another church in the presbytery after only nineteen months at Laurel .

By leaving as soon as he did, Reese established a precedent followed altogether too frequently by his successors. Indeed, its lack of competent pastoral leadership remained a serious problem in the life of the Laurel Presbyterian Church, and in the nineteenth century the congregation failed to successfully call an experienced Southern Presbyterian pastor. Of its four pastors from 1860 to 1899 only one remained for even as much as four years. Of the remaining three, two left under clouds of controversy and the third, Reese, left after an unusually brief stay. In short, the Southern Presbyterian Church found it difficult to maintain strong pastoral leadership in this small congregation on its northern periphery, and in spite of a few notable exceptions, relatively poor pastoral leadership continued to plague the congregation for much of the first century of its existence.

After another year without regular pastoral leadership, the church presented a call to Mr. H. E. C. Baskerville, a ministerial candidate under presbytery's care, in September 1872. The Laurel Church's experience with Baskerville only raised more pointedly the issue of competent pastoral leadership. Instead of immediately accepting the Laurel call, Baskerville asked the presbytery to nominate him for overseas mission work. A special committee of presbytery appointed to examine him reported back that, while not fully qualified for the mission field, he did have a deep sense of a call. Presbytery then did nominate him for missionary work, but evidently the reservations the special committee raised about his qualifications caused the presbytery or one of the mission agencies to have second thoughts. Baskerville, as it happened, did not go into mission work, and the presbytery ordained and installed him as pastor at Laurel on December 5, 1872. Not surprisingly, the presbytery also made him chairman of its Foreign Missions Committee.

By April 1874 denominational statistics show that the Laurel Church grew to a new high of thirty members, while giving rose from a mere $164 ($9.65/member) in 1870-1871 at the end of Reese's first year as pastor to an impressive $749 ($24.97/member) in April 1874 at the end of Baskerville's first fifteen months in office. One might almost say that in those fifteen months the Laurel Church went from being 'tiny' to being just 'small,' The presbytery did continue to assist the congregation with $250 per year given to help pay the pastor.

Yet, something was amiss. The Chesapeake Presbytery minutes for April 1874 do not list Baskerville as pastor of the Laurel Church although they show him still living in Laurel . Furthermore, in that same month of April 1874 the presbytery licensed Elder James Nicols of Laurel to preach, a preliminary step necessary to ordain a man lacking a formal theological education. Presbytery, it appears, intended to replace Baskerville with Nicols, suggesting that problems existed in the relationship between Baskerville and the church. The full extent of those problems surfaced in the presbytery minutes of May 1874 when Baskerville confessed before the Chesapeake Presbytery that he had treated his wife 'harshly.' He reported that he had already confessed as much in a congregational meeting of the Laurel Church, and he asked for a dissolution of his pastoral relationship with the church. But, he stated, he felt repentant and sorrowful for what he had done, and he requested that presbytery not suspend him from the ministry. Presbytery responded to his confession and plea by dissolving the pastoral relationship between Baskerville and the Laurel Church as of May 24, 1874 and by voting fifteen to one to suspend him from the ordained ministry. This event must have had a hurtful, unsettling impact upon the small Laurel Church.