Old Church, New Life Seventh-Day Adventists Resuming Services At Fruitland Valley Site On Its 100th Anniversary

A hundred years ago, founding members of the Fruitland Valley Seventh-day Adventists dedicated their small frame church.

Today, descendents of those founding families, along with prospective members for a revived church and other community members, will hold a centennial celebration to remember and honor their ancestors and the church they built.

Missionary Daniel House was an original member who helped build the church in the community a few miles south of Hunters on Lake Roosevelt. He and others hauled donated lumber with a borrowed team and wagon and built the 24-by-30-foot building.

The church was the community’s cornerstone for several years, said Verna Steele Dubois, granddaughter of Annie House Steele, Daniel House’s daughter.

By 1937, most members had moved on and church was discontinued - for all, that is, except Annie Steele. Every Saturday for 12 years, from 1937 to 1949, she walked to the church to hold her own Sabbath-day services.

When Dubois was little and spent the weekend with her grandmother, the two would make the trek. They would climb to the balcony, where Grandmother Steele would give the Sabbath school instruction, and then move downstairs, where she would play the old pump organ, sing hymns, read Bible passages and pray, Dubois said.

But even when there were no grandchildren to accompany her, Steele faithfully attended church every Saturday.

She was a “plain and simple and practical woman” who wore long dresses and high-topped shoes and fashioned her hair in a neat bun, Dubois said.

In 1949, the church finally sat entirely empty when Steele’s husband became ill and she could not leave him long enough even to attend her solitary services.

The abandoned church fell into disrepair. Age made its mark. Vandals had their way with paint on the inside.

Seventh-day Adventists in Colville tried to revive the church in the late 1970s, but after three years they gave up the struggle.

Still, the Colville group, mostly members of a single family, did much to refurbish the building back then. The roof was rotting, the walls were buckling, and the floors were heaving. But with a little help and a lot of faith, the building was refurbished and modernized to accommodate electricity, said Phyllis Cunningham, a member of the church’s second life.

If they hadn’t taken the interest then, there would be no building today, Cunningham said. It would have collapsed upon itself.

Still, it would take more than a single family to make the church viable, she said, and after three years, the church stood empty again.

Then came talk of the building’s centennial, and the founders’ descendents decided to paint it, fix it up, and clean up grounds and the adjoining cemetery. They contracted to have the building painted, weeded the grounds and placed 35 markers on graves without headstones in the cemetery. Some 70 pioneers are buried there.

The volunteer fire department burned away the cemetery’s underbrush - rose briars had taken over - so others could have a chance to further clear the land.

And the Cunninghams and the Upper Columbia Seventh-day Adventist Conference renewed discussions about worshiping there once more.

The church will start up with a congregation of about 10, Cunningham said. The charter group had 21 members.

The conference has refurbished the inside and reconnected the electricity, and the church will once again be a house of worship, said Wayne Searson, conference trust director.

“The building has touched a lot of people in the community,” Dubois said. “There are all kinds of families who have some kind of ties to it.”

Dubois now attends St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Chewelah but doesn’t consider herself a “denominationalist,” not like her grandmother, at any rate. But she has a strong attachment to that little building in Fruitland - “Grandma’s church.”

The centennial celebration will be at 3 p.m. today.

The original pump organ will be there for someone to play hymns on, and the original pulpit, crafted by Gunder A. Thompson 100 years ago, will once again be center front.

“I think it will happen this time,” Cunningham said of the church being restarted. “I think it’s really going to catch on.”

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